key: cord-0059591-dj25ytzl
authors: Cobb, Thomas J.
title: Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age of Malaise and Populism
date: 2020-07-26
journal: American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_7
sha: e690a33ff8604b39178c279d3d4486f24675c0c3
doc_id: 59591
cord_uid: dj25ytzl

This chapter reviews the earlier chapter discussions and detects key tropes associated with diplomatic contradiction. It further applies the previously employed interdisciplinary methodologies to the 2010s and observes that this has been a divided decade in terms of the reflection of foreign policy cognitive dissonance in American film. Richard Linklater’s Bildungsroman drama Boyhood (2014) and a cycle of comic book adaptations released late in the Obama era normalise political fissures in their dramatically different narratives. The most thematically striking films of Trump’s presidency, in contrast, frame Mead’s kaleidoscope around Manichean clashes of racial and socioeconomic identity, portending perennial ideological rivalry for America’s future. These analyses lead to the conclusion that, irrespective of the 2020 election outcome, diplomatic contradiction will continually infuse US film.

ideals" (Huntingdon 2014, 297) and "order versus violence" (Schlesinger, quoted in Coyne 2008, 12) , respectively underlined by the references to Huntingdon and Schlesinger's arguments in the first chapter, anchor the treatment of foreign policy in productions as diverse as political dramas, Revisionist Westerns and comic book adaptations.

Specific invocations of historical contradiction supplement these illuminations of a cognitive dissonance in American life and foreign policy. Most common is the transgression of the Vietnam War, which fuels the anxieties of Colonel Ron Horn in Three Kings and vividly embeds itself in the minutiae of Avatar's Hell's Gate. Yet there are other possible interpretations; Daniel Plainview's shifts between Social Darwinism and progressivism in There Will be Blood recall the contradictory imperialism of the late nineteenth century, while the authoritarian realism in The Dark Knight reflects a stance enervative of the liberal internationalism vaunted by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945. Most salient in each picture, however, are contemporaneous issues surrounding American foreign policy relevant to their year of release. 1996's Independence Day mirrors the potential for centrist triangulation through military intervention in the 1990s; 2003's Tears of the Sun engages with the alliance forged between militarists and evangelical Christians in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks; 2005's Syriana, notably released in the first year of Bush's second term, predicts a world where the Wilsonian goals endorsed by neoconservatives are sabotaged by Hamiltonian predilections.

Different films deal with the lack of reconciliation within International Relations in distinctive ways. In pictures such as Three Kings, Team America and Avatar, resolution is achieved after lengthy periods of ideological conflict and incongruity. Gates's rapprochement with Horn, Gary's 'dicks, pussies and assholes' speech, and Sully's championing of Pandora's natives all foreground a new consensus associated with the national zeitgeist. By 'new consensus', I mean political configurations and ideological blends that put forward an image of political moderation designed as an antidote to the fears of overseas quagmire. These include the remoulded Global Meliorism of the 1990s, a modified variant of smart power and a determined application of the 'leading from behind' approach pioneered by Obama. Some films concerning these standpoints conclude somewhat artificially, restoring a sense of both narrative and political equilibrium to a world plagued by uncertainty.

The endings of other productions, encompassing many released over the course of Bush's presidency, propound disarray while invoking the failures of important ideological and political collaborations. The lost patriarchal authority of Ed Tom Bell at the end of No Country for Old Men, the collapsing state of Plainview's empire during the final scene of There Will be Blood, and the noble lies of The Dark Knight's climax purvey subtexts of disintegrating foreign policy coalitions and imperial overstretch. Key in these films is the unwieldiness of intervention, the dominance of political extremes and the supplanting of one facet of American foreign policy for another. Much as the Bush administration struggled to straddle Jacksonian nationalism, Hamiltonian mercantilism and Wilsonian idealism in the Iraq War, these pictures render an International Relations landscape that is mercilessly chaotic, culminating in scenes of ideological dysphoria.

