Michael Cieply: From Campaign Flicks To ‘Civil War,’ The Political Genre Has Followed Us Down

I’m not overly fond of politics. Given a choice, I’d rather talk food, or faraway places.

But I do have a weakness for political films—or, more precisely, films about political campaigns.

The best of them have been sharp, often witty, and self-aware to the point of cynicism. Bulworth. The Campaign. Wag the Dog. Primary Colors. Dave.

As a genre, they tend toward satire, if not broad comedy. In one of my favorites, David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis, two inimical American political consultants corrupt Bolivian politics by transplanting our worst habits to foreign shores. It’s painfully funny stuff.

Where serious, the campaign genre tends to be confessional. With The Ides of March, progressive filmmaker George Clooney, adapting a play be Beau Willimon, unmasked Faustian bargains behind the gleaming ideals of a “good” politician in a hard-fought Ohio primary.

Should we show it at the White House, Barack Obama asked. “Absolutely not,” Clooney told him. The picture was too real to be of any help to a real politician.

Pictures like that were never huge hits. The biggest and probably silliest of them, Jay Roach’s The Campaign, took in $86.9 million at the domestic box-office, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. That didn’t re-write the record books. But somehow it helped to keep things in perspective.

It’s okay to play politics. Just don’t take yourself too seriously, the movies seemed to say.

Well, that was then, this is now. Friday will bring the opening of what currently passes for a political film, Alex Garland’s dystopian action-thriller Civil War. It’s about division in American politics, taken to an extreme. One could argue that it’s simply a paranoid projection. But, as Clooney told an audience in Toronto when introducing the distinctly discomfiting Ides of March: Films don’t lead the political culture, they follow.

With Civil War, film is following the culture into the dark place in which it now dwells. The artful cut-and-thrust of campaign gaming—the stuff of The Distinguished Gentleman or Man of the Year—has been replaced by a mutual, near-religious zealotry the object of which is the destruction of opponents.

Just last week California Senate candidate Adam Schiff told the Los Angeles Times that he genuinely fears Donald Trump will try to jail him if Trump is elected President again. No small number of Democrats are already trying to jail Trump.

Blood sport of that sort doesn’t raise hopes for the campaign film genre (though it got a laugh in Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin).

So maybe it’s time for a good body-switching picture. Or zombies. Or an amnesia flick. Whatever gets us through November.