Unclear and Present Danger - The American President (feat. Linda Holmes)

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John were joined by Linda Holmes of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Our to discuss the 1995 political romantic comedy “The American President,” directed by Rob Reiner, written by — you guessed it — Aaron Sorkin, and starring Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, David Paymer, Samantha Mathis and Michael J. Fox, among others.“The American President” stars Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd, a widow, who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist, played by Annette Bening, while he also runs for re-election and attempts to pass major legislation. The film is both a romantic comedy, depicting the president’s courtship, and a political drama, depicting the effort to win votes, dodge criticism and shore up the White House’s political position.The tagline for “The American President” is “Why can’t the most powerful man in the world have the one thing he wants most?”“The American President” is available for rent or purchase on Amazon and iTunes.Our next episode will on the 1995 science-fiction thriller, “Twelve Monkeys.” Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodLinda HolmesAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on the 1970 film “The Conformist.” Our next episode will be on Elia Kazan’s 1957 political drama “A Face in the Crowd.”

The President has asked me to convey to you that he's sending his energy bill to the floor with a call for a 10% reduction The President's expecting our full support. Yes, he is, Sydney. The President's dreaming, AJ. The President has critically misjudged reality. If he honestly thinks that the environmental community is going to whistle a happy tune while rallying support around this pitifully lame mockery of environmental leadership, then your boss is the chief executive of fantasy land. I want you, Mr. President? How are you today?

I couldn't be better. My apologies for the interruption. Mr. President, I don't know what to say. I'm speechless. All evidence, the contrary. What would happen if I called Sidney Wade and asked her to be my date at the state dinner on Thursday evening? President, you can't just go out on a date. I'm having dinner at the White House.

I'm having lunch at the Kremlin. Would you like to dance? Yeah, I guess. I mean, yes, sir. I'd love to. Never mind that she is the hired gun of an ultra-liberal political action committee. And never mind that his 12-year-old daughter is sleeping down the hall. Lucy, you okay with this? Am I having dinner with a lady?

Dad, it's cool. Just go for it. Never mind any of that, folks. My name is Bob Rumson, and I'm running for president. In the past seven weeks, 59% of the country has begun to question your family value. This poll doesn't talk about my presidency. See, this Paul talks about my life! I gotta nip this in the bud. This has catastrophe written all over it.

Sidney, the man is the leader of the free world. He's brilliant, he's funny, he's an above average dancer. Isn't it possible our standards are just a tad high? You think there'll ever be a time when you can stand in a room with me and not think of me as the president? Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s, in what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans.

I write a substack newsletter called On Popular Front, and I wrote a book about American politics in the early 1990s, which now has a cover and a release date, which is, I think, June 18th, 2020. It's very handsome cover, too. Yeah, I'm very happy with this. We also have a guest this week. Joining us is Linda Holmes, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, and author of Romance novels, Love Stories. And I think that will be a helpful perspective to have for talking about the movie we have this week. Welcome to the show, Linda. It's a real pleasure to have you.

Oh, thank you so much. I'm so excited for this. For this week's episode, we watched the 1999, 1995, not nine. Kind of very different vibe for a 99, I think. The 95 political, romantic comedy kind of drama. The American President, directed by Rob Reiner, written very obviously by Aaron Sorkin. It is the proto-Westwang. It is.

It's not just the Proto West Wing, but as soon as, like, the movie opens with, like, walking and talking, and then, like, male characters talking down the women character, it's like, oh, yeah, Aaron Sorkin wrote this. Yeah, it's not just Sorkin, it's sorken. It really is. It's true. The American president stars Michael Douglas, Annette Benning, Martin. Sheen, David Pamer, Samantha Mathis, and Michael J. Fox. And because this is really a Proto West Wing, you will recognize basically half of the recurring cast from the West Wing are peppered through this movie at various points. So for West Wing fans, it is a fun, it's fun to watch. I feel compelled

to note, I haven't done this in a while, but I feel compelled to note that this movie was shot by the great John Seale, whose credits include Witness Dead Poet Society, the firm, previous episode, the talented Mr. Ripley, and one of the best movies at the 21st century, Mad Max Fury Road. So I just want to notice. It's a good looking movie. It looks good. And there's real master behind the camera.

Okay. The American president stars Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepard, a widow, who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist played by Annette Benning, while he also runs for election and attempts to pass major legislation. the film is very much a romantic comedy depicting the president's courtship, but it's also a political drama depicting the effort to win votes and shore up the White House's political position. I think the movie actually works surprisingly well to meld the two together, but I'm sure we all have some thoughts about it as well, some thoughts about its depiction

of American politics. The tagline for the American president is, why can't the most powerful man in the world have the one thing he wants most? Which is, great tagline, not the least, because it is like the actual perennial question presidents ask themselves, except less about their love lives, more about why can't they govern like a king. But, you know, it's a good tagline. The American president is available for rent or purchase on Amazon and iTunes. So if you've not seen it, recommend checking it out. It's a nice, cool hour and 50 minutes, something to watch in the evening. or, you know, while you're doing other stuff.

It's really, it's a, it's a pleasurable watch, easy to get through. It was released on November 17th, 1995, so let's check out the New York Times front page for that day. Take it away, John. Okay, well, the first story that grabs my eyes kind of related to the movie. House approves rule to prohibit lobbyist gifts. Freshman prompts move. Policy exceeds Senate limits. by covering a wide range of items, big and small.

After several hours of proclaiming the necessity of winning back public confidence, the House of Representatives voted tonight to prohibit members and their staffs from accepting gifts, free meals, and free travel to charity sports events. Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed the new limits. He said it today it was time to end accepting gifts from Mobius and others who give you the gifts because you are a member of Congress. Of course, now we can still do this to Supreme Court members. If the House was going to act, it should act decisively and clearly.

Members could accept gifts from personal friends and family members who will be barred from accepting others' gifts even items of nominal value like T-shirts or baseball caps. The new rule adopted 422 to 6 vote, went further than most advocates of limits had expected as recently as a week ago, and further than the Senate did this summer when it banned gifts worth more than $50. Well, basically, you know, part of the program of Newt Gingrich's sort of populist, I suppose you could call it, you know, campaign to win the House was attacking the kind of, you know, implied in actual corruption that members of Congress engaged in with either very problematic and troubling relationship with lobbyists, and also kind of taking advantage of the perks of being the house member, like drawing checks from the house bank that maybe didn't have any money behind them, which was a big scandal.

And this was a big thing that Newt Gingrich kind of beat on C-SPAN and other outlets like that and, you know, had something to do with them take back the house. So that's an interesting little piece of context. And this movie is about a lobbyist. Yes, I feel like it's worth noting that pretty much through its relatively recent jurisprudence, the Supreme Court has kind of legalized bribery and all but name. Right. The big kind of landmark case in this regard was McDonald versus the United States, which was decided in 2016. McDonald, Bob McDonald, the former governor of Virginia, who was basically like taking gifts in favor from one of his rich friends.

and letting that rich friend influence state policy. Virginia governors only serve one term at a time. They are not eligible for re-election. So he leaves office under the cloud of scandal. He has prosecuted and convicted for bribery, corruption kind of stuff. I know he's prosecuted. He's not convicted. He's prosecuted.