Withstanding these contrasts, the films examined share an affinity in their emphasis on diplomatic incongruity. The rising prevalence of allegory charted across the book perhaps highlights that this style is more effective at painting crosscurrents of policy than pictures that attempt to attain an aesthetic realism, a point conveyed by Mamoon Abassi's dual analysis of Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) . Inverting the fantastical premise of Avatar's Pandora setting, Abassi sees James Cameron's blockbuster as a more nuanced portrayal of the difficulties of winning hearts and minds than the gritty verisimilitude of Bigelow's war opus, which is set in 2004 Iraq. The cognitive dissonance and contradictions of US foreign policy, and the need for resolution, is central to Avatar, a film that stresses the damaging impact of American hard power to Abassi (quoted in Barker 2011, 160) :

Ironically, and contrary to official film labeling, for many Iraqis 'Avatar' is seen as the most accurate Iraq War movie so far, while 'The Hurt Locker' might appear as more alien to them. The link to Iraq in 'Avatar' is apparent to many from the outset of the film, but it is further entrenched with the use of terms like 'shock and awe' and 'fighting terror'. However, the plot thickens. The blue humanoids in 'Avatar' appear more humane than their human invaders, who came from earth to steal the resources of their planet. In 'The Hurt Locker', where we follow an adventurous US bomb squad in Iraq, the Iraqis in the movie appear to serve just as a background that shows how heroic the film's stars are. Almost faceless and voiceless, they are-as in the world of politics-robbed of their humanity.

The spirit of political allegory and reflection of fragmentation has continued since the distribution of Avatar in 2009; yet these phenomena have manifested differently across two ideologically oppositional presidential administrations. On one level, a cycle of films which arrived late in Obama's presidency reflects Bacevich's (2016, 370) notion, put forward at the end of his 2016 book America's War for the Greater Middle East, that the American populace remain "deep in slumber" about a United States unable to "reshape itself" and restore "effectiveness to selfgovernment" in response to imperial overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan. The various pictures reflective of this context contain the refrains of circumscribed civil liberties, endless war and disjunctions between realism and idealism which escalated in Bush's second term, normalising longstanding disconnects. Productions released after the 2016 election, however, have shown International Relations dichotomies take on an impassioned and possibly more partisan bent, capturing the extreme divides of white nationalism and cosmopolitan globalism illustrated by Trump's electoral victory. In the final pages of this book, I examine these discrepancies and posit hypotheses for the future of diplomatic allegory.

The NormalisaTioN of malaise: The laTe obama era

The low-key odyssey of Boyhood (2014), a drama directed by Richard Linklater which charts the growth of a seven-year-old boy from the year 2002 until the summer of 2013, reifies a sense of numbness synergetic with Bacevich's view of a somnambulistic American perception. Boyhood, which is set in Linklater's home state of Texas, follows the lives of Mason Evans Jr. and divorced parents, Mason Sr. and Olivia, along with sister Samantha. The narrative consists of set pieces which range from the banal to the melodramatic, underscored respectively in discussions of the future of the Star Wars franchise and arguments between mother Olivia and her family circle. One novelty of this eclecticism is its simulated occurrence in the 'moment'. The film was shot incrementally from 2002 to 2013, a process which allowed its child protagonist to develop onscreen and his parents to age in front of the viewer's eyes. As Chloe Schama (2014), a reviewer for The New Republic, noted, aspects of Boyhood resemble Michael Apted's Seven Up documentary series, which, starting in 1964, followed the lives of several individuals from childhood into late middle age. The treatment of tumultuous political events in Boyhood, presented as proximate to their occurrence as cinematically possible, also invites fascination.

A scene in 2004 where Mason Sr. talks to his son about the upcoming presidential election features a rant against George W. Bush delivered without the benefit of hindsight and the distance of history.

In this sense, Boyhood is somewhat comparable to the tonally oppositional 25th Hour in showcasing reactions to transformative moments relatively improvisational and impromptu. It differs, however, in its tangible normalisation of political upheaval. Seismic episodes such as the Iraq War and the 2008 election are assimilated within a quotidian context, mere adjuncts to the real-world routines and dramas experienced by Mason Jr.'s family. At the same time, interpretable allegories of diplomatic failure emerge from the juxtaposition of Mason Jr.'s formative years and the subdued political mise en scene. It seems no coincidence that soon after Mason Sr.'s rant against the Iraq War and the imperial excesses of the Bush administration, Olivia marries an alcoholic academic with authoritarian tendencies.

