Marc Cassivi: The Apprentice, by Ali Abbasi, in theaters since Friday, is the first fiction feature film to focus on the journey of Donald Trump. I understand those around him not being delighted that this unflattering portrait is being released a few weeks before the American presidential election, but at the same time, the film seems at first almost sympathetic to Trump. Young Donald is presented as a man who has a flair for business, lives in the shadow of a castrating father and has not yet renounced the elementary principles of justice. According to the portrait that The ApprenticeTrump’s lack of confidence turned into arrogance through contact with his mentor Roy Cohn, then into megalomania. But the film doesn’t make him a caricature of a talentless idiot. This is perhaps what bothers those around him the most, ultimately, the credible aspect of the portrait. Before The Apprenticethere have been films about the Trump presidency, but without Trump.
Manon Dumais: Indeed, and what better than a horror film to illustrate the Trumpian era? You probably know that director Jordan Peele likes to say that Get Outreleased in 2017 and considered by many critics to be the first film about the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, is actually a documentary. Oscar for best screenplay, a rarity for a horror drama, Get Out features a black photographer who becomes the prey of a white bourgeois family. In fact, it’s like a bloody version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinnerby Stanley Kramer, released in 1967, two years after the signing of Civil Rights Actunder Lyndon B. Johnson, successor to John F. Kennedy. Obviously, Peele wrote the screenplay while Barack Obama was in office, but the racial tensions he illustrates with fierce humor have been amplified under Trump. If there’s a film that makes me think of the Trumpian era, it’s Jokerby Todd Phillips, where we echo the incel subculture.
M. C.: I laughed so hard when the father character in Get Out said to chum of his daughter, who is black: “By the way, I would have voted for a third Obama term if I could have done so! »
I had never considered Joker from this angle, but it is true that the theses of the film – the radical relationship to capital, to the gap between social classes and to police authority – are very Trumpian. Not to mention what’s going on in the Joker’s head, which is on the order of narcissistic delirium…
Marc Cassivi
M. D.: Narcissistic, you say? What’s the creepiest thing about Jokeris to see all these men who worship him, after the murder he committed live on TV, and put on clown makeup like him. Remember the Trump supporters wearing a bandage over their ear after the assassination attempt on him? In Joker – Folie à deuxHarley Quinn helps make the Joker a charismatic figure, a media star, while he is tried, in a trial broadcast live on television, for the murders of five people – no one knows that he also killed his mother. Doesn’t that remind you of when Trump said he was so beloved that he could kill people at point-blank range without there being any consequences?
Moreover, during a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump suggested a “day of police violence to end crime”. Um… we’re not very far from the horror film franchise The Purge (2013-2021). Would Trump be influenced by cinema?
Manon Dumais
M. C.: Trump influences horror film makers, that’s for sure! Two weeks ago, Stephen King wrote about X as Greg Stillson’s character in his novel The Dead Zone was inspired by Donald Trump. It was a joke: he wrote it 45 years ago. But if you remember David Cronenberg’s adaptation, it’s the story of a university professor (Christopher Walken) who suddenly, after an accident, has a supernatural gift of prescience. He shakes hands with Stillson (Martin Sheen), an ultranationalist U.S. Senate candidate, and has a vision of him becoming president of the United States, starting a nuclear war.
Which leads us, inevitably, to Civil War, by Alex Garland, which recalls the insurrection of January 6, 2021 and the refusal (to date) of Donald Trump to admit his electoral defeat. In Civil Warthe father’s wish in Get Out is achieved: the president remains in power for a third term. By force.
Marc Cassivi
M.D.: Anticipatory stories like those of Civil War and frankness The Purge are increasingly worrying, because the dystopian universes they describe seem to be moving closer and closer to our time. In the third part, The Purge — Election Yearset in 2040 and released in 2016, the year Trump won over Hilary Clinton, a Democrat promises to eliminate the Purge, whose hidden goal is to eradicate citizens in need and allow the better off to express their violent impulses. During the debate between Kamala Harris and Trump, the vice-president recalled that she wanted to help the middle class and SMEs, while her rival wants to satisfy multimillionaires. That said, America’s fiercest critique comes, once again, from Jordan Peele. Into the horror drama Us (United States/Us), released in 2019, the American dream is taking a hit. We see wealthy families attacked by doubles, who come from abandoned underground passages in various places, in order to take their place by killing them. As a metaphor for the gap that is widening between social classes, it is quite violent.
M. C.: Jordan Peele has the gift of taking the pulse of his nation, you are right. Despite all the reservations that I have expressed about Megalopolis — does it fall into the “so bad it’s good” category? —, Francis Coppola also offers in his own way a fable about the fall of the American empire inspired by the Trump presidency. We can sense it in the grotesqueness of the film and in one of its characters, played by Shia LaBeouf. Caesar’s cousin (Adam Driver) is an idle and venal son of a billionaire (Jon Voight, a rare pro-Trump comedian) who reinvents himself as a populist demagogue. At a press conference before the presentation of Megalopolis at the New York Film Festival in September, Coppola said his film was a reflection of “where the United States is going in a few months.” You had to see the grimacing face of Robert De Niro, next to him on stage. He said all the bad things he thought of the Republican candidate. He’s not the only one who hopes Coppola is wrong.