And the court then holds that, in fact, he did not receive the gifts for a technical official act. Defining an official act extremely narrowly to qualify as an official act. The court said the public official must make a decision to take an action on that question or matter or agree to do so. Setting up a meeting, talking to another official or organizing an event does not fit the definition of official. I think it's a very bad ruling, but the effect is basically that as long as you aren't literally saying, thank you for this gift or money, I will do this for you. As long as you have not literally said that, then basically anything goes.

The thing that's so weird about this to me is that before I was a journalist and before I was a novelist, I was a nonpartisan legislative attorney for the Minnesota House of Representatives. And many people in many different kind of jobs will have said this exact same thing as all of these stories have come out, which is limitations on what you're allowed to accept are incredibly common. People navigate them every day. They do it in journalism. They do it in public service jobs of all kinds. When I was a nonpartisan legislative staff, I wasn't allowed to take lunch from lobbyists. I mean, that's why they talk about these as cup of coffee rules. I wasn't allowed to take a cup of coffee from the lobbyist.

And it had nothing to do with any direct, you know, I mean, I was a peon. I was a nobody. You just don't do it. And it had nothing to do with like they're trading this cup of coffee for this particular act. It had to do with maintaining a certain level of independence, both real independence and the perception of independence is the same thing. It happens in journalism. And it's just so funny to me that people act like, oh, this is so complicated to navigate. And oh, you know, well, where do you draw the line? And it's so difficult to tell people like, you can't do anything. Like, people do this. every day. They do it every day. The only time that people are not asked to do things like this is when they do not wish to do them. Because people do it every single day in much lower paid and much less powerful jobs. They just simply don't take stuff from people. It's not that difficult. Yeah, yeah. The wild thing about, not to spend too much time on this, but the wild thing about the court's argument and oral arguments especially is you have like Roberts and some of the other justice being like, yeah, but what if you're going to like a baseball game with your friend who happens to be a U.S. senator? And it's like, this isn't, this isn't really a thing for 99% of

people. To your point, Linda, it's like really hard just to say you can't do that. If you're a lobbyist or you're a rich guy with business with the government, sorry, you can't treat your a buddy who is a U.S. Senator or governor of a state to a special baseball game. You just pay for yourself. As I said, it's not that hard. When I was a few years ago, I had become personally friendly with a guy who won Survivor. And when I was out in California at this critics thing, we had dinner. And we just went out to, we just went out to dinner. We'd become friends by then, right? We just went out to dinner. But I still covered Survivor from time to time. And he said, hey, I want to pay for dinner. And I said, no. I also was at a press thing

one time, and I won a contest for naming ingredients in a Gordon Ramsey gazpacho. Thank you very much. It will be in my obit. But the prize was a fancy dinner at one of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants. And after I won the contest, and after he said, oh, congratulations, you've done fabulously, I realized, oh, I can't take the, I can win the contest, but I can't take a dinner that's worth a couple hundred bucks at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant because I cover this show and because this was a press thing. And so it's fine to go through the exercise. This is too many stories. But it's just, it frustrates me because it's so easy. Yeah. Speaking of bribery and corruption, the image on the top of the fold here is, and we've discussed this before

because it's happened a few times, ex-president of South Korea jailed in bribery case, Rotee Wu in the backseat of a car that took up to jail and sold yesterday. He was arrested on charges accepting hundreds of millions of dollars of crimes by his president. I think we established that there were like three jailed, at least three jailed South Korean presidents. They love to throw their presidents in jail.

And good for them. Good for them. Yeah. I love it. And also kind of related to the movie, this is big news in the mid-90s. The Washington Pop-Boyer steals budgets thunder. Forget for the moment the future of Medicaid. tax cuts for the middle class, resizing the social secret that are balancing the thorough

budget in seven, eight, or nine or ten years. Dialogue between Congress and the White House has boiled down to this. Who got to stretch out where and who got to talk turkey with whom and who got access to the front door of a Boeing 747? On Wednesday, yeah, this is this. Speaker Newt Gingrich confessed he had freighted a stopgap spending measure with restrictive conditions that prompted a veto and a government shutdown in part to spite President Clinton for failing to show adequate courtesy to him and Senator Bob Dole, the majority leader on Air Force One, on the way to and from Israel for the funeral of Prime Minister at South Rabin 10 days ago. Of course, Rabin was assassinated.

This is petty, but I think it is human, Mr. Gingrich complained in demanding to know why the president failed to negotiate the budget on the nearly day-long round trip and then had Mr. Dole and him used the rear stairs upon landing on Andrews Air Force base. You just wonder, where's their sense of manners? Where's their sense of courtesy? This was infamous and it did not make Gingrich look very good. I mean, at least in the eyes of people that I knew. And it's sort of revealing of Gingrich's character. He's extremely petty and he's very fixated on like the honors and prerogatives of his office.

And he felt like he had been mistreated. He was made fun of for this, rightly so. I don't think this really helped his political position. It didn't hurt that much. But this was a big joke. much a Clinton era movie I know I know and you know what

it's sort of in line with the sorts of things that happen in the movie not exactly but it's in the firmament of this movie it's in the background and that I guess is there anything else here that looks interesting to you guys West Bank Settlers talking of

portrayal when armed policies took charge of the West Bank city of Janine last week the Unthinkal became a reality for many Jewish settlers. It's a creepy feeling, said Mahal Bronsty, a nurse in the nearby settlement of Ghanin. They're terrorists, not police. They were trained in terror camps, and now the government has decided to call them police. Many of her neighbors are secular, a far cry from the Belco settlers of Hebron, who spew the violent religious ideology that fired Igal Amir, the confessed assassin of its Akrabid. Basically, you know, part of the Camp David Agreements

Oslo Accords were that, you know, that the Palestinian Authority would take over large sections of the West Bank and obviously settlers who were accustomed to viewing the PLO as a terrorist organization, we're not happy with this. Obviously, you know, by six years from now, Oslo would be in Tatters, there would be another end of Fata, but it seemed to be going forward at this point. Anything else, guys? The only thing I feel like it's worth mentioning is just that, you know, there's a government There's budget feud and potential government shutdown and everything happening around this time. And we're recording this on September 15th, 2003, when the government's probably going to have a shutdown. The emergence of the shutdown is a routine part of budget negotiations is like one of the, you know, one of the legacy. of Congress in the 90s and specifically Republican control of Congress because it generally only

happens during that point. And what's interesting is just to note that with each iteration of this, the demands, right, become less and less tethered to like the actual budget. So, you know, this time it was like we want spending cuts and programs under Obama. It's we want to repeal Obamacare. Now it's like, I don't know, I guess they want to release pictures of Hunter Biden's hog to the public. I don't really know what the ask is. But it's, that's where we're heading toward the shutdown. Okay. The American president, the movie is straightforward plot wise, so we're not going to spend a ton of time on walking through the plot. Basically, the setup is that it's the third year, fourth year of Michael Douglas's presidency,

president, whatever the character's name is. Shepard. Yes. And he has. So subtle. So subtle. And he has a sky high approval rating, 6 or 3%, and wants to use it to pursue a crime bill that he's promised.