Bill's controlling tendencies and perniciousness steadily increase over the film's first half. He signals synergy with Texas's red state identity when he ensures that Mason Jr. has his head shaved, a prescriptive ritual which purveys undertones of illiberal militarisation. His monitoring of his biological children's phones further elicits memories of the anti-civil liberties Patriot Act, illuminating meaning in the personal as well as the political. The ambience of malaise reflected in the tropes of failed fatherhood renews in the years which coincide with Obama's presidency and implies the futility of hopes for reform. Soon after a humorous sequence where Mason Jr. is told off for putting an 'Obama 2008' campaign poster on a Confederate sympathiser's lawn, Olivia embarks on a relationship with Jim, a mature student and Iraq War veteran. In their first onscreen exchange, Jim talks about his involvement with the chaos resultant from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. As with Bill, disappointment follows. Linklater soon establishes that, circa the early 2010s and in the throes of the Great Recession, Jim has been forced to take a job as a security guard and, in a sign of encroaching alcoholism, drinks resentfully. Boyhood's failed models of fatherhood, not unlike America's political leadership, are doomed to disappoint and incapable of orchestrating unity. In a landscape of endless war and economic inequality, the surrogates of Bill and Jim provide perceivable allegories of a stasis in American diplomacy.

Connotations of political shortcomings are delivered, in other respects, genially and subtly. Peripheral elements of Boyhood's second half speak to a relinquishing of the Democratic hopes for peace and economic security through the amicable depiction of figures traditionally part of liberal demonology. Mason Sr. eventually remarries into a conservative family steeped in Christian piety and Mason Jr.'s meeting with them is suffused with cordiality, an ephemeral and unlikely glimpse of the transcendence of a "red state, blue state" divide once visualised in Obama's 2004 National Democratic Convention speech in Boston (Leibovich 2016) . When Mason Jr. works in a fast food restaurant at the age of seventeen, his boss is a character of affable goofiness rather than a harbinger of neoliberal exploitation and even appears at his graduation party as a gesture of goodwill. Far from the partisan disdains and hopes which infused Linklater's allusions to the Bush and Obama campaigns, these subtle asides introduce an acceptance of political difference and imperfection, a pragmatism which occurs in tandem with the film's delineation of the ageing process.

This disposition can be understood as a peculiar inversion of the politics manifest in George Stevens 's Giant (1956) , another film preoccupied with the social vagaries of a Texan family. As mentioned in the first chapter, Giant follows the social changes experienced by a multi-generational Texan dynasty over a series of decades. Whereas Stevens's picture builds towards a grand allusion to the inequities of pre-civil rights America, implicit in the barring of patriarch Jordan Benedict's interracial grandchildren and daughter-in-law from a diner, Boyhood concludes with a sense of quietude and contented exhaustion. Olivia remarks, before her son heads off to college, that life has moved too fast and she "thought there would be more". Mason Jr. ends the film by contemplating that existence, rather than consisting of moments to be seized, encompasses moments which "seize us". Far from a wakeup call against social injustice and imperial overstretch, Linklater's mosaic of Texan life is cheerfully fatalistic, celebrating the bewilderment inherent in our interactions with popular culture, the social institutions of church and school, and political change.

Films part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically those released towards the end of Obama's first term and throughout his second, ratify similar refrains of political imperfection and cognitive dissonance. 1 The 2012 blockbuster The Avengers, a production premised on an iconic superhero squad uniting to fight an alien invasion, features a climax set in Manhattan redolent of the 9/11 attacks, raising the implication that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to alleviate the trauma of their casus belli. Much as Avatar's expansive allegory rivalled the hermetic realism of The Hurt Locker in political resonance, The Avengers's evocation of anxieties resultant from the War on Terror offers saliences which compete with Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a Kathryn Bigelow directed geopolitical thriller concerning the build-up to Osama bin Laden's assassination in 2011.

As Pardy (2016, 28) comments, "The Avengers recognizes that the long running wars have made American patriotism divisive" through a finale which "harkens back to 9/11 with its New York setting". Some critics as well noticed this fixation, albeit occurring in jingoistic fashion. Richard Brody of The New Yorker (n.d.) thought Joss Whedon's production "carries out its cartoonish mission while addressing graver concerns-the construction of a post-9/11 revenge fantasy that takes place against the backdrop of unpopular foreign wars". The arc of leading billionaire scientist Tony Stark, otherwise known as the superhero Iron Man, returns to these predilections in the beginning film of 'phase two' of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man 3 (2013). Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of the battle of New York and facing a villain primed to launch terrorist attacks on the United States, the titular superhero encounters threats that would have been relevant a decade earlier and grapples with the atmosphere of endless war cultivated in The Avengers. 2 The Captain America films accumulate comparably repetitive emphases on malaises emergent in the Bush years and recurrent in Obama's presidency. 3 The first instalment depicting this traditionally patriotic superhero, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), tells the origin of Steve Rogers, a man with multiple physical ailments who transforms into the super soldier Captain America for the Second World War. This debut for the comic book hero climaxes with Rogers frozen in time and its epilogue shows him thawed for the world of 2011.

