Fictional leaders

My favorite, who I think is a more accurate portrayal, is Buzz Windrip from Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here”. We should hope to reduce the presidential power, not to elect angels.

F

Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office.

Or rather because their creators can set up strawman arguments for the opposition.

“Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office.”

Well, _someone’s_ ideal virtues … :-)

As you said, Perkins did embody _an_ ideal, whether or not it is _the_ ideal. Whereas Hacker, Urquhart, and the Prime Minister in _The Sandbaggers_ don’t embody any ideal.

Is that what you are getting at?

“…he is intelligent and knowledgeable and mentally engaged, and he doesn?t grope the female staff.”

Chuckle.

Well as far as fictional presidents go, I do like Jack Ryan and John Sheridan.

Don’t forget the brilliant political acumen of Harrison Ford as President James Marshall…

I always liked Alan Alda in Canadian Bacon.

Don’t you think Martin Sheen was more personable, and had better values, when he was playing the Prez in the Dead Zone?

Not much of a difference.

I’m told Arnold Schwartenegger actually won a vote for governor of California. You can’t tell me he’s a real person.

Kip, if you figure out how to score a copy of A Very British Coup, tell me where you got it. Also, I’ve never managed to see A House of Cards. I’ve seen the rest of the Urquhart series, but not the first, and I would really like to.

As for the main point, I too have noticed that British political fiction tends towards farce if not tragedy, while American political fiction tends to portray it’s fictitious presidents as ideal men. My theory is that it’s because the US is a monarchy and the UK is a republic.

Think about it for a second. I finished reading Captain Swing a couple weeks ago, and one of the things Hobsbawm points out is that the rebelling labourers kept trying to inform the proper authorities. They couldn’t believe that the King would countenance the injustices they faced. No one is quite so naive nowadays, but Americans still want a president who embodies the values the proles in Captain Swing believed the King to naturally have. The UK, in contrast, is used to seeing its PM’s treated as incompetent, dishonest scum all the time – that’s what Question Time is for.

Brits dream of being led by a competent politician, Americans want to be led by a father figure who embodies wisdom and dignity. Every four years, the US tried to elect most plausible king from the candidates; every now and then, the Brits go to the polls and pick the least incompetent general manager.

Having a figurehead Head of State in Britain has led to a persistence of the undemocratic, pre-Enlightenment institution of monarchy, an institution that is romanticized even though its past is about as shameful and bloody as any other autocratic style.

In India, on the other hand, the figurehead President has such little power that he’s more punchline than president.

Coup is now available on DVD at Amazon. (Myself, I saw a second-generation videotape of one of the Masterpiece Theater broadcasts.) –But speaking of hard-to-find British thrillers: what I also want to get my hands on is Edge of Darkness. Wow, that was good.

But! Presidents and prime ministers. (Sounds like an Andy Partridge song.) –We just haven’t had our government up and running nearly as long over here as the Brits. Give us time. We’ll grow into our cynicism.

How very coincidental — I’ve got the last Urquhart series at home right now! if you’re in the US, Netflix has all of it, as well as pretty much any other decent UK or US series you might want. I’m not sure that Urquhart is Machiavellian, though — he really goes so much farther. Maybe he’s Post-Machiavellian? Still, it rates for one of the best political series ever, IMO.

I think one of the things I like about Jed Bartlet (referred to by many of my colleagues here on campus as “our real president”) is that he has Capra-esque qualities. He’s Jefferson Smith transformed by a much more frightening and complicated world. The ideals are there, but Bartlet tries to make sense of the grey zones as well.

“If I say that George W. Bush is a complete waste of protein that could otherwise nourish ecologically useful insects, I am undermining the war on terrorism and denigrating America.”

Well…there are still a hell of a lot of people who don’t buy that for a second. Aren’t there? I hope?

Thanks Jamie.

And Gore Vidal said “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”

I know, I’m just a weapon of mass quotation today.

“My theory is that it’s because the US is a monarchy and the UK is a republic.”

It isn’t just me then…

Chris – obviously, Brits are quite critical of the royal family without being accused of treason. Rather, Britain is republic because no one is the monarch in the sense of being above ordinary political criticism. Although many Americans are critical of the president, many Americans still object quite voicefully if you are publically disrespectful towards the head of state simply because he is the head of state. “Respect for the office if not the man” – that was how my history teacher described it.

<<The Amazon page for A Very British Coup also – surprise, surprise – had a direct link to A House of Cards.>>

In the U.S., another part of the problem is that there is always a core of voters who will support their President no matter what a lout or liar he is – they bestow their leader with a sort of divine benevolence that excuses his actions, no matter what they are. We only have to look at the current president and the previous president for evidence of this on both sides of the aisle.

I don’t know which system is better, but I have a feeling that the current U.S. president would spontaneously combust if he was ever faced with Question Time.

Also: I cannot sit through an entire episode of The West Wing, let alone a whole season. The speechifying, the walking and talking, the emotional drama – I just can’t stand it.

digamma – eh, exactly… I was going to say the same thing. Palmer is good looking and charming but he is soo dumb. He can’t do anything without Bauer, he let his wife dupe him twice, and he needed to have it explained to him that it was better to detonate a nuke in the desert than off the coast of San Francisco. I could be president too if that’s the standard required.

