Film and the American Presidency

Jeff Menne, Christian B. Long

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415834391
• eBook ISBN: 9781135049911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The contention of Film and the American Presidency is that over the twentieth century the cinema has been a silent partner in setting the parameters of what we might call the presidential imaginary. This volume surveys the partnership in its longevity, placing stress on especially iconic presidents such as Lincoln and FDR. The contributions to this collection probe the rich interactions between these high institutions of culture and politics—Hollywood and the presidency—and argue that not only did Hollywood acting become an idiom for presidential style, but that Hollywood early on understood its own identity through the presidency's peculiar mix of national epic and unified protagonist. Additionally, they contend that studios often made their films to sway political outcomes; that the performance of presidential personae has been constrained by the kinds of bodies (for so long, white and male) that have occupied the office, such that presidential embodiment obscures the body politic; and that Hollywood and the presidency may finally be nothing more than two privileged figures of media-age power.

1 The Fictional Lives of American Presidents

Jeff Menne and Christian B. Long

DOI: 10.4324/9780203502051-1

One of Akira Kurosawa’s late films, Kagemusha (1980) tells the story of a double who is recruited as a standby for Lord Shingen and who must, in effect, become Shingen when the lord dies and leaves his clan vulnerable. The movie’s interest in the sovereign’s double is on one hand mechanical. How will the double pass as the sovereign? When Shingen’s grandson is presented with the double, the young boy detects the impostor. “You can’t fool a child,” Shingen’s brother admits, and it was “reckless” for them to try. Shingen’s horse rejects the double, too, suggesting that neither can animal instinct be deceived. The movie’s interest, on the other hand, is conceptual. In what does sovereignty consist? When Shingen’s disinherited son, Katsuyori, seeks to assert the legitimacy of his own sovereign claim by a display of military daring, he doubts his success owes solely to himself. He took the castle, his aide assures him. “It’s true that I took the castle,” Katsuyori says, “but the credit does not go to me, it goes to the phantom of my late father.” The very fact of Shingen, deceased in person but not in spirit, “frightened the enemy away.” It becomes clear in the course of Kagemusha not only that the mechanics of sovereignty are simply the means by which the movie narrativizes its interest in the concept of sovereignty, but also that Kurosawa means to draw a connection between sovereignty as a concept and the operations of film as a medium. In a late scene, Shingen’s brother seems to regret his recruitment of the double. “What will happen to the double,” he wonders. “A shadow cannot exist without the person. When it’s finally known that the person is gone, what will happen to the shadow?” It’s a curious involution of metaphor: the shadow, in this case, is the flesh-and-blood double, masquerading as the dead Shingen. That Shingen’s brother continues to think the dead brother more substantial a person than the living person of the double would seem to attest to something in sovereignty of corporeal transcendence. It might be that, conceptually speaking, sovereignty requires a material body as the shadow cast by what we call the body politic. In a certain respect, this is why neither the child nor the horse is fooled by the double, because sovereignty is a concept, not a thing. Children and horses can get by without concepts. What makes the metaphor of the body and its shadow more interesting, for our purposes, is that it’s easy to hear in it Kurosawa’s theoretical fascination with film. Film will outlive the bodies that have been impressed on it. Which will be more real, ultimately, the bodies or the medium preserving their shadows?

