Moviegoers look for levity during this current state of 'chaos.'
Our political clowns are not funny; they’re appalling. Recent excesses in prosecutions/persecutions and intramural power grabs that then spark self-righteous conniption fits make a spectacle of shamelessness that cries out for ridicule. But we currently don’t have the filmmakers or entertainers — or thinkers — to do it. The only film criticism I’ve read that speaks to this real-life farce comes from a review of the 1980 comedy Airplane! that described the disaster-movie spoof and its laughable, already outdated convictions: “Deadpan manly authority heroes such as Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves and Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges, who have aged to look like Republican ranchers. Each of these stoics has one gag that is repeated with variations.”
That “Republican rancher” snipe contained the truth of Hollywood evolution — Ronald Reagan aging from actor to politician, veteran stars losing their left-wing bona fides to radical upstarts. But the wit of “Republican ranchers” survives for its relevance to bipartisan characteristics today, the implication of sun-tanned self-satisfaction displayed by members of Congress, mayors, governors, district attorneys, and D.C. bureaucrats.
As a ship-of-state analogy, Airplane! is preferable to the probably appropriate Titanic. It would take a farce on the level of Airplane! to convey the outrageous misbehavior of politicians who no longer represent the needs of their constituents but smugly exhibit their class advantages — the latter revealed in the personal license of pols who exempted themselves from lockdown restrictions so they could enjoy salon visits, exclusive dining, and private birthday parties. Could performers Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, and Bono (who posed for grip-and-grin Zelensky photo ops) or Matthew McConaughey and the cast of Ted Lasso (who all posed for Biden endorsements at White House press briefings) match the self-deprecating humility and true artistry that the senior Nielsen, Graves, Stack, and Bridges achieved? Probably not, because the idea of “manly authority heroes” has been emasculated — by progressives in Hollywood and on Capitol Hill. Reactions to the recent change in the speaker of the House amounted to one-gag skits, with variations ranging from intemperate to hissy fits. Stoicism is over, undermined by blame and accusation, and by the wild allegations from the seething prosecutor and smirking judge of the fraudulent fraud trial in New York.
It’s hard to get past these affronts. Our need to bear them would benefit from a stabilizing perspective — a recognition of absurdity that the media are not providing. Recent box-office hits — The Super Mario Brothers Movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Barbie, Oppenheimer, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, The Little Mermaid — are not artistic successes. All of them appeal to juvenile sensibility. And Barbie and Oppenheimer — the most grotesque of the bunch — fail as examples of escapism because they especially lack a sense of humor about social concerns that literally drive the public to distraction.
The ultimate insult of the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes is that Hollywood professionals have the audacity to seek extra compensation for having already coarsened, infantilized, and misrepresented our contemporary experience through patronizing, dishonest, mediocre fare. (And be sure, Barbie’s and Oppenheimer’s shrill depictions of humanity are decidedly mediocre.) There’s need for a comedy that’s not just about the failure of political parties but about the spectacle of failed manhood. Adam McKay’s atrocious Don’t Look Up was humorless about its climate-change heroes (except when Meryl Streep got her just deserts). McKay lacked the humanity of Abel Gance’s End of the World and worse yet doesn’t have the go-for-broke jokiness of Airplane! or the visual wit of William Richert’s political satire Winter Kills. Its masculine Oedipal comedy is in another class.
This week’s compacted political farce doesn’t cry out for SNL punditry — which has long been MIA, even before the strikes. It needs the artful self-recognition that was at the heart of the social and genre satire in Airplane! Those all-American performers showed the confidence to act out self-mockery, to sustain manly heroic authority in the face of emergency — what leftist media prefer to call “chaos.” When our role-model performers and politicians lose sight of their purpose, the confusion is demoralizing, and right now American movies don’t help.