And also he is going to try to get a modest. environmental bill through. The prominent environmental lobbying group wants him to push for something more ambitious and hires Annette Benning's political strategists to try to lobby the White House in a very direct way that does not seem particularly realistic. But the president shepherd is spitten with Annette Benning's character and thus begins a kind of courtship love affair. that gets entangled with this effort to pass legislation, and also causes the president's approval ratings to begin to decline as his Republican opponent, played by Richard Dreyfus, begins to hammer on the relationship as indicative of a character problem in the White House.

And so we see the president and his staff both sort of wrangle and negotiate this relationship, its impact on the president's standing, on his legislative agenda, so on and so forth. Obviously, it all ends with the president giving a rousing speech at a White House press conference, denouncing his Republican opponent and winning back Annette Benning, who had left because the president had decided to initially at least sacrifice the environmental bill for the crime bill. But he reverses course, and all is saved, I suppose. And that's the movie. And I'd like to know what would you guys think, Linda?

Yeah, this movie, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this movie with you guys, and I think I told you this from the beginning, is I have this really, like, complicated relationship with Sorkin and Sorkin's work. I really loved a few good men, weirdly, and I really loved this movie. I really loved his first TV show, which a sports night. Great show. Terrific show. You know, everything is flawed, but I think in some of those early days,

he was more fixated on his, he sort of is a combination of optimism and axe grinding always. And I think there was more of the kind of idealism and less of the axe grinding before he started making shows like Studio 60 in the newsroom, which are essentially 95% axe grinding. But also at that time, the other weird thing that happened was that Sorkin kind of famously got into a dust up on the forums at Television Without Pity, where I was working at the time. And he and Rick Cleveland kind of got into this thing about credit for. this episode of the West Wing. And this is one of the funny things about this is that one of the reasons why he tangled with our forum moderators was that they didn't believe it was really him, which always makes me laugh because of the way that Annette Benning doesn't really think it's shepherd when he calls her. But so there were all these different things that came around,

but as I kind of came into later West Wing, I mean later his part of West Wing. And then, you know, basically everything he did after that, I started to kind of sour on him. But For a long time, I have retained a lot of affection for this movie and thought of it as like, this is good, Sorkin. When I went back and watched it this time, I was really surprised how poorly I reacted to do it and how much I kind of was annoyed by it, particularly, like, once you start to see the sexism in the way that he writes women, you kind of can't unsee it. And that's regardless of his obvious fondness for characters like Robin Tuttall McCall, who's played by the wonderful Anna Devere Smith in this movie,

and she is very much the proto C.J. Craig from the West Wing. He has a lot of affection for those characters, but this is one of many things he's written where the woman kind of plays the role of the conscience. And I think that, you know, Sorkin has an idea that women have access to a kind of moral clarity that doesn't necessarily come naturally to men because men are distracted by a desire for power

that he doesn't think comes naturally to women. So you've seen him kind of play this dynamic out over and over again. It's the dynamic of this. It's the dynamic of a few good men. It's the dynamic of his movie about Steve Jobs. Yes. And it's very much the dynamic of his movie about Mark Zuckerberg, which I think you can see his take on the social network

as this opening scene where Zuckerberg kind of rejects the attempt of this woman to write the ship for him. And as a result of that rejection of her kind of, moral clarity guidance. He then kind of goes off into this like other wrong way. Anyway, I still find this movie really charming. I think of all the meets cute that there are in the romantic comedies of the 90s. This is one of my favorites, the way that he kind of comes in doing literally the he's right behind me isn't a joke, which is so cliched. And yet I love the way they pull it off here. But the more you watch this movie, I'm like, why does she not understand

anything about how politics works if she's a professional political. Also, she just moved to D.C.? Like, why are we supposed to believe? There's this wonderful, there's this wonderful moment where, you know, if you want to know how close the ties to the West Wing are, you know, Michael Douglas is the president and essentially Martin Sheen playing his second in command, very much as Leo McGarry. And there's this wonderful moment where somebody kind of passes a message to Shepard through Sydney, the Annette Benning character. And immediately, Martin Sheen, understands it and Andrew Shepard understands it. But Sydney, the professional political strategist is like whoop the dude doesn't understand the implications of what's been said to her. So like this movie,

I was surprised how poorly it had aged. There are still a lot of things that I appreciated about it. I love this Michael J. Fox performance. It always makes me giggle. I think as Jamel pointed out, it's really good looking. I very much appreciate how how loving made it is, and I still believe, despite my kind of estrangement from a lot of Sorkin's work, that he has an ear for kind of musicality and dialogue that's really rare, and that I still just love to listen to as long as I don't worry too much about what the content is. So I still find much of this pleasurable, but I do find the clanging things about it more clanging than perhaps I expected. Yeah. I kind of fucking hate Aaron Sorkin, and I kind of,

kind of also fucking hate Rob Reiner, to be honest with you. I don't know if I was just in a cranky mood when I watched this. But this, yeah, it's definitely a proto-West Wing and has some of the worst parts of West Wing to it. And Rob Reiner has been some terrific movies that I love. But I think he and Aaron Sorkin both, and when they're matchup together, they have this terrible sentimentality, which I cannot stand. And they have these, their movies are just chock full of these lectures and homilies where the music builds and just drives me crazy. The first thought I had when watching this movie is this movie is so normal, it seems weird. There's something almost uncannily inoffensive about it that made me

almost think of it. I was like, this is like watching some kind of Stalinist propaganda movie, but for liberal, for like, for like Hollywood liberal, sentimentalized liberalism, where you know, like they had these movies in like the 30s and 40s, which they showed Stalin is this kind man who was nice to children and so on and so forth. But this movie was just like if there was some kind of propaganda for the American system and not even particularly attractive parts of the American system. I mean, okay, she's a lobbyist for a good cause. We're all left-leaning, I presume.

We love the environment. But, you know, she's sort of, it's not an unproblematic part of the political system, the access of special interests to, you know, high areas of power. you know, not mediated through elections, but, you know, through their funding of private donors and so on and so forth. So it's, so that would, it's, it was sort of like this, oh, even though we have a, you know, a system, an unrepresentative system, you know, it's full of these kind of virtuous people and I just, it's driving me crazy. I thought that the Michael J. Fox speech that he gives to the president was Aaron Sorkidism and it's absolute worst. And incoherent. incoherent. Totally.

And it was just like, it was amazing, weird. It was like, no, I am the people. I get to lecture the president. It's just so absurd. Where's the moral center of the movie? What's supposed to be good and what's supposed to be bad? I mean, obviously in Aaron Sork and West Wing universe, the idea is like, these people are decent. They know that they have to compromise sometimes.