There’s got to be some satirical message in there to justify those ridiculous plots. They’re fun though.

I don’t like The West Wing. It’s all too corny for me. And Sheen will always be Apocalypse Now. I can’t see anything he’s in and not think of that so I just can’t picture him as the goody goody president. He was far better in the jungle, paint on his face, opium and all…

Harrison Ford in Air Force One has got to be the most ludicrous representation of a President. He fights off every single terrorist himself! Wow! he saves his family and his country! awesome! Er, not. It made 24 plots seem realistic. How can people go see that kind of movie and not roll in laughter?

I think George Clooney would make a great president. For real. Not just in the movies. Improve the political reputation of America instantly. But he’s gonna be too old by the time Bush III gets ousted…

“I’d supposed the whole point of that show was to provide lefty-liberal types like me with a sort of wet-dream what-if fantasy president whom we could happily imagine trying to doing all kinds of principled Johnson-without-Vietnam stuff.”

Of course it is, also Clinton-with-trousers-zipped stuff. That’s why I said wet dream way up above.

“I’m not sure what this says about our different political and televisual/cinematic cultures…”

Not to split hairs and all, but you’re really talking about the different cultures of political and televisual/cinematic writers, mm?
Inasmuch as they produce the planking and caulking for the two cultures there’s a mapping/overlap, but the culture itself would be more the metabolized and redisplayed stuff that the writers put out.
It’s true that the writers themselves, when they’re on it, are reflecting the culture, but that reflection has a much wider field than the immediate contemporary. There isn’t much Shakespeare on TV; but there is, I’ll wager, in the lives and minds of writers like Aaron Sorkin and Paul Redford.
The big illusion is the TV is dispensing a kind of group vision – but it’s not.
It’s the very small very limited world-view of a highly-filtered and competitively scrambling subset of the subset which is Hollywood/TinselTown etc.
That out of that sub-subset comes work like The West Wing is inspiring and, to me, more a testament to something potential than currently extant in humanity.

President Andrew Shepherd in The American President is another idealised Clinton – with no Hillary attached either. Of course, he was pretty much Sorkin’s proto-Bartlett.

And Hugh Grant’s PM in Love, Actually seems like quite a nice bloke, complete with his crowd-pleasing ‘stand up to the Yanks’ speech.

Are there any depictions of leaders other than US Presidents and British PMs worth mentioning and how positive/negative are they? All that springs to mind is De Gaulle in The Day Of The Jackal which doesn’t really count. Plus, there’s the question of how modern monarchs (as opposed to historical ones, who can be depicted as either heroes or bastards) are depicted on screen – I can’t think of many examples there, either, but they seem to do better than political leaders (the King in To Play The King seems like a much nicer chap than Urquhart – admittedly, that’s not hard).

Surprised no one’s mentioned Jeff Bridges in “The Contender” yet, the most Clintonesque screen president so far – especially with the running gag about his food consumption. Gary Oldman’s also brillant as a right wing senator in what is a pretty good film until they whack the standard happy-sappy ending on.

And speaking of “A Very British Coup”, two good books along the same lines are “The man to held the Queen to ransom and sent Parliament packing” by Peter Van Greenaway (late 60s, leftish) and “When the kissing had to stop” by Constantine Fitzgibbon (late 50s, rightish).

When I think of TV/film Presidents, I think of Reagan. Oh, wait.

Anyway, when I think of TV/film Presidents, I think of President Tom Beck in Deep Impact, played by Morgan Freeman. I remember watching that thinking, “Damn, I’d vote for Morgan Freeman for President in a heartbeat.”

My favorite fictional British Prime Minister was Alan B’stard (from The New Statesman). He was far funnier than the one in Yes, Prime Minister. I think he ended as a fascist dictator, becoming “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth”.

But I also liked an American version where the British Prime Minister was a madman who asked Britons to commit mass suicides to reduce unemployment.

The only fictional portrayal of an Australian PM I can recall is in The Dish, where the PM says to aspiring candidate for office

“There’s one rule in our party. Don’t f**k up …”

“And ?”

“That’s it.”

(Can’t quite get the tonality right in print, but it’s a great line, and about as sympathetic as Australians are likely to go for in a fictional PM)

I may be missing something but Goldwater????

“Our tendency to mix the Pres up with Daddy and God”

I read a good history of the Presidency last year. One striking thing was the debate over America’s “Elected Monarchy”. The debate actually started in the 1790s, as soon as people saw the cast that Washington and Hamilton were putting on the Presidency. The debate ran pretty hot all through the 1800s. Lots of people from every party are on record as having raised questions about whether it was such a brilliant idea to make the head of state and the head of government the same person. Jackson’s enemies, who included everyone at one time or another, all expressed doubts about the “Elected Monarchy.” The debate only really died away after 1932, when an imperial presidency began to seem natural, for whatever reason.