When just over a decade later Dave (Reitman, 1993) appeared as more or less a rewriting of Kagemusha, even if it didn’t raise matters to the philosophical order that Kagemusha had, it suggested that a fascination with sovereignty and film—as operations in doubling—was in the warp and woof of American cinema. It suggested this notion, at any rate, to critics who kept Hollywood movies in historical perspective. The story of citizen Dave Kovic (Kevin Klein) recruited to stand in for President Bill Mitchell (also Kevin Klein), Dave, Stanley Kauffmann would note, recalled any number of movies: Kagemusha, The Prisoner of Zenda (Cromwell, 1937) and (Thorpe, 1952), The Prince and the Pauper (Keighley, 1937), Moon over Parador (Mazursky, 1988), and—the key comparison, for Kauffmann—The Phantom President (Taurog, 1932). ¹ Dave was written by Gary Ross, also a speechwriter for Bill Clinton, so the consanguinity of this Hollywood fantasy and Clintonian political style is easy to trace. Clinton’s deputy director for personnel, Jon Emerson, credited Ross with “a good sense of the pulse of the people. It’s why his sound bites work and why his movies work.” ² Critics found meaning, indeed, in the movie’s release within months of Clinton’s inauguration. The hopeful everyman, Dave figured the “Clintonian burst of energy and good intentions in the White House,” in Kauffmann’s words. ³ In one register, then—a quite practical one—a movie like Dave lets us consider how the technical infrastructure of Hollywood and the US presidency are related. They’re related, simply, because personnel pass between them; one can learn techniques in Hollywood and apply them in politics. We can call this an instrumental relation. The famous case of this is Ronald Reagan. But there are many less obvious versions. Bill Clinton, for instance, claimed to have studied High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952) in order to learn from “the look in Gary Cooper’s eyes as he stares into the face of almost certain defeat, and how he keeps walking through his fears toward his duty.” ⁴ In his study The Leading Man, Burton Peretti gives the most forceful articulation (in what is now a considerable literature) of the instrumental relation between Hollywood and the US presidency. ⁵ Because the president “had the potential to enact a powerful and charismatic role,” Peretti argues, his part in government was analogous to the lead actor’s in motion pictures. Harnessing such charisma—a patent operation of Hollywood industry—was a means for “incorporating vastly different subgroups and individuals,” Peretti says, into a unitary national audience, whether for the sake of the box office or ballot box. ⁶ As Hollywood perfected its charismatic appeals in the 1920s and on, the White House increasingly turned to it for instruction. ⁷

But in another register, what a movie like Dave suggests is that these high institutions of culture and politics—Hollywood and the US presidency—have understood their powers in view of each other. We can call this understanding a conceptual relation. In learning its medium, Hollywood seems to have been taken with its power for producing doubles. From The Playhouse (Keaton, 1921) to The Parent Trap (Swift, 1961) to Multiplicity (Ramis, 1996), bringing together two or more exposures of an actor in a composite frame has been a way to declare the peculiarities of the medium. Film multiplies a person. A movie that double exposes Hayley Mills as identical twins, though, is only a showy rendition of what the medium does in the first place. Among classical film theorists, Jean Epstein took a certain kind of splitting to be definitive of the film image. “On the screen we are seeing what the cinema has already seen once,” he wrote, “a double transformation, or rather raised to the power of two, since it is multiplied in this way.” ⁸ Watching the screen image, that is, we are given views of the object as seen by the camera—by its “metal brain,” as Epstein puts it—which is to say we see it “enhanced by filmic reproduction.” ⁹ It’s no longer the same thing; it’s now a new thing: “a second generation beauty, the daughter—though prematurely delivered and slightly monstrous—of a mother whom we loved with our naked eyes.” ¹⁰ Epstein described this process in the somewhat mystical French Impressionist term photogénie, a term that “one runs into a brick wall trying to define.” ¹¹ Whatever the film image added to its object, in short, was impossible to specify. But it added something, this much was clear. Epstein was led by this ineffability to say that “cinema is essentially supernatural.” In it, “Everything is transformed.” ¹² While Epstein’s modernist enthusiasms did not carry the discourse in Hollywood, it was nonetheless the case that those within the industry granted film this transformative effect. Take the example of Humphrey Bogart. “Bogie was a medium-sized man,” according to John Huston, “not particularly impressive offscreen, but something happened when he was playing the right part. Those lights and shadows composed themselves into another, nobler personality.” ¹³

It was this aspect that Ronald Reagan knew how to exploit. “The actor,” Reagan said, “learns to see himself from the outside in as others see him, not from the inside out.” This perception, it should be qualified, is more practically true of the film actor, who has a derealized version of himself to aid this act of seeing. With it, Reagan “gives up the ‘mental picture’ of the character he plays as separate from himself and becomes at once the viewer of the object and the object seen.” ¹⁴ It is something other than W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” That term, after all, though it ever suggested one’s “two-ness,” as Du Bois put it, did so in marking one’s disempowerment in the gaze of another. From Reagan’s “two-ness,” by contrast, he derived the power of sovereignty. In his screen self, Reagan imagined that people “see themselves and that I’m one of them.” He was, he liked to say, “Mr. Norm.” ¹⁵ Calling himself the norm let him hide the fact that his exceptional status as an image helped focalize for the audience their normative representation, a disavowal of sovereignty that typifies popular sovereignty. If Reagan was the norm yet held the juridical power to say what the norm was, to set it in place or declare its suspension, then he was not norm but sovereign. In the famous formulation of legal theorist Carl Schmitt, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The exception, which entails suspending the constitutional framework, no matter how briefly, has abetted the redoubling of executive power in the US government, in emergency after emergency, from the Civil War to the Great Depression to the 9/11 attacks. The “liberal constitutional state” tries to “repress” such a concentration of power, Schmitt notes, “by a division and mutual control of competences.” But the high incidence of crises undoes the effort. In The Executive Unbound, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule claim that “liberal legalism” has “proven unable to generate meaningful constraints on the executive.” ¹⁶ The mechanisms of the president’s redoubled power, they explain, have been delegations (“legislatures enact statutes that grant the executive authority to regulate or otherwise determine policy”) and emergencies (“external shocks require new policies to be adopted and executed with great speed”). ¹⁷