They presented the Republicans as so terribly horrible and unreasonable, which, of course, they are. But because what's a big deal? He's a widower and he's dating. There's really no problem. I mean, I think the bigger deal is that, you know, that they didn't make. They were saying, oh, it's a family values thing. The real thing is like, well, she's a lobbyist. Exactly.

Yeah. I was, I kept, I guess I hadn't seen this in so long. I was like, obviously there's a plot line about the fact that like there was a literal lobbyist living in the residence. Uh-huh. And it's like, no, that's, that's not the issue. The issue. In a literal bed with the president. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Literally in bed with the president. Uh, yeah, that's, that's. You can date, but you can't date a person who's actively being paid to influence you. That's, of course you can't. That, again, not difficult. Right.

We all agree the president can get it wet. No one has a problem with that. No one has a problem with that. I have a problem with that. But actually, it's come to think of it, it's interesting to think about this movie three or four years before the Lewinsky scandal because this presents the president. you know, obviously we're supposed to think of Clinton, this nice liberal president during his time, as this sort of, you know, attractive but decent fellow and he just wants to meet somebody new after his wife has died, not the Clinton, you know, who already, you know,

his affairs and whatever he was doing were well publicized at this point. His reputation in that regard was not good. But this movie sort of implied that the, as a piece, let's just just. take my conceit and run with it as a piece of propaganda. It sort of implies that Republican interest in the president's sex life is so absurdly stupid because he's obviously just a decent guy. He's not a pervert up to no good. He's just trying to, you know, he has a daughter and he just would like to start a new family. And, you know, the absurdity of that when you compare it to Clinton's actual romantic and sex life is pretty funny to think about.

And then you think about, you know, the Walensky scandal blowing up a more interesting movie albeit it would not lend itself to Reiner and Sorkin's sentimentality would be about a president who was actually doing something maybe kind of a little bit bad or he had an affair and the affair

maybe on the one hand could be presented as passionate and on the other hand could be presented as sordid that might be an interesting movie this movie is just like he's doing nothing wrong it's the most vanilla normal adult relationship he's dating

a lady he's very proper you know everybody's nice sending flowers etc etc but it's just like this guy there's no moral conflict in the movie because he never does anything really wrong he kind of gets talking to because he's being selfish or something but i don't understand what anybody's supposed to like where is the moral conflict in the movie there's no drama this is why i fucking hate a few good men there is no dramatic center of the movie like where is the moral conflict supposed to come from. Where is the drama? Where is the tragedy? This is my question for you guys. Well, when you talk about, when you talk about him not doing anything bad, the thing that I find funny is the one thing he does that the movie really treats as legitimately bad is the trading

of one legislative priority for another legislative priority, which is not bad necessarily, right? He's mucked it all up by making a bunch of personal promises to her and they have this relationship and all that stuff. But deciding it's more important to me to pass. this than it is to pass that. I'm going to pick this over that is governing, right? So that's actually not bad, but it's the thing the movie treats is bad. I think as to what you said about the propaganda element, this is one of the movies that I talk about when I refer to this idea that there are like four cultural Washington's, right? The first one is the swamp one, the one where everybody's bad, everybody's evil. Nothing is good there.

And that's the one that kind of encourages kind of civic nihilism and doesn't let people ask for anything. It's very destructive, but it's often very popular with people who are inside those establishments, which I think is weird. So that's A. And then B is the Sorkin one, which is also kind of the Capra one, which is the, it's those people versus a team of good people, right? So that's cultural DCB. Cultural DCC is the visual iconography of America. It's the D.C. that is the postcard one that includes like your Washington Monument and your Capitol Building and your National Mall. You see a lot of that one in like Captain America Winter Soldier and stuff like that. And then the fourth actual notion of D.C. is like, oh, yeah, it's a city.

People live there. That one you almost never see in the movies. But this is very much the Sork in D.C. where it's like the good people versus the bad people and whatever the good people do is good and whatever the bad people do is bad, Richard Dreyfus has never had more fun in his life. I think he actually thinks the person he's playing in this movie is worse than the shark and jaws. And he's having, he has never chomped so hard

on every single bit of scenery. He actually hums a little happy tune at one point. It is hilarious to me. And it's that good and evil. thing, right? And as such, it's not terribly useful. No, it's melodramatic. It's melodramatic. And it's not like, yeah, it doesn't, I mean, I guess in the West Wing, sometimes he presents, like, Republicans as like, there's always a moment where like, we're, we don't like each other, but now we can, we can agree. But I think that's because they had to make sure that, you know,

Republicans buy sneakers too, right? So, so like, so, so they had to, they had to kind of tone down the aggressive liberalism of that show a little bit. But I think, yeah, in this movie, it's pretty manichaean that the, you know, the Republicans are good and the Democrats are, I mean, the Democrats are good and the Republicans are bad. You know, that conforms the way I view things, but it would, again, be more interesting. I really am interested in that kind of schema of the cultural presentation of the you see. And it's incredible how this movie presents lobbying, which kind of belongs to DCA

and most as part of as it kind of subtly says, oh, you know what? It's okay. It's just part of the way the sausage is made. And I think that that sort of, it's a part of post-New Deal liberalism that I think does irk voters and they view it maybe on fairly and unreasonably from time to time. They do view it as. a you know part of the non-representational aspect of of politics in dc and i was just surprised that this movie was so brazenly celebrating it pro lobbyist pro lobbyists and also pro dc elites you know it's just like oh yeah they're they're nice people they're parties yeah they're just having nice parties and dating and you meet the french prime minister the president of france and you speak

french to him and everything's very charming it's just it's a movie of there is not even a moment of populist anger in this movie. And Sorkin is allergic to that. He loves the insiders. He thinks within them there are a lot of intelligent, witty, virtuous people who know best and will throw their browsings are sincere and will come to the correct conclusions. I think that that makes less and less sense once you get to the Iraq war, once you get to the war on terror and stuff like that. I think the image of DC as a kind of chummy and clubby world with, you know, clever but virtuous people. Look, it's super comforting. There's nothing. This movie, you could just, you know, curl up with Chinese food on a nice fall night and

just really feel cozy and comfortable. Like, there's nothing wrong with the world like a lot of movies he made. But it is not a fair or accurate representation. of the way the country is governing. I think it does not to come down too hard on what is ultimately a pretty harmless movie, but kind of does people disservice. I think this is why there was kind of a backlash. Maybe a backlash has gone too far, but a backlash against Aaron Sorkinism as an aesthetic or project or something.

A couple of thoughts. The first is, Linda, I had the very funny image of Richard Dreyfus auditioning for the part of the shark. So that just made me chuckle. Another kind of just like silly observation. Because it's Michael Douglas playing the president and like Douglas generally plays sleazy characters. Like that's his thing.

Like sleazy, sleazy sex addicts is kind of Michael Douglas's character type. It is interesting to think about a version of this movie in which the president isn't so virtuous, which the president does play in which president is my. Michael Douglas, right? Like, what would it be like to have the kind of guy that Michael Douglas usually plays as president of the United States, which would be more like Bill Clinton?

