What Will Hollywood Do If Obama Fails?

What will Hollywood do if President Obama fails? Forget simply preserving the status quo or making marginal improvements for this agency or that constituency, but fails to even remotely square the difference between the promise of his administration and its actual performance. This is not to wish failure upon our – yes, our – new president, since I actually like Barack Obama the person (not Obama, The Messiah™) and have no desire to see the economy worsen or Islamic terror gain additional traction, but should this presidency be a stillborn effort to suspend politics-as-we-know-it and have us wave our ploughshares in an impromptu chorus of “Yes We Can” — don’t expect a single film to even criticize President Obama, or use him as a metaphor for military defeat or political impotence. The future decade will simply vanish, a missing gap far wider than anything Rose Mary Woods could accidentally erase. How do I know? Because there isn’t a single film of any repute, during or after the presidencies of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, that addresses the (many) failures of these men.

In the case of Carter, the films of the Seventies – and let it be known that I venerate this fabled period, like any good cinephile – are a smorgasbord of dramas about Vietnam and Watergate, with customary attention paid to the machinations of evil corporations (Pakula, Alan; see films of) or faux populists (Altman, Robert; see “Nashville”). Content with attacking Richard Nixon, or using him as an all purpose villain who might as well have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s accomplice, Jimmy Carter simply . . . fades away, Hollywood’s forgotten man who nonetheless managed to reap a whirlwind of economic ruin and humiliation in the Middle East. But it is Carter’s facade of honesty – “I will never lie to you” – that insulates him from nothing more biting than a few sketch comedy acts on “Saturday Night Live,” with Dan Aykroyd as the pious Southern governor who kept George Washington’s honesty and traded the cherry tree for a bag of Georgia peanuts.

There is no oblique or transparent critique of Carter’s presidency, for Hollywood accepts this period as (at best) forgetful or (at worst) another dark chapter in the Nixon White House, any successor to the Oval Office having been made seemingly irrelevant by the actions of “The Man with the Five O’clock Shadow,” a trespasser in the home of Roosevelt and Kennedy.

The memory hole is even worse with Hollywood’s approach to Bill Clinton. The adulation for Clinton takes shape in films (“The American President,” “The Contender”) and TV (“The West Wing”), an alternate universe where the president has all of Clinton’s presumed smarts – and a Nobel Prize, too! -without any of the bimbo eruptions, or mean-spirited conservatives who seek to leave one third (at least) of the nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished. The Clinton of the movies is more charming and handsome (thank you, Jeff Bridges) than his real-life self, a man beset by hapless foes or outrageous hypocrites. Always eloquent and slow to anger – the cinematic Clinton is justifiably righteous in his indignation – this fictional president never overlooks the plans of jihadists or others who want to harm the United States. Thus makeup artists apply powder to Clinton’s nose, costumers give him better tailored suits and his Southern accent becomes a rich baritone — voila, I present you Ronald Reagan without conviction.

Hollywood now finds itself in love with The One — and that infatuation, which rivals the sort of hysteria that citizens normally display in totalitarian countries, will never dissolve into criticism. Disappointment, perhaps. But that disappointment will be the lament of what-might-have-been, a debate over the promise of the Obama administration’s efforts to return to Eden. Before the Republicans attacked. Before our innocence died. Before we came to our senses.