Early one morning when the house was still dark, I slipped out of bed, went downstairs, walked barefoot across the dining room floor to get the laptop charger — and stepped directly in our dog’s latest commentary on the recent election.
“Trump again,” I muttered, hop-wobbling to the bathroom on the sides of my feet, the way character actor Walter Brennan used to walk in the movies. “Ol’ Maisie has been off schedule since that guy won.” As I cleaned up the evidence it struck me: I couldn’t go on like this. I couldn’t go on blaming our president-elect for things he had no direct hand in making happen.
My thoughts stayed on the president-elect, though. Like any superstar, he’s hard to tune out. Every other day, on the way to another movie screening, I walk by a building along the Chicago River that reminds me in 20-foot-tall letters: TRUMP. That signage was hard on the eyes aesthetically before the election. Now the brand name serves as the least necessary imaginable reminder of who’s taking charge.
Here’s where we are now. We’re living in a news cycle, a sustained, unprecedented historical episode, that resembles one man’s heavily fictionalised biopic rather than the usual multistory ensemble miniseries known as life in America.
This is Trump, the movie. The running time is to be determined: either four years, plus the campaign prologue, or eight years, plus prologue. Please turn off your cellphones.
Soon enough we’ll get our first actual Trump biopic, probably on HBO or from Amazon Studios or Netflix or maybe an old-fashioned theatrical release from a major studio. If it happened with George W Bush, it’ll certainly happen with Trump. Bush’s eventful two-term presidency inspired HBO’s excellent Recount, about the 2000 Florida voting irregularities; W., Oliver Stone’s undervalued, unexpectedly nuanced portrait of Bush, played by Josh Brolin, before and during his presidency; and, following the Bush administration’s Iraq invasion, a war movie genre unto itself containing everything from The Hurt Locker to Grace is Gone, the one with John Cusack as a war widower on the homefront.
It’s tempting to imagine Alec Baldwin starring in a full-on Trump biopic, after his sterling comic turns on Saturday Night Live. But few of us are in the mood for a primarily comic portrait of our next commander in chief. Trump fascinates because he’s a well-chronicled and habitual liar who’s also remarkably easy to read. He does not hide his contempt for whatever is bugging him at the moment, or his disinterest in any number of subjects. He’s not much of an actor, in other words. Like the king in Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, later filmed as The Madness of King George, he must learn what it means to “seem,” to appear like a trustworthy leader.
Trump may not pay much attention to it himself, but the issue of language is about to become very important in our country.
Right now he and his closest colleagues are the nation’s most conspicuous screenwriters, revising or deleting what they improvised, successfully, on the campaign trail. The wall along the US-Mexico border? Well, that was more of a “great campaign device” than an actual wall, according to Newt Gingrich. It was a metaphor. Not an actual wall. An idea.
In David Mamet’s gorgeous play (and film) Glengarry Glen Ross, about real estate salesmen who, in Mamet’s words, “could sell you cancer,” Moss (played on screen by Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin) are sitting in a booth at a Chinese restaurant. “Someone should rob the office,” Moss says. A few lines later:
Aaronow: I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just
Moss: No, we’re just
Aaronow: We’re just “talking” about it.
Moss: We’re just speaking about it. (pause) As an idea.
That’s the linguistic quintessence of Trump. He’s learned that you can talk about things, or you can speak about them, in inflammatory theoretical terms, and though “talk” and “speak” are synonyms you can pretend there’s a clear distinction.
It’s amusing to read newspapers such as The Times of London gently point out the blunt untruths coming out of the new guy’s mouth. Recently, in a story about the Russian leader’s “beautiful” (Trump’s word) letter of congratulations to (US) president-elect, the final paragraph went like this:
“Mr. Trump has claimed to have spoken to Mr. Putin ‘indirectly and directly’ and said last year that he ‘got to know him very well’ when they were on the TV show 60 Minutes. But last month Mr. Trump denied they had met, saying: ‘I have no relationship with him.’” Flat denials are useful dishonest rhetorical devices, and they have a way of working long enough to paper over the outrage of the moment.
When the first Trump biopic comes to pass, I hope the screenwriters and filmmakers capture something of what life was like, day to day, in 2016, when the uses and misuses of language — Trump’s predatory, multidirectionally vicious language — seemed gradually, and then suddenly, not to matter much anymore.
With hate crimes and bullying and swastikas on the rise, it’s cold comfort to reflect on what our next president had to say, in the second presidential debate, about his own 2005 comments about grabbing women non-consensually.
“It’s just words, folks,” Trump said, more weary than reassuring. “It is just words.” You took him seriously, which was your problem. Those monologues about building a wall, those admissions of genital-grabbing, the threats to deport Muslims — our president-elect was not talking about those things, he was “speaking” about them. As an “idea.”
Now he has a country to run. The real-time presidential biopic commences. The whole world is watching. —Chicago Tribune/TNS