Which I think gets to something that I think is interesting about this movie and kind of Sorkin's work in general. And here, maybe you can sort of like talk about the 90s, the mid-90s as a political moment. Sorkin's a relationship to Clinton, if you just try to figure, divine it by this film in the West Wing feels like a Hollywood liberal betrayed, right? That Clinton betrayed some kind of promise of being kind of a decent, forward-thinking president that Sorkin and Sorkin's crowd, you might say, really hoped him to be.

And so the presidents he's written, President Shepard and President Bartlett, are in both their ways kind of idealized Bill Clinton's, right? They are moderate, liberal, intellectual types from small states, small kind of parochial states who nonetheless have these like broad cosmopolitan sensibilities and who deploy them for the good of the country. Now, what the good of the country means in this is often quite narrow, right? Like in this movie, our two competing bills are a moderate gun control bill and a bill that, like, moderately reduces fossil fuel emissions.

And that's like the height of ambition, right? That's the height of the two-thirds of the American public supports the president, and the height of ambition is maybe... Like a little tiny bill. Yeah. And then likewise, in the West Wing, I will never... There's maybe... Is it the third season opener?

It might be the third season opener. Because I think that's when Bart was running for re-election. Yeah, because the movie, the West Wing begins. and Bartland's second year of his first term. And so season three is the beginning of his fourth year, and they're about to announce for re-elect. And I think it's Josh Lyman and Rob Blow's character, who's never forget, are...

Sam Seaborne. Sam Seaborne, there we go. One of the Aaron Sorkin's same initial names that he loves so much. Go ahead. Basically, basically Michael J. Fox playing a version of that kind of character. But they are discussing the kinds of policies that might appeal to ordinary people. And what they come to is a tax credit for college tuition,

which like today is like a joke. That's like a joke about democratic policymaking, like uppercase deed democratic policymaking. But that was like the height of ambition for this kind of moderate liberal. So I'm just struck by even by this point, because this movie would have been in production in the 94, I suppose, and I was being written before then. That even at this relatively early stage in the Clinton presidency, there is like this

sense that sort of, oh, we could have something better than Bill Clinton, but not like fundamentally different, just sort of like more respectable. So like, you know, the president wants to sleep with someone in this movie, but he wants to sleep with someone in like a nice respectable way. Like he wants to have, you know, a monogamous relationship with a nice lady. he's not he's not bill clinton who just you know just likes women in a sleazy way there's no perception of any kind of enjoyment of power sexuality or anything in this movie that's what's so aggressively normie about it it's just like there is no like it's just in

the confines of the world of a romantic comedy where it's just like these things power at the highest else, you know, a sexual relationship between two adults who probably, you know, have a certain amount of baggage coming with the jobs they do. These things are just all, you know, portrayed in the most innocuous way possible. And you're just like, there is not much drama. You know, you would imagine, in reality, the, and especially with the public pressure and so on and so forth, the inner lives and the romantic lives of such people would be very complicated. and the way they related to their partners would be extremely complicated and meeting it through all kinds of thoughts about power and domination and so on and so forth and very weird.

Instead, you know, these are two professional in the world of Aaron Sorkin, two nice college education professional people who have decided to go on a date. It's a little complicated because there's a lot of focus on them, but they're, you know, they're both well-meaning people and they can work it out. it's just not, you know, a world that, you know, knowing what we know about the person, we have a wealth of documentary evidence of the personal lives of American presidents and especially their affairs and their, you know, their love lives and sex lives. And we know them to be a great deal more complicated and strange than the way this movie.

So it's sort of the way this movie kind of desexualizes, not desexualized, like drains all kind of perverse enjoyment out of these people who are fucking politicians at high levels. You know, they're going to be sick on some level. You know, there's going to be something animating them that's excessive. And you don't see that. It's just like, you know, we know about JFK, we know about FDR, we know about LBJ, we know about all these people's as demon. We know about Nixon.

We don't, fortunately, we don't know too much about Nixon's sex life. But we know about the demons that possess these people. And then it's just like, well, these are just nice folks. I think the project of Aaron Sorkin's career has been the examination of great men, right? And when he says great men, he means a very particular kind of great men. And I think he believes that the well-being of the world is reliant on encouraging great men to become great and to remain great. And I think he believes that the greatest threat to the world is either that great men will falter or great men will be. thwarted. And that's his interest, right? If you saw his take on To Kill a Mockingbird, you would think

that To Killa Mockingberg is already enough of a great man story, right? But he actually really made it way more of a great man story. He sort of marginalized the character of Scout and made her sort of off to the side narrating the story of her father and her brother, and which is sort of about her father's struggle to be and remain a great man and to turn her brother into a great man. And when you see something like the American president, his interest is not in the relationship itself. And it's really not in understanding politics. It's in understanding how you nurture, protect, and expect the most from your great men. And that's why the climax of this movie, the emotional and dramatic climax of this movie, is merely everybody filing into the press room to hear him,

meet their expectations. That's, it's not a drama in the sense of he does something new. It's in the sense of he has risen to the expectations and hopes and dreams that all these people already have for him as potentially a great man. And that's when you get this, I'm going to go door to door and I'm going to convince people to give up handguns. That's another interesting time capsule situation. But, um, it's not a dramatic.

climax that's reliant on something changing. It's just the reassurance of the great man is intact. And certain other things that he's done like the Steve Jobs movie and the Mark Zuckerberg movie are, you know, the shakiness is will the great man or will not the great man, you know, kind of pull through? And in some ways, he's most successful, I think, when he's not necessarily writing about anybody who is all that great. I think that's why Sports Night to me is a better show than the West Wing. It's one of the reasons why I think Moneyball is one of his better scripts. Like that's a guy, you know, Brad Pitt in that movie is a guy is really good at something, but he's not world-changingly great and the world doesn't really rely on his greatness.

The lower, the stakes, the better he is. And he will never understand that about himself. He has no interest in living that life. But the lower the stakes, the best. The better. better Aaron Zorkin is. That's so true. When he does something about like, oh, these are smart people who are extremely good at their jobs and they have kind of complicated lives, but they really apply themselves. He's a, but that's the thing. He's a, he's a lover and chronicler of professionalism. And he wants to professional, professional manager class virtues. But you get to these higher reaches and then those things are not applicable or they are applicable only there that's the that's the myth that i think that he kind of sold to a lot of people was like you know there's just

decent folks who are confident and clever and are going to apply themselves really hard and get through it he also has a myth of hype i think this also infected lots of ways people lots of cinema lots of tv a lot of ways people think about movies a kind of myth of hyperconfidence Not a world in which there are tragic possibilities that are beyond anybody's control, not in people's inner lives, like they're haunted by flaws that they can't control, or in the sense that there are issues in the outside world that are just beyond the powers of clever, professional people handling. And that's why his shows and this movie are very reassuring and nice, because you're like,

well, you know, a smart, well-meaning person will be able to handle this. It has, it's a myth that has a lot of political success and something to be said for it. I don't want to be too, to denigrate it too much. But that's sort of like certain part of resistance liberalism too, which is like, oh, we have all these wonderful Washington bureaucrats who will, you know, do, they'll do their duty, you know, go off into their offices and then the music will play in the background on the American flag and the leaves fall. You know what I mean? It gives people, I mean, there are. worst visions of American politics. It gives people a false, sentimentalized and unsophisticated portrait of both humanity and large and politics as a practice.

