Fascism at 24 frames per second: onscreen representations of the Presidency in Trump's America

i was catching up with some episodes of the supergirl tv show last night. one them featured our clean-living heroine saving the life of the newly-elected female president and wondering how anyone could have voted for 'the other guy'

clearly the show was shot before the election results were in, and it set me wondering about how representations of the presidency might change onscreen over the next four years. with what seems likely to be the most openly malign and mean-spirited president in living memory in power for the next four years, how will films and tv shows choose to represent the white house and the office of president?

will shows already built around us politics and espionage (like scandal or homeland acknowledge a sea-change in us foreign policy? will we see new shows or movies about federal employees dealing with, or resisting, changed circumstances? will we see 24-style action propaganda about heroic border patrol agents monitoring the construction of the wall and gunning down evil mexicans? will the president be presented as a hero or a villain?

I suspect the new Good Wife spinoff will deal with this pretty directly

i hope so!

i feel like whatever happens any new examples of the default onscreen representation of the president as competent and good-looking are going to appear ridiculous very quickly

The new "One Day at a Time" series on Netflix has an episode where all sitcom hijinks and laughs are halted so they can deliver an impassioned pro-immigration message. Given that the main characters and the head writer are all Latinxs, it could be they wanted to do that anyway, but it certainly sounds like a direct anti-Trump jab.

i also wonder if we'll get some lulz from borderline-outsider-art pro-trump stuff along the lines of the immortal reagan's raiders

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NiZ4_lyCf64/Tc6D6xFezRI/AAAAAAAAATI/QQz9_H9CdhM/s1600/1.jpg

This was a great kids book that came out last year I think, written when Trump was still running:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514p2G-IwqL._SX403_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91Hnw2zJ6ZL.jpg

The new "One Day at a Time" series on Netflix has an episode where all sitcom hijinks and laughs are halted so they can deliver an impassioned pro-immigration message. Given that the main characters and the head writer are all Latinxs, it could be they wanted to do that anyway, but it certainly sounds like a direct anti-Trump jab.

sounds bad!

It was great and made me cry.

was prompted to remember this thread when reading something about larry wilmore's new show, co-created with bassem youssef, which

centers on the Sharif family, an ordinary Middle Eastern American family with two superhero parents at a time when it’s illegal to be a superhero, so they are forced to save the world in secret.

this was the part that jumped out at me

“At its heart, it is a family show about assimilation and the difficulties and the problems and the conflicts with assimilation,” Wilmore told Deadline. “There are so many issues immigrant families face becoming Americans. To combine this with a fantasy adventure show seemed like an interesting approach to a family show.”

The comedy won’t be topical. “There won’t be a President Trump,” Wilmore said. “Even through it would be America, it won’t be this version of America, it won’t be a political show in this sense, it will be in its own world.”

american horror story is getting great milage out of president trump this season

i've never seen ahs - what's the deal this season?

I feel like we could very easily see a string of just the kind of bland graying white-guy movie presidents we're all familiar with, who are always popular and will both be reassuring to a certain strain of bland graying white guy put off by Trump, and available for Trump fans to project their fearless leader onto even though he looks and acts nothing like them. See all those cartoons where he's drawn as combination He-Man and Fabio. There's a line from Bill Pullman's fighter pilot president in Independence Day (via W, who obviously wanted very badly to be this guy, and was for a lot of people) to the way Trump is fantasized about. Plus, movie presidents almost never deal with anything *political* - they're projections of national identity and national masculinity, so they shoot down aliens and punch out terrorists on Air Force One.

Obviously there will be a few films with women and/or POC in the role. These will be viciously attacked as Hollywood liberalism run amok by thousands of twitter bots who have not seen the films, which will mostly be about robot asteroids tunneling up from the earth's core, directly under the White House. This in turn will be garbled into a metaphor for immigration.

xpost I haven't watched it yet, but based on the trailer it looks like they're dealing pretty directly with the election of Trump as an American horror story.

Surprised there's no mention here of Designated Survivor, which began before Trump's election, but even early on had story lines about fascist governors rounding up immigrants. Even though Keifer is an "independent outsider" he's obviously a liberal wonk.

If anyone wants to write an in-depth study (in maybe a couple of years, when there's enough perspective to get the lay of the land) of serialized entertainment that existed prior to November of 2016 and the ways in which it's changed in response to the world in which it's now being created, I will preorder that book right now.

frank miller, the joker AND trump? what could possibly go wrong

https://static2.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/The-Drak-Knight-Returns-The-Golden-Child-Joker.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=738&h=738

Frank Miller swore off being a right-wing shithead, didn't he? Or did I imagine that

this is a pro-trump, pro-joker, pro-murder comic. and if you don't like it you're a snowflake.