In the more subversive 2014 sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rogers attempts to adjust to twenty-first-century society after missing out on seven decades of human development and history, discovering wider fissures within America's political life as a result. Although a significant part of the film's action portrays the threat provided by the Winter Soldier of the title, who attacks Rogers late in the first act, its explicitly politicised elements do not stem from its signature antagonist. The plot comes to hinge on the revelation that Hydra, a pernicious organisation defeated during the throes of Second World War in the first film, has agents planted within the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D., the special law enforcement organisation which facilitates superhero collaboration in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In a scene purveyed by the overtones of 1970s conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975) , Rogers finds a secret bunker in New Jersey which reveals that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been subverted by Hydra since the end of the Second World War. This is proved by a supercomputer housing the consciousness of Dr Armin Zola, a Nazi scientist thought to have been eliminated in The First Avenger. Zola speaks of creating a world so "chaotic, that humanity is ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security", invoking the classic tropes of the idealism/realism dichotomy.

The pernicious trade-off envisioned by Zola, coupled with Captain America's coming to terms with his missing out on seventy years of US history, can be seen to address a discrepancy between the moral mission of the pre-1945 fight against Nazism and the comparatively murkier politics of the subsequent Cold War. Yet Captain America: The Winter Soldier arguably offers greater resonance for the bipartisan disillusionments of the Obama era in its fear for a United States corrupted by rogue agencies and vulnerable to authoritarianism.

Both voices of the radical left and libertarian right seized on its conveyance of a political landscape where national security priorities override privacy and civil liberties. In respect to a moment where a Hydra mole confesses to employing surveillance and private data to execute individual threats, Josh Bell (2014) of the ACLU drew parallels between this policy and the revelations over the National Security Agency's spying in 2013, an instance of a "secretive agency … undermining the very values that the government is meant to protect". Bell also detected that Hydra's "secret helicarrier program" of "Project Insight", an operation premised on aircraft designed for widespread assassination, overlapped with Obama's liberal adoption of drone strikes and his "legal justification for putting people on the real-world kill list" (ibid.). Conversely, Republican commentator Glenn Beck (quoted in McSweeney, 2018, 164) suggested that Captain America: The Winter Soldier formed a "pro-American story", replete with libertarian shibboleths against "killing people with drones" and "spying".

The third film in the Captain America trilogy, Captain America: Civil War (2016), showcases further frustrations with the unsatisfactory triangulations and renewed schisms of the Obama years. Released in the final year of a presidency alternating between unilateral drone attacks and the vaunting of soft power diplomacy, this sequel, effectively an 'Avengers 2.5' because of its inclusion of multiple characters from across the MCU, reiterates a clash between realism and idealism. The catalyst for this friction occurs as a result of an episode of collateral damage in Lagos, Nigeria, brought on by a firefight between the Avengers and criminal supervillain Brock Rumlow.

The Sokovia Accords, a set of resolutions passed by the UN which circumscribe the actions of the superhero team through a regulatory panel, prompt differences of opinion between Captain America and Iron Man. Whereas the former accentuates the distrust of big government implicit in The Winter Soldier by decrying the accords as a threat to "our right to choose", the latter draws on his creation of the robotic antagonist Ultron (a plot development of 2015s The Avengers: Age of Ultron) to rationalise the UN oversight and assertions of multilateralism. Compounding matters are the divided allegiances of fellow Avengers, separations which lead to a memorable set piece at a German airport where erstwhile allies fight one another. A dark plotline encompassing the brainwashing of Rogers's WW2 comrade Bucky Barnes, who was revealed as the Winter Soldier in the third act of the previous film, adds to the crosscurrents afflicting the MCU.