Well, I mean, the thing is, right, is that there are, it's almost as a story he can get like half of the story right. There are smart, well-meaning people who are in Washington, who are in government, who do this because they really genuinely do want to improve things. those people exist. And in my experience, much, in my experience, the typical cynicism that, like, the typical American has about Washington is, like, overplay that, like, most of the people you meet in government, in and around government are there because they believe in something and they want to do something.

They want to accomplish something. People disagree about whether they want to accomplish is good, but the sincerity is there. But I think Sork and misses, and I think this idealized vision, misses is that it is all not just mediated by very real structural, institutional, personal obstacles, mediated by kind of things that are just intrinsic in the project of any kind of like democratic political life. Like, for example, you know, sometimes what the people collectively want is incoherent. And like, how do you manage that?

But also, as you were suggesting, John, it's, like, mediated through the actual, like, personal either foibles or, or perversities of individuals, right? And so, like, there's, if we want to, to imagine a different version of this movie, we've talked about maybe Michael Douglas being slees here, maybe think about Annette Benning as, this is a high-level professional political strategist. like this is a person who has a real taste for in love of power that's why she does it so why not make that part of her character that that gets to something more true about what is happening in this world this is a person who whatever her decency luck likes power and that is that that that that is a trait that can fuel things that are useful like in this case she's like mercenarily trying to improve an environmental bill, because it also feel things are very ugly and disturbing. But I don't think, I don't think Sorkin has an awareness of that, has an awareness of how, like,

I think he can clearly identify when someone like Steve Jobs is a piece of shit in a lot of ways. But like someone, like Atticus Finch, who this isn't necessarily in the characterization in the novel, but like if you're thinking creatively about that character, a white southern, a liberal white Southern lawyer in 1960 may still be possessed of deep prejudice, may be as interested in making himself appear to be a more moral and just person than his peers, not for any particular selflessness, but just because, like, hey, I think the people up around are bunches of pieces of shit, and I want to at least, like, stand out relative to them. I don't think, I don't think Sorkin has an awareness of that element of the human personality whatsoever. It's either-

he doesn't advance it. Right. Especially not in women. Not in women. Yeah. No. Yeah. And women are totally harmless.

Right. Right, right, right. That could be smart, but they have no moral complications, really. Yeah. Yeah. He needs to read two things, which I'm sure he claims to have read, but has not understanding. He should read.

He should, he needs to read some, some Robert Carr books. And he needs to read some Freud. Just to understand human beings as having, libidness, you know, lust for power and sexual gratification that are overpower their rational minds and their nice professional lives. It is fascinating to me that nobody, not one person in the course of this entire movie, says to Michael Douglas, you know, she could be trying to get close to you for some kind of reason related to her life as a professional political strategist. Nobody suspects that she could be,

as Jamal said, that she could have a desire for power. They all just see her as like this nice woman who we don't want to do anything bad to. And she at the end of this film is so shocked and horrified by the idea of political horse training. And I thought, how long have you been in D.C. And what were you doing before this? She's supposed to be some crackerjack strategy. Well, listen, as we talked about at the beginning of this discussion, you know, they suggest that she has this history in lobbying. She has this history in politics. But she doesn't seem to actually understand anything about the way that any of it works. And the funny thing is, if she did, it would really remove the tension from the romantic element of the film, because if she knew and he knew that in the end, you know, the bills are going to do what the bills are going to do, and which, you know, if you imagine a world in which it is acceptable to date a lobbyist, which it is not, if you, the only way that would ever work is if everybody says, hey, look, no hard feelings, bills are going to do what they're going to do. I'm going to lobby against, you know, I might try to pull levers against you.

incidentally there's no political strategy from her in this film other than just saying to people on the phone like don't you want to get have clean air like that's not what political strategists do my favorite moment in this film in some ways might be um michael j fox on the phone with a uh a vote that they've just lost on their bill and he says to the guy um you know you know what i'm going to do and this is all we're going to get the votes and we're going to win. And after we do, I'm going to go to Sam and Harry's. I'm going to eat a steak and I'm going to make a list of everybody who tried to fuck us this week. And the reason I love that moment is that that feels like a real person. That feels like a real person who is into power. And in fact, right after John Federman was elected, his campaign manager had a tweet that was like, look, if you're one of the Democrats who was freaking out about his debate performance and all this other stuff and saying that he was doomed and we were all on big, trouble. Like, you're, you know, you're an asshole and you're a big loser. And I actually quote

tweeted that and said, like, this is Michael J. Fox sitting, you know, having his steak at Sam and Harry's. That's what is happening right now in this tweet. Look at Nixon and LBJ. It feels real. Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely agree with you. And that's the kind of mentality that's not so attractive, perhaps. But it can be very funny to, but that's the way like Nixon and LBJ acted. They were like, it's horrible. It's like, oh, I'm going to make a little list and I'm going to get revenge on the people who boarded me. That's a huge part of the mindset of being a successful politician. I mean, that's because I would say that's Obama. You can sense it in Obama. He has a good sense to sort of like keep that stuff like submerged.

But like a black guy doesn't become president of the United States if he isn't like an apex political predator. Just doesn't happen. Right. No, you punish your enemy. means, and you reward your friends, and that's a big part of politics. That's the thing. Like, we have the whole sentimental conception of American politics, which has a certain function, which may not be for the worst. They may not be totally fake. But, you know, when you were a political junkie, I think like all of us here, and we have a little bit more knowledge of the characters of the people who do these sorts of things, you know, yeah, you're absolutely right that one scene rings true

and in the way that politics is actually done and the way people actually talk to each other and it's just too bad that you know as a screenwriter or as a writer artist or whatever Sorkin doesn't really have it in him

to kind of create I mean like even when you read Carroll's books on Robert Moses and LBJ and we're given to understand that Robert Carroll disapproves of many of the qualities of those men and their ruthlessness and their heedlessness to others suffering and yes but there's a certain level of not admiration but you know their will to power does come through and it's

attractive and unattractive ways and you see the way they apply themselves and the way that they manipulate others around them and the way that they're tireless about that and the way power is actually exercised I think is much more it may a much more interesting movie and you could make the case I mean this would probably take a very artist of a high level is that you could make a movie

you could imagine a movie or a novel or anything where both things are true where there is a conflict between the wills to power of these characters and their actual idealism and also a question

of where one ends in the other begins and is one possible without the other. Can we, do we get the Civil Rights Act and the voting rights act if LBJ is not a huge son of a bitch? I don't know. Like, these are interesting questions. Of course, with the specific movie, the problem is if either one of these people take really seriously what their obligations are to the people they work for, to what their jobs are, they're not in this relationship in the first place. So you really have to kind of reimagine the whole thing. Because, you know, he, among other things, that's one of the things that really struck me about Shepard in this film, is that at no point does he really understand that he's

also putting her in a potentially terrible position and really compromising. Her boss is mad, yeah. Well, exactly, but that her boss is mad, but also, like, he sort of is very blasé about the fact that she's now under all of this scrutiny. They have this, you know, they have this very high profile date at the state dinner where they dance, by the way, to I have dreamed from the king and I, which is one of my favorite little visual pun, like, kind of puns in the, in the movie that it's. from the king and I.

