It was very strange to live in a world where Donald Trump was president, but it might be even stranger to be living in a world where he isn’t. For a few interminably long years, one of the stupidest, most mean-spirited people on the planet entirely reshaped our culture and our government in his image, and now, all of a sudden, he’s gone. Trump somehow made people dumber on an almost minute-by-minute basis, dragging us all down into the pit of his dripping, diseased brain until we were mumbling “I love to see it” about cat videos and calling Mario Kart races “very nasty, very unfair, a real raw deal.” Or at least, that’s what he did to me. I guess I can’t speak to your experience.
The American president almost always leaks into our cultural psyche simply by virtue of being the most famous person alive. But as in many things, Trump was different. He provoked a fervent adoration in those who agreed with him and a furious indignity in those who didn’t. I think when all is said and done and the history books have been written, the art that came out of the Trump era will prove to be unique, largely because so much of it was so angry that it often just didn’t know what it was about. Race, class, fame, abject American ignorance: There was so much to think about, and so little time to process any of it before we were on to the next outrage.
In a bizarre, parasitic way, Trump’s own background in entertainment seemed to make the industry even more sure that they were morally required to bring him down. There was a puffed-up edge of “We created him, we’ll destroy him too” in the most embarrassing pieces of Trump-era entertainment. Saturday Night Live self-righteously broke the fourth wall to address him, only a year after it had allowed then-candidate Trump to host the show. And as the deeply broken president made it a habit to watch and tweet about the show, it was almost impossible to blame them for continuing to toothlessly skewer him. It wasn’t that SNL had become smart enough to influence the leader of the free world; it was that the leader of the free world had become stupid enough to allow SNL to influence him.
In fact, the few Hollywood products that seemed to genuinely capture and transcend the Trump era were the ones that were made outside of his influence. Moonlight’s Best Picture win, the first of Trump’s administration, was widely seen as a rebuke to his election, but Moonlight was finished long before he had even won the nomination. Whatever Academy voters’ intentions, it’s simplistic to reduce that film’s diverse portrait of Black queer life into merely a thumbing of the nose at a bigoted president.
The same is true for Get Out, released a month into Trump’s term and widely interpreted as a broadside against Republican bigotry. But Get Out was also written long before what Trump would call his big beautiful red map ever came to pass. It’s a movie about the dark underside of wealthy white liberals’ fetishization of diversity, not one about Trump’s flirtation with white supremacists. And Parasite, while conceived and filmed while Trump was very much President, succeeded because its depiction of another country’s firm class stratification felt so similar to our own. Their separation from Trump, intentional or not, allowed them to capture the truth of his presidency: as a symptom of a broader problem, not as the disease itself.
But the closer stories got to him, the quicker they fell apart. The weakest portions of Steven Spielberg’s otherwise rip-roaring procedural The Post are the ones that wink at the audience with monologues about the importance of a free press, and when Jaeden Martell whispers “Liberal snowflake” in Knives Out, it’s a distraction from the film’s witty and uncompromising script. Everyone wanted to take on Trump, often at the cost of their own films’ quality: Adam McKay’s Vice grouses at its audience for enjoying The Fast and the Furious instead of reading about Halliburton, and BlacKkKlansman takes a dive into real footage of the Charlottesville killing just before its credits begin, tricking viewers into watching a snuff film against their will.
But to be honest, when I think about the defining art of the Trump era, I don’t really think of any of these movies. I think about the things that gave me the same sense of grotesque confusion that Trump and his followers did. I think of craven corporate explosions like The Lion King, movies that made no sense and made money anyway. Or Green Book, the Best Picture winner about racism and homophobia that also happened to be inexplicably directed by one of the guys behind Movie 43. I think about the movies that seemed to totally shatter culture, the Ghostbusters remakes and Last Jedis that prompted legions of weirdos to make angry YouTube videos for years on end. I’m not going to think about Jojo Rabbit or The Trial of the Chicago 7 when I think about the last four years. Instead, I’ll probably think about Cats. What the hell was up with Cats?
What’s worth watching this week: I don’t know, it’s January. I watched Locked Down on HBO Max. It sucks! Don’t watch that. Here, watch Colin Trevorrow’s Home Base on YouTube instead.