Battleground: American Film in the Trump Era
Chris Pine and Ben Foster in Hell or High Water (2016)
The increasing sense of polarization, antagonism and division in the United States has led many to refer to US culture as a battleground of entrenched differences. Conservative radio host and author Michael Savage has compared Trump’s election victory to the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and asserted that “Trump and the patriots that elected him are going to have to fight their own eight-year war as well. The question is, what will that war look like?”
American cinema gives us some compelling examples of what that war looks like. Scholars of contemporary screen studies are beginning to assert that American cinema has emerged as one of the primary battlegrounds on which this war of interpretation is being waged, a frontline in what many refer to as the “culture wars”. The films should not be regarded as disposable entertainment, but rather as visceral cultural artefacts which reflect, engage with and have even been able to influence the climate of the tumultuous era in a range of palpable ways.
So how have films engaged with the cultural and political moment now commonly referred to as the “Trump era”?
From “Deplorables” to Black Lives Matter
A diverse variety of films from a multiplicity of genres offer insights into some of the defining issues of the Trump era and even the shifting coordinates of the socio-political climate that directly led to it: from historical drama to science fiction, superhero blockbuster to horror, each have produced texts firmly embedded in the current historico-political moment.
We can clearly see those Hillary Clinton described in 2016 as “the deplorables” in several films which empathetically portray white working-class Americans. These “angry, forgotten, or silent Americans” appear in films made just before the 2016 election, like Hell or High Water (2016) and Logan Lucky (2017), and after it, like Unplanned (2019), Richard Jewell (2020), and Hillbilly Elegy (2020).
The plot of Hell or High Water, which concerns two brothers attempting to prevent the foreclosure of their family ranch by robbing local banks in West Texas, might well be a fictional one but the film dramatizes the very real economic and cultural anxieties explored in Arlee Russell Rothschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) and Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2017). While some categorised this group in largely derogatory terms, thereby only increasing their sense of alienation and exclusion, American cinema was able to offer more nuanced portrayals of their lived experiences and in doing so provide an explanation why so many might have been drawn to Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again”.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the anger and frustration of the Black Lives Matter movement (2013-) is undoubtedly manifested in films from the last few years like BlacKkKlansman (2018), If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), and Clemency (2018). These are films that exemplify James Forman Jr.’s lament in Locking Up Our Own (2017), that American society continues to be defined by the impact of “felon disenfranchisement laws that suppress black votes, to exploitative housing practices that strip black wealth, to schools that refuse to educate black children, to win-at-all-costs prosecutors who strike blacks from jury pools, to craven politicians who earn votes by preying on racial anxieties.”
Even films which centre on the holocaust that was the Atlantic Slave Trade like The Birth of a Nation (2016), Harriet (2019), and Emperor (2020), are deliberately constructed to engage in a vivid dialogue with contemporary discourse on issues of identity, memory and memorialization that circle the Trump presidency. They emerge during a period in which many citizens of the United States are reassessing the historical character of the American experiment, whether that might be to challenge or reaffirm it, and directly participate in this process.
Films from and about the Trump era already provide a compelling testimony to the turbulent period in the same way as America of the 1970s is materialized in iconic films like Dirty Harry (1971), Chinatown (1974),The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), or Apocalypse Now (1979). Peter Lev in his American Films of the 1970s: Conflicting Visions argued that these films should be considered “key moments of a debate on what America is and what America should be.”
We might make a similar claim about the diverse tapestry of films produced by the American film industry in the last decade, that they too are complicated, dynamic and sometimes frustrating, even paradoxical texts, but never less than intrinsically connected to their cultural moment. With the 2020 election less than a few months away and America more divided than ever, these battles will continue to be fought onscreen and off for a long time to come.
Terence McSweeney is a Senior Lecturer at Solent University, Southampton where he teaches Film and Television Studies.