But I, you know, they have this very high-profile date. She immediately becomes really kind of hunted by the press. And he's sort of like, well, this is going to happen. What can I tell you? And it's like he's not concerned at all. Anyway, neither one of them would be in this relationship in the first place if they were serious people. Yeah, right.

Or they would be in it as an affair with all of the concomitant problems. and issues to do with that, yeah. So two quick thoughts. I think that I think the closest thing to the movie you're describing, John, is Lincoln, funny enough. Which Lincoln, that movie doesn't lean as much on Lincoln's, uh, Lincoln as political animal. It leans, it in the, kind of in favor of the idealism a bit more.

But the movie still tries the balance to do. It still tries to, it very much tries to suggest that, like, you don't get the 13th Amendment if Abe Lincoln isn't willing to really get into the dirt to win votes. And there's that whole basement scene with Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddea Stevens, which is kind of like the, there's like two thesis statements in that movie. The first is the cabinet meeting near the beginning, like that kind of the turn from the first to the second acts where Lincoln is explaining that he's taking. all these contingent measures because he believes that they need to get rid of slavery, but the Constitution grants have no power to do it. So he's opportunistically looking for ways to advance his agenda. And then on the turn from the second to the third act, he has the basic meeting with Thaddeus Stevens, where he's like, listen, we both want the same thing.

And what I'm asking you to do is think about what gets you to our final destination, not what makes you feel good. And so I think that I really have a lot of affection for that movie, not the least because it's very much, it's very much like, hey, look at that guy. I know that guy kind of movie. That's very true. Yeah. But I think that's one of the few movies about American politics that really does try to sort of like synthesize kind of like, oh. Yeah.

Kind of accomplishments of these kinds of things require not just idealism and competent, but actually sort of like be more unsavory and like less glamorous parts of politics. Right. And I think the other thing that's interesting to me is. If you think of this film and the West Wing as one continuous project, which I think you sort of have to, it's interesting to me that, you know, this is 1995, the West Wing starts in 99, and then in 2002 is when you get the wire, which in some ways, you know, you don't want to place things in dialogue with each other too much that aren't suited to be in dialogue

with each other. But it is true that the West Wing was enormously popular at that time as a story that really is about individual people and personalities overcoming the challenges of American politics. And I think the wire, the brilliance of the wire to me has always been, you know, and I've got issues with David Simon as well. But, you know, the brilliance of the wire to me has always been its understanding that systems are larger than any one person. And the goodness or decency of any individual person is easily devoured by the size and the power of systems. And so it's almost like in many ways, they really are opposite and complementary in that one kind of celebrates the power of the individual to do important things.

And the other sort of acknowledges that the individual is helpless in a lot of systemic dynamics. Right. Just to add, I think it's actually those are two things that are great to put in dialogue, like then for least because their audience was the same as well, right? Like they kind of appealed to the same groups, kind of groups of people. But just to just to add to that observation, the wire has the competent, decent, moral characters who are basically thwarted by the system. There's Lieutenant Daniels, especially as he rises up the ranks. And then there's Lester Freeman, who is a talented, competent, moral decent police officer of detective who is as he wants to pursue something larger than just

street crime thwarted. And then there's the character of Tommy Karketti, who is sort of like an anti-sorking character in a lot of ways, like a talented, competent in some ways kind of decent politician who is consumed basically by his own irrational urges and desire for power. Like, that's, like, the Carcetti character has exactly those elements that an equivalent character in an Aaron Sorkin production would not have. Would not have. And it's also, obviously, the other, I think, comparison that's worth making between those two films, despite, you know, as you said, their audiences are the same. And it's, it's worth thinking about all that stuff. But, you know, the American president comes out in 1995, so three years after 1992. And race does not exist in this movie. does not exist as a political issue. There's this kind of, you know, rat a tad about the crime bill, which seems to be a gun bill. But in the 90s, crime bill did not necessarily mean gun bill.

It meant all kinds of stuff. Super predators. But race does not exist in this movie as a piece of politics, as a political, you know, as an idea that it would be exploited in any way by these, you know, either the hateful people that Michael Douglas is against or. or it just does not, it does not exist, you know. I think, I think we should begin to wrap up. Final, final thoughts on the American president. Any, any final thoughts? I have two.

Well, they're not exactly thoughts. But it's funny that you talked about Lincoln because I was walking around in my apartment here the other day. For some reason, that part, I said to my itself, Buzzard's guts, man. And there was the scene from Lincoln where he, like, starts yelling at them for not, you know, applying power properly in Washington and for arguing with each other.

and he kind of gets a little scary. I wonder if I thought about that because I was annoyed with the presentation of political power in this movie. The other thing I want to know that we should not let pass

is that apparently, according to Wikipedia at least, Aaron Sorcombe was on crack cocaine when he was in. I read that too. Yeah, and he and that's why it took him a long time to finish.

I thought maybe it would speed things up a little but you would also think maybe he would have come up with a little bit of a more interesting movie. Guess not. Drugs do different things to different people. And that's okay. But anyway, I just thought that was a good piece of trivia. Yeah. I think for me, it's just a continuing project of, you know, everybody has those people whose work you loved when you were younger and that the more you examine it, the more you have to kind of re-examine it, I guess. And Sorkin is really that guy for me is very influential on me in a bunch of different ways.

But as I said, the more you watch it, there are certain things that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And so as charming as I think it is when Michael Douglas comes in and says, let's take him out back and beat the shit out of them, which I think is really funny as a meat cute. boy it for me it held up worse than I expected on on this particular rewatch and that was a little heartbreaking but you know choose better heroes next time you know it's that kind of thing yeah I think what this movie makes me want to do is actually just like watch do a rewatch of the sork in west wing of those first four seasons just to kind of like see how it holds up because the one the one thing I will say is that part of the part of the vibe of politics in 1990s was a very cynical sense that like none of it actually mattered.

And the one thing I will say for Sorkin's work, for all of its problems, is he does believe that politics matters. And I think that in that way, this movie is an interesting contrast with the kind of nearly nihilistic view of politics. No, this stuff, you know, this stuff matters. You should pay attention to it. You should care about it. and I'm going to create dramas that will, in some way, shape, or form get you to care about it.

So that's, I think, I think that's, I'll say in his favor, in his sort of, to his credit, I'll say that he has that. But it's for only certain types of people who are, that should matter to and should be left responsible for these things. That's my only counter. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

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More on than I should be. I'm working on it. Yeah. I'm still there. It's, I just frankly can't deal with like all of the ads. Yeah. That you can't scroll without having. It's a lot of ads.