Captain America: Civil War derives its inspiration from the Marvel Civil War comics of 2006-2007, a crossover storyline which provides the foundation for the feuds of Rogers and Stark. Erdemandi (2013, 214) viewed this yearlong comic book saga as synergetic with "post-9/11 debates over national security and civil liberties". These alternate priorities are again respectively outlined in Iron Man and Captain America, who disagree over the introduction of "governmental regulations to protect civilians" and dispute whether "registering superhero identities will take away their personal freedoms" (ibid., 217). There are crucial alterations made to the work of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven by Captain America: Civil War directors Anthony and Joseph Russo. The Civil War comic books depict Stamford, Connecticut, as the site of collateral damage which dramatises the need for superhero regulation, a contrast with the 2016 blockbuster's use of Lagos, Nigeria. Illustrations of firefighters sent to rescue New Englanders trapped under debris, juxtaposed with a funeral service for children lost to the tragedy (Millar and McNiven 2007) , form invocations of the days following the 9/11 attacks. This haunting symbolism is substituted in Captain America: Civil War for an allegory more ecumenical in orientation; the fact that the Russo Brothers present the Sokovia Accords as a product of the UN rather than the US government of the comic book source material plays to contemplations of America's reputation in the world and supersedes the anxieties of domestic national security. If, as Erdemandi (2013, 223) contends, the Civil War comic books contain "debate over the role of freedom and security", the Russo Brothers's production extends this dichotomy into the realm of International Relations, injecting irreconcilabilities of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian central to the post-Iraq era.

Coupled with this capturing of disjunction are the refrains of stasis familiar to Obama's second term and the failures to mine true Wilsonian alternatives to endless war. The tone emblematises this mood of resignation. Despite a bombing attack at a UN ceremony in Vienna which kills T'Chaka, a leader of an African kingdom central to the MCU, and a twist which establishes that a brainwashed Barnes assassinated Stark's parents in 1991, Captain America: Civil War is subdued in its evocation of trauma compared to the source material's allegorisation of 9/11. The film's ending, which lacks resolution and succeeds an inconclusive fight between Rogers and Stark, differs wholly from the epilogue of the comic books, which show the surrender of Captain America to the authorities. Further, for most of the picture, it is unclear whether the audience should be siding with Roger's unilateralism or Stark's Wilsonianism, an ambiguity which prompted McSweeney (2018, 254) to note the "reasonably balanced argument" delineated. To McSweeney (ibid., 254) , it is only late in the second half where the film sides with Rogers, a stance resultant from Stark's "internment" and "involuntary incarceration" of his opponent's allies.

This deliberativeness is contrary to the hyperpartisanship of the political rhetoric and the superficial qualities of the cinematic milieu which has attended Trump's presidency. Heading beyond the stasis of the preceding years of American politics, Trump's victory in 2016 extrapolated the disintegrating relationship between the Wilsonian and Jacksonian polarities, illuminating diametrical opposition to the syntheses of both these schools evident cinematically and diplomatically twenty years earlier. Moreover, his campaign and presidency have inspired allegories galvanised by the surge of nativist populism across the Western world and fixated on the undercutting of homeostasis within Mead's kaleidoscope, mirroring vituperative dynamics in contemporary foreign policy debate.

Trump's presideNcy: The coNTiNuaTioN or eNd of Kaleidoscopic diplomacy iN americaN ciNema?

The inauguration of Donald Trump, an event outlined at the beginning of this book, can be interpreted as a homogenisation of the multifaceted complexion of American statecraft cited by Mead. The president's inaugural address in January 2017 rebuked a long-term neglect of Jacksonian shibboleths through references to an "enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry" and the "very sad depletion of our military" (Trump 2017). Several articles by Mead acknowledged these grievances as essential to understanding Trump's repositioning of Jacksonianism as a national force, but more importantly, they implied their break with Mead's kaleidoscopic thesis. In January 2016, Mead (2016a) viewed Donald Trump's strong status in the Republican primaries as proof that Andrew Jackson, the populist nineteenth-century president after whom the Jacksonian school is named, was again "central in American political life". In the wake of Trump's surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton in November, Mead (2016b) underlined the ascension of the Jacksonian further through the hypothesis that "Mr. Trump's strongest supporters are the twenty first-century heirs of a political tendency that coalesced in the early 1820s around Andrew Jackson".

