Republicans & Drama

This weekend, I’ve got a cultural observation to share from my most recent movie & TV essays: Storytelling depends on drama, drama depends on conflict, conflict depends on a sustained awareness of our difficulties & their potentially intractable character. This is why Republicans fail to deal with culture—they’re the party of an increasingly implausible claim to normality. The juxtaposition of topics will jar, but the contrast makes my point: I wrote about Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective for its 10th an., the last impressive TV show, I think, & the new Reagan movie, which I recommend everyone seeing, because Dennis Quaid & Penelope Ann Miller make for a very likable & very Reagan & Nancy-like pair.

For my friends at Acton Institute, I reviewed the first biopic of the great president after FDR. Now what’s so striking about the movie is that there’s just not a lot of drama. The fear of the Cold War, the fear that the country is collapsing in the ‘70s, the fear of death when Reagan faced an attempted assassination is largely absent from the movie. Granted, that’s partly lack of talent; the Republican half of America isn’t very interested in artistic talent; but I don’t think that’s the major problem—I think a certain need for reassurance, a return to normality, to “a sunny disposish” is the bigger problem. We undercut our great men by this tendency, unfortunately, so they are then easier to dismiss or diminish whenever liberals get a chance to snipe at them. Here’s the bigger issue:

The core of Reagan is anticommunism, the uniting of political commitment & activity in Reagan’s life from his days in the Screen Actor’s Guild to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The movie gets across this lifelong conviction & Reagan’s place in politics, but fails to convey the danger of communism, either foreign or domestic. The sequence of the movie suggests an argument that would add up to an attack on liberal elites in culture as slaves of ideology: Communists in Hollywood in the 1940s, then hippies in the late 1960s—& they should have added the media in the 1980s. But Reagan doesn’t take this route, & thus misses the most important opportunity that comes out of its plot, to explain Reagan’s domestic opposition.

This failure follows from the decision to replace Reagan’s politics with his rhetoric, & with the sunniest aspects of his rhetoric at that. We get a movie that softens both America & Reagan. That somehow corresponds to our desire to remember the good things, but it makes political conflict unintelligible. In a few bad moments, the movie suggests that Reagan’s showmanship saved America. But it was arms & wealth & the willingness to use both. An audience persuaded by such an idealized vision would paradoxically be led to despair over our own situation, since they’d expect easy victories instead of the conflicts in the midst of which Reagan thrived.

Now, compare this situation with True Detective, an amazing elegy to American manhood. America looked up to Reagan, to the point that there’s no movie star that can hold a candle to him. Yet no one can create drama out of that reality. Pizzolatto on the other hand can make compelling drama out of some sordid murders in the bayous of Louisiana & make Matthew McConaughey look like the American Avenger, to the point where millions of people, liberal & conservative take the drama quite seriously. Pizzolatto is sort of conservative, somehow pro-American, on our side—but he hasn’t got the Republican attitude of commitment to banality—maybe he should have been given the Reagan project! I wrote up True Detective for my friends at Law & Liberty:

McConaughey as Rust Cohle is a genius, but he’s an unknown quantity out of Texas, whereas his partner Marty is the steadier figure, trusted in the Louisiana State Police & more willing to get along. Rust is trying to embody the freedom America represents. He’s a rugged individualist—you look at him & see TR or Hemingway: He either rules or else rejects society in order to chase freedom. Marty is a more recognizable Southern figure—you look at him & think: sports kid, popular in high school, went into the police because he liked life’s pleasures but would otherwise have joined the military. He’s gradually started turning into a good ol’boy enjoying life’s successes.

The plot turns on elite corruption in Louisiana leading to terrible evils—child abuse, human sacrifices, a complete betrayal of our Christian way of life, a pagan madness somewhat reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft. It reminded me of Walker Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome, which has a very similar plot & an existentialist protagonist for a detective, but with a different agent—modern science is the Faustian bargain for Percy. Pizzolatto is comparatively familiar, blaming the authorities in politics & religion. Southern corruption is much less interesting in the 21st c., however; the major artistic effect he achieves is a suggestion of the return to the past, an occasional glimpse of an older pre-feminist America. Even beyond the charms of nostalgia, this might be simply a necessity of storytelling, since Pizzolatto prefers men, their violence, & their conversations, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in contemporary storytelling.