A lot of ads. So if you'd like to, you can find this pot as that unclear pod. You can also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com for this week and feedback. You have an email from Jason. titled Vietnam versus the War on Terror in American Cultural Memory. This was a response to our Dead President's episode, which is the episode two episodes ago. Hello, Jamel and John. I enjoyed your aside in the Dead President's episode and the Cultural Memory of Vietnam.

I grew up in the 80s in a small town with lots of Vietnam veterans and refugees from Vietnam in Laos. The war came up all the time, and people were coming. constantly relitigating it. Many, many people in my community evidently felt that if we had blown up even more of Southeast Asia, this somehow would have resulted in victory, a very common belief among many Americans of Vietnam War generation. I currently teach high school history, and I start my Vietnam unit by mentioning how the war used to matter so much in ways it does it now. I like to register my students' own knowledge of the conflict and where they got it from. As you mentioned, their associations are vaguer and reflect time's passage and generational shifts.

What has really surprised me in recent years is that my students' knowledge of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan might actually be even less than their knowledge of Vietnam. When I started teaching at the university level in the 2000s, those wars were omnipresent for my students. When I taught at a university in Texas in the late 2000s, early 2010, I had many students who were veterans of these conflicts. I can't blame my current student's lack of knowledge since those invasions happened before their birth. It is also obvious that our society is mostly tried to forget that the more recent conflicts ever happened, except during the chaos of American withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago. I know it's beyond the 90s purview of your

podcast, but at some point it might be interesting to get into the films made about the war on terror, Zero Dark 30, Hurt Locker, Lions for Lambs, etc., which just don't seem to have had much of a lasting cultural impact. I'm interested in what you might think about our nation's collective amnesia on this topic. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Just for, just to say, we will eventually run out of movies of this general type from the 1990s. And at that point, assuming we decided we went this podcast to continue on, we're going to do war on terror movies. I mean, that's sort of, I think we're at the right point to really begin historicizing all of that stuff. I recently rewatch, I went through this period of watching a bunch of the CIA movies made about CIA torture program, documentaries, and then Zero Dark 30, of course.

And it is very interesting to watch that movie, what, 10 years, 10 years on. So you guys have any thoughts? No, I think that's well put. It's very interesting. I don't know what cultural, I think it's just harder to have a mass culture directed by a single kind of consciousness of anything anymore. So I think things just kind of come and go much faster and, like, trends are faster, movies kind of go out of people's consciousness.

There's less memory. Maybe that's it. I don't know what it is. But I know what he's talking about, but I'm not quite sure off the cuff. I'm comfortable, you know, saying the reason why. But I have noticed what he said.

Yeah, I think Hollywood has struggled to make good movies about that era. And I think there are financial and business reasons for that. I think there are creative reasons for that. But I have felt like a lot of those films have been unsatisfying in different ways, but I have struggled to figure out

what I think would be satisfying. And I don't know. All I will say is I will listen to those episodes about the podcast about those movies because I get it. Yeah. Off the top of my head, it just seems like,

Vietnam was a generational conflict for Americans in a way that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror simply really hasn't been for like, you know, I was a teenager when the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq began. It's just like it wasn't, you know, there was the, there was the, there was a generally large protest, but there was no sustained protest moving over after that. And it may have a lot to do with the fact that this was a volunteer army. and National Guard that were fighting these wars. And so the lack of any direct connection for many Americans to the conflict itself

does shape how it's sort of understood and revisited in cultural life. And it's like noteworthy. It's a little noteworthy. I mean, in dead presidents, just to go back to that film, our protagonist is like part of like a thick web of association. in his neighborhood and his school and his community

like he's coming out of something he's draft or he volunteers but he's into the war and I'm trying to think of a movie like Jughead where the protagonist there

is almost like this totally isolated figure much more akin to taxi driver yeah taxi driver there's no sense that he comes from anywhere

or American sniper I'm interested to revisit for a bunch of reasons the Chris Kyle as portrayed in that, it kind of just, like, appears just as a fully formed soldier, not from anywhere. And that, to me, feels like it might reflect the sense that, like, for the American public, the soldiers, obviously they're good, they're Americans, are coming from, you know, small towns, whatever. But, like, because there's, there are people you know, right? And so it's harder

to sort of imagine them in the ways you might imagine people, you know. It's just a, it's just quick speculation. I also wonder whether it's going to turn out that a lot of the best films, you know, when we look back on that period, are not, even the ones that are really about that are going to be ones that weren't officially about that. Because of course, when you go back and you look at Vietnam, but also like even something like the Blacklist, you know, the best movies about the Blacklist in a lot of ways were not officially about the Blacklist. They were about other things, but they were reflecting upon it. So, and I think it takes a certain amount of historical perspective to get there.

But it may be that the films that will eventually, you know, be the most useful for kind of dissecting what that period of time was, are not necessarily going to be movies that textually were about that, those wars. That's really good point. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Jason, for the email. Episodes come out most of the time every two weeks.

So we will see you then with an episode on Terry Gilliams. sci-fi thriller, 12 Monkeys. Oh, cool. Which I've never seen. It occurs. Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. It's interesting.

Here is a brief plot summary. In the year 2035 convict James Cole, reluctantly volunteers to be sent back in time to discover the origin of a deadly virus that wiped out nearly all of Earth population and forced to survivors into underground communities. But when Cole is mistakenly sent to 1990 into 1996, he's arrested and locked up in a mental hospital. There he meets psychiatrist Dr. Catherine Riley and patient Jeffrey Goins, the son of a famous virus expert who may hold the key to the mysterious rogue group Army of the 12 Monkeys thought to be responsible for unleashing the killer disease. You can find 12 monkeys for rent on

iTunes and Amazon. Linda, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, this is great. Thank you. You should come back. Yes. Anytime for anything. I have, you've done many of my favorite trench coat thrillers, but I know that there are always more. Do you have anything you want to plug? You want to say people to check out? You can always find me at Pop Culture Happy Hour. You can find my books. One is called Evie Drake starts over. The other one is called Flying Solo. You can find those wherever you buy your books. And we have a newsletter at npr.org slash pop culture newsletter that I send out every week. So I will just leave it at those several things. Awesome. Speaking of things to advertise, listeners should not forget the unclear and present Patreon,

where we tackle the films of the Cold War kind of deal with the mid-20th century. We've recently been on this kick of excellent European films about, you know, political things. And so our most recent Patreon podcast is on The Conformist from 1970. A lot of fun watching that great episode. Our next episode of the Patreon will be on a face in the crowd, which is not European, but excellent nonetheless. And you can listen to those episodes and much more episodes on movies like Z from 1969, another foreign film, episodes on films like the third man, we're kind of covering some of the greats. You can listen to that in much more at patreon.com slash unclear pod, just $5 a month for two episodes. a month. And I think it's worth it. For John Gans and Linda Holmes, I'm Jamel Bowie,

and we will see you next time. I'm going to be able to be.