The military historian, Andrew Bacevich, echoed this perception of the Trump phenomenon as a transformative updating of Jackson's politics. Bacevich (2017) identified Trump's victory as a repudiation of "the underlying consensus informing US policy since the end of the Cold War". This repudiation was catalysed by the Hamiltonian pressures of "unfettered neoliberalism" and the Wilsonian ideal of "the US military as a global police force", making Trump's rise of greater impact than the "crude Andrew Jackson's ousting of an impeccably pedigreed president" (ibid.). The nullification of a "post-Cold War consensus" meant that Jackson's defeat of John Quincy Adams in the 1828 presidential election "was nothing compared to the vulgar Donald Trump's defeat of an impeccably credentialed graduate of Wellesley and Yale who had served as first lady, United States senator, and secretary of state" (ibid.).

The motifs of a purist Jacksonianism located in Trump's touting of 'America first', have, however, been simultaneously countervailed by the president's mercurial governing style. Despite his campaign's rejection of a militarised Wilsonianism that had been shared by Republican neoconservatives and liberal interventionist Democrats, various incidents have elicited the resumption of a kaleidoscopic approach. The vituperative reaction of the 'Alt-right' to Trump's bombing of Syria for human rights violations in April 2017 hinted that the Wilsonian/Jacksonian breakdown of the late Bush years was liable to return in a newer, conspiratorial form. 4 Trump's failure to achieve total withdrawal from the Middle East and Afghanistan, a distinguishing feature of his campaign especially when juxtaposed with the accusations of 'globalism' levelled at Hilary Clinton, established the truly perennial nature of the endless war once promised to be abolished by Obama. On the domestic front, the citing of tax cuts as the main achievement of Trump's first two years in office foregrounded the ineluctability of a Republican Hamiltonianism largely ignored in his populist 2015-2016 campaign. 5 Like the rapacity and vulgarity of Daniel Plainview, the avaricious and seemingly improbable candidate Trump, at least on an attitudinal level, has belied the benevolent America championed by neoconservative and liberal interventionist ideologies. Yet this anarchic tendency has frequently only served to renew the politics of the kaleidoscope, resurrecting old habits and refusing to exorcise longstanding demons.

Hollywood allegories released during Trump's presidency have fittingly reflected the divisions of the binary and heterogeneous qualities respectively attributable to his administration's electioneering rhetoric and conduct in office. The Shape of Water (2017), an Oscar winning magical realist story set in early 1960s Baltimore and directed by Guillermo del Toro, overlaps with the binary position. The premise of del Toro's film revolves around a romance between Elisa Esposito, a cleaner rendered mute as a child through an unspecified act of violence, and an amphibian man retrieved from the Amazon River by the US military. Esposito grows to sympathise with the amphibian man's imprisonment and abuse under military personnel in her job as a cleaner in a secret laboratory in Baltimore, relating especially to his position as representative of an oppressed minority. Their courtship begins in a first act which also touches on the oppression of African Americans and outlines the inequities experienced by Esposito's homosexual next-door neighbour Giles, who is ejected from a diner for revealing his sexuality to a male employee.

Reifying the social and racial illiberalism of the pre-civil rights United States, Esposito and the amphibian man's relationship contends with the bigotries of an America orientated around an atavistic Jacksonian agenda. This political antagonism emerges in the chief villain, Colonel Richard Strickland, who tortures the amphibian man in the secret government laboratory and supports the amphibian man's vivisection in order to advance US scientific knowledge in the Space Race. It is outside these applications of violence, however, where Strickland most connects with the vulgarities of the Trumpian political persona. Displaying attitudes not far removed from the language of the 'Hollywood Access tape' and Trump's mockery of a physically disabled reporter employed by The New York Times (BBC 2015) , in one scene Strickland simultaneously threatens Esposito sexually and mocks her muteness by boasting that he can "make her squawk a little". In another aside, this time taking place in Strickland's suburban home and soon after an altercation with the amphibian man, the colonel has sexual intercourse with his wife and instructs her to be silent, nihilistic behaviour relatable to Trump's brand of populistic chauvinism.

