Trump casts shadow over pop culture

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/12/2018 (2808 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What to do with the annual pop culture roundup in a year so crowded with pop culture-type stuff?

So many memes, so many hip-hop beefs, so many songs of the summer, so many true crime podcasts, so many internet boyfriends.

So many weddings, royal and otherwise — Nick and Priyanka had two! So many scandals, from feuding YouTube beauty stars to Roseanne Barr’s racist rants.

So many TV shows, as we hit Peak TV. So many movies, as Marvel and DC extended their Extended Universes.

As we wrap 2018, I’d like to concentrate not on the avalanche of individual stories but on the big issues that resonated through this roiled-up entertainment year.

It was a year for questions — and maybe even a few answers — about representation and inclusion, power and money.

Donald Trump was another big factor. In a weird fusion of politics and entertainment, his ratings-obsessed, reality-TV presidency cast a long, orange shadow over the media and entertainment landscape. With his unerring instinct for dominating the news cycle, Trump both fuelled and occasionally stymied the pop-culture resistance.

REPRESENT!: According to the annual report on onscreen representation from researchers at USC Annenberg, “exclusion is the norm rather than the exception in Hollywood.”

Movies like Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse aimed to shift that paradigm this year, and their boffo box-office success will be more effective than moral suasion in getting the movie industry to do the right thing.

Widows upended the heist film with a strong female cast — and the magnificent Viola Davis front and centre — while the woman-led Oceans 8 even pulled off the redemption of Anne Hathaway, who had been exiled from the A-list for the female sin of “trying too hard to be likeable.” (There are some gender-based differences in banishment criteria. See Harvey Weinstein, et al., below.)

Female-driven stories were even more visible on television and streaming services. Amy Adams showed us her scars in Sharp Objects, Sandra Oh was deliciously ambivalent in Killing Eve, and Issa Rae was perfectly imperfect in Insecure. Elisabeth Moss continued her revolution in The Handmaid’s Tale, while Robin Wright finally got to take control in House of Cards (after Kevin Spacey’s disgraced exit amid allegations of sexual misconduct and assault).

As the Weinstein Effect continued to shake the entertainment world, the #MeToo movement gathered some galvanizing public support, from Kesha’s wrenching performance at the Grammys to Frances McDormand’s fierce Oscar speech.

High-profile actresses made the magazine covers, but cultural commentators emphasized the need to look behind the camera for equality, underlining the need for more women greenlighting, writing and directing movies and TV.

Some issues came down to money, the language movie studios and TV networks understand best. It was revealed, for example, that Claire Foy had been paid less than co-star Matt Smith in The Crown — even though she’s the queen! — and that Mark Wahlberg required $1.5 million to do reshoots on All the Money in the World (made necessary, again, by the sudden departure of Kevin Spacey), while his co-star Michelle Williams turned up to work for $1000.

Even with small steps toward more inclusive representation, there was backlash. Some irate internet fans declared that recent Star Wars projects featuring women, people of colour and an openly pansexual Lando Calrissian were all part of a menacing conspiracy of enforced diversity. (Evidently, admirals with fish heads and bounty hunters with tusks are fine in the Star Wars canon but approaching a representative cross-section of human beings is still too much for some viewers.)

TRUMP TV: Forget the sheen of prestige television. In terms of sheer watchability, one of the best “shows” on the small screen right now is the ongoing Trump coverage.

This daily collage of clips from CNN, MSNBC and late-night comedy is packed with all the ingredients of good TV: cliff-hangers and turnabouts, revenge plots and surprise reveals, gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight comedy and dysfunctional family drama.

There are great characters, from keener MSNBC host Rachael Maddow to steady Jake Tapper at CNN to those brilliant cameo appearances by wily, old-school Watergate prosecutors. Then there’s Trumpland’s own cast of grifters and goons, from the sinister Stephen Miller to the entertainingly unhinged Rudy Giuliani.

While many of us remain transfixed by the political turmoil unfolding before us in real time, I can’t wait for the HBO drama series that’s bound to come out of this saga — which I’m pretty sure will be titled Individual 1.

PEAK SATIRE?: The Trump era has continued to test the limits of satire at a time when reality is often a grotesque joke. Can scripted comedy top the absurdities of, say, Anthony Scaramucci’s expletive-filled ten-day tenure as White House communications director? Or Kellyanne Conway’s blatant bad-faith defence of “alternative facts?” Or Melania Trump dressing like a 19th-century imperialist to visit Kenya? (Where do you even get pith helmets these days?)

Sacha Baron Cohen struggled with this conundrum, his knack for real-life stunt comedy often running into a post-parody wall in his uneven series Who Is America?, as did the Cartoon Network’s flattened-out and unfunny Our Cartoon President.

Saturday Night Live has been hit-and-miss, especially with Alec Baldwin, its in-house Trump impersonator. Baldwin channels a kind of compressed, sullen stupidity in his Trump act, which has a degree of verisimilitude but adds very little insight. The President Show’s Anthony Atamanuik does better with his take on Trump, which puffs him up as a bundle of need, impulse, awkwardness and desperate over-compensation.

Maybe it all comes full circle with the recent Trump tweet in which the American president suggested that SNL’s coverage of him was one-sided and possibly illegal. (“Only defame & belittle! Collusion?”) In fact, this fundamental misunderstanding of how comedy functions is itself pretty funny, and has led to more and even better comedy in response.

Let’s hold onto that, as we head into an uncertain 2019.