What has emerged in response to the weak constraints on the executive, argue Posner and Vermeule, are constraints in the form of “politics and public opinion.” ¹⁸ It’s not ex ante law that constrains presidential power, that is, but ex post popular response. Such an outlook quickly makes it plain why the cinema can understand itself as a political institution. Television, too. To the extent that the mass media shapes public opinion, it generally assumes political power. “The greater the president’s powers become,” Posner and Vermeule argue, “the more essential popularity and credibility become.” ¹⁹ But we are concerned with the cinema in particular, and how it has produced such popularity and credibility in dimensions unavailable in other media. Television has played a more ad hoc part in shaping public opinion—issue by issue, as it were—such that a consensus might be enacted in plebiscitary terms (we will not tolerate Watergate, for instance, we will tolerate Monica Lewinsky, and so on). Cinema, by contrast, acts on different scales to set the parameters of what we might call a presidential imaginary. It lets us see power from the inside, the dynamics and byways of the political process in operation. It lets us imagine the qualities that make one presidential, the training and background that prepare one to act under world-historical distress. Because this cinema is usually Hollywood cinema—as taken up in the essays in this anthology, anyway—these representations are worked out in rather short-form storytelling. Some of the famous president films, such as Wilson (King, 1944, 154 min.), Sunrise at Campobello (Donehue, 1960, 144 min.), and Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012, 150 min.), have run long relative to the average feature-length movie, perhaps in a kind of formal recognition of their epic subjects. But even such a length requires a narrative compression unnecessary in, say, a novel or television series. Hence it’s hard to say that these movies are narrativizing the political process in the ways we might find in other modes of realism. It might be more correct to say that they catch the spectacle of executive presence and deed.

Tabbing the spectacular nature of president films—this, we note, being the nature of film itself (its duration, its doubling)—we can then take inventory of the narratives that emerge from it. We’ll accentuate, here, two of the more persistent narrative strains. One, to borrow from Dana Nelson, is the president-as-superhero. ²⁰ The spectacle in these narratives is the president’s salvific act. In the exaggerated form, the president fulfills his role as commander-in-chief in the mode of a “kick-butt action hero,” as Variety’s Todd McCarthy would say of Harrison Ford’s president in Air Force One (Petersen, 1997). ²¹ This role involves fisticuffs, skulking around with weapons, and ultimately the triumph and redemption of the nation. In the understated form, the president is simply a graceful, remarkably effective statesman, pure of heart in contrast to politicians that we find everywhere else in his story. He can oversee and execute legislation in so efficient a manner that the political system, by his grace, suddenly seems designed to work. In the case of Gabriel Over the White House (La Cava, 1933), the president’s grace is explained in supernatural terms. An angel, Gabriel, has entered the body of President Hammond while he is near death. In other cases, the president is merely a simpler man, which is to say he isn’t self-interested. A movie like Dave is the outcome of this tradition that includes, too, more kid-friendly movies like Streets of New York (Night, 1939). In the latter movie, young Jimmy aspires to be a public defender, which is just a way for him to formalize his good citizenship, and his hero in this effort is Abe Lincoln. Hence the movie’s alternate title, Abe Lincoln of Ninth Avenue. Lincoln’s pure model of citizenship, in fact, presides over much of American cinema, whether in earnest in something like Cheyenne Autumn (Ford, 1964) or in parody in something like Putney Swope (Downey, Sr., 1969). John Ford, we might say, was the first to understand that working within the tradition of the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Fictional Lives of American Presidents
• Part I Early Cinema and the Classicalizing of the Presidential Image
• Part II FDR and the Mediated President
• Part III Postclassical Presidents
• Part IV Beyond the Reaganite Presidential Imaginary
• Part V The Mise-en-Scene of the Presidency
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index