GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: “Dave” and Our Situational Politics.
Viewed from our current turbulent times, the [1993 movie, “Dave”] movie is something of a time capsule. It gives us a glimpse into a more egalitarian, less angry Hollywood, back in the days before the movie business went rabid… when the overriding impulse of the theatrical movie model was to tell stories that appealed to the widest possible swath of Americans… because that, as everyone in the world understood, was how you made real money.
The movie is certainly political, in ways we will get into, but its politics are subtle… it is subtext rather than text. If you were not a hyper-partisan, as most normal Americans were not in those pre-social media days, the politics were so subtle that they amounted to little more than background noise.
“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.
Most importantly, with the movies and TV shows of this era, Progressive Hollywood was telling us “this is how it ought to be… this is how Government should work.” But to watch “Dave” here in the post-Biden era… the era of Trump 2.0… is to realize that what Hollywood really did in the late-90’s, was to set a bunch of traps for itself and then gamely walk right into them thirty years later.
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