I have taken
quite a hiatus from my blog. I haven’t stopped going to movies (check out the
updated Fresh Cuts tab where I rate the movies seen). In
fact, I’ve needed films more than ever to survive what has kept me away from
the keyboard: the 2016 Presidential Campaign.
As everybody
that lives in the United States knows, reality has given way to fiction in this
presidential race. As one tweet put it, we’re caught between trying to break
the glass ceiling and hitting rock bottom.
It has been maddening
to see the misogynist, vulgar, narcissist candidate running for the GOP ticket take
this election into a rabbit hole of chaos. The support he has received, not
just from his base and the GOP, but from the media/press has been even more
infuriating. That he ended up being the candidate for the Republican Party is definitely
not due to any merit of his. This support has come on the back of the
unwarranted and despicable attacks that have been made to Hillary Clinton. Since
it has been clear to me since the 2008 campaign who the best person fit to run
this country is, I have been hard at work providing my grain-of-sand support to
get the first woman president of the United States into an office she well
deserves.
As we have very
clearly come to see in the final days of the campaign, sexism has raised its
abominable head and has tried to drag the race into the gutter, succeeding in
getting the GOP there. Despite this and because this country is still a nation
where good things happen and often, we will very probably finally have a woman
president in the White House come January 2017!
The idea of a
woman in the White House in the movies has only been seen as science fiction and
as a rather ridiculous proposition. You can count these movies on two hands.
Since this is a movie blog, let’s take a quick peek at how utterly preposterous
the idea of a woman American President has been to filmmakers.
Let’s begin by
saying that most movies that portray a woman in the White House as President are
usually quite mediocre, if not downright bad. The idea first appeared on film
in 1953, in the movie Project Moonbase, directed by
Richard Talmadge. The movie took place in the futuristic world of 1970, so
science fiction, and to cement how futuristic it was there was a Madame
President. The lunar expedition in the movie is foiled by the mission doctor
who turns out to be a spy, so the crew crashes on the moon to stop him. The
officer in charge of the mission is actually a woman, but one who turns to her
male subordinate whenever there’s trouble and marries him after landing on the
moon. What’s more, she requests her husband be promoted so she won’t outrank him!
It would take
33 years for another movie to portray a woman as President of the United States
in 1986. The title of the movie is an indicator of just how ludicrous the idea seemed
to the movie industry: Whoops Apocalypse. What’s more, in
this British satire directed by Tom Bussman, the actress Loretta Swit plays
the first woman president of the United States, who takes up the office only
after the previous president, a former circus clown, dies as a result of daring
a journalist to hit him with a crowbar.
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| Loretta Swit as US President in Whoops Apocalypse |
The following
year, 1987, Joan Rivers took the commander-in-chief position in the Australian movie Les
Patterson Saves the World (directed by George Miller), another
political farce where Rivers is really just the comedian-in-chief.
So, yes, after
sci-fi, the comedy genre is the one used to portray women as presidents. Another
decade would pass and Christina Applegate would bring the chuckles to that idea
in 1998 when she played President Diane Steen in Jim Abrahams’ film comedy Mafia!
(Originally entitled Jane Austen’s Mafia!).
Another ludicrous and sexist plot that leads this woman president to almost
declare world disarmament before her gangster ex-boyfriend convinces her they
should get married.
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| Christina Applegate in Mafia! |
Argentine
director Gabriela Tagliavini tries to do a better job portraying the President
of the United States as a woman, but again it has to be in a science fiction setting.
Perfect
Lover, released in 2001, was also known as “The Woman Every Man Wants” because
it takes place in a future, the year 2030, in which women are the dominant
gender and the plot still centers on a man wanting an old-fashioned complacent
and sexy woman.
Still about
another decade later the film Iron Sky (2012 - Timo Vuorensola), this
time a science-fiction comedy for heaven’s sake, brings us the year 2018 (so
close) in which a Sarah Palin-like President of the United States leads the US
against an attack by Nazis from the moon, while nuclear war breaks out on
Earth. Believe it or not, there is an Iron
Sky 2 in the making.
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| Iron Sky |
We arrive at
this year’s Independence Day: Resurgence (2016-Roland Emmerich). Another
science fiction movie in which the President is a woman, played by Sela Ward.
It’s another end of the world movie, so I guess that’s why a woman is the
president, one who is, this time, killed by the alien queen. So much for
democracy winning!
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| Sela Ward in Independence Day: Resurgence |
Such a short
and sorry list! TV has done a little better, with 24, Commander in Chief, Madame Secretary, Scandal, State of Affairs,
Prison Break, and a couple of other
non-sci-fi or comedy shows that have a women as President of the United States (although women in politics are still getting laughs: Hail to the Chief, Veep, Parks &
Recreation). But here’s hoping that once that final glass ceiling is
shattered, it will become a bit more common to see women leaders in film, as
Hillary Clinton takes us out of the rabbit hole and into wonderland.