Although The Shape of Water was shot prior to Trump's inauguration, its filming period took place from August 15, 2016 , to November 6, 2016 . This therefore intersected with the dramatic final months of the 2016 presidential race, a synergy accentuated in a 2018 article by John Richardson titled, "The Shape of Water: an allegorical critique of Trump". Richardson (2018) views the characters of Esposito, Giles and Zelda, an African American friend and work colleague for Esposito, as emblematic of "Americans who live lives of quiet oppression in the pasttense America that shimmers, mythical and revered, at the heart of the Trump campaign promise". This period, a point of nostalgia for Trump's vision but anathema to Hillary Clinton's, offered "comfort and reassurance to people whose lives have been disrupted by global trade, population movements and the emergence of AI in the workplace" (2018). If the Americans who lived under quiet oppression stood out as representative for the progressive supporters of Hillary Clinton, Strickland is "designed as a bridge to Trump's present-day political toxicity", through "boasts about his power to sexually assault women" (ibid.).

Del Toro's condemnation of the cultural Jacksonianism hegemonic in America's early 1960s is complemented by his portrayal of superpower politics. The journey from dove to hawk signalled by scientist Robert Hoffstetler, a Russian mole hired to extract the amphibian man for vivisection by the KGB, rejects the hardnosed realism typified by Strickland's Soviet counterparts. Coming around to a kind of humanist internationalism, Hoffstetler repeatedly refuses to kill the amphibian man and even abets his escape in collaboration with Esposito, Giles and Zelda. Hoffstetler's torture and murder at the hands of Strickland in the third act only acts as an overture to the exorcism of cold American Realpolitik. The Shape of Water concludes with a showdown between Strickland and the amphibian man which results in the former's execution and the latter's triumph, illustrated in voiceover dialogue provided by Giles which tells the viewer that Esposito lived "happily ever in love" with the amphibian man.

An alternately heterogeneous allegory can be found in Black Panther (2018), a comic book adaptation which declines to ratify easy assumptions about the Trump era's ideological polarities. Resembling Avatar, Ryan Coogler's Oscar nominated addition to the MCU elicits a passionate treatise on imperialism and multifarious allegorical readings which mask its shifts towards centrist resolution. The 'Black Panther' superhero of the title is T'Challa, the designated heir to a sub-Saharan African kingdom known as Wakanda. Unknown to the West and the international community, Wakanda harbours technology far superior to the 'developed world' and is disguised as a third world nation in order to safeguard its wealth from colonial marauders. Its leaders have been part of a dynastic line empowered both by a metal known as vibranium and heart-shaped herbs which enhance physical prowess and enable communion with deceased Wakandan rulers.

A tradition of isolationalism has allowed the economic and cultural realities of T'Challa's country to remain hidden from Western diplomats. Yet the policy alterations proposed at the end of the life of Wakanda's recently deceased previous king, T'Chaka, force son and new monarch T'Challa to contemplate whether it is appropriate to renew longstanding policies of non-involvement with the United States and abstention from intervention in impoverished neighbouring African states. Vexingly, before his death in Captain America: Civil War at the hands of a bombing perpetrated by the brainwashed Bucky Barnes, T'Chaka stated to the UN that "Wakanda is proud to extend its hand in peace" through cooperation with other nations and ratification of the Sokovia accords, a Wilsonianism nullified by his demise.

Black Panther, in addressing the political ambitions left unfulfilled by T'Chaka's departure, universalises the dilemma of establishing firm boundaries between what Brands (1998) categorises as "exemplarism" (which is based on the worldview of an America leading by example) and "vindicationism" (which hinges on an America performing the role of global policeman). Brands' dichotomy, which manifested itself fluidly in Team America: World Police, is transplanted to the setting of Wakanda through an early exchange between the newly enthroned king T'Challa and childhood friend W'Kabi. Moving from the exemplarist view that Wakanda should consolidate its values "at home" (ibid., 4), T'Challa references the desirability of internationalist policies encompassing "refugee programs" and "foreign aid". This philosophical change overlaps with the vindicationist ideal of America "as a beacon to the world", portraying diplomacy as a Manichean choice between "freedom and slavery" (ibid., 2).

Coogler reflects the danger of a drift from the soft power of exemplarism to the hard power of vindicationism, however, through T'Challa's cousin and chief antagonist, Erik Stevens, otherwise known as "Killmonger". Killmonger is the unfortunate son of N'Jobu, the younger brother of King T'Chaka who planned to undermine Wakanda's policy of isolationalism while an undercover agent in the United States. T'Chaka's execution of N'Jobu for treason left a child Killmonger abandoned in South Central Los Angeles and destined to take on the role of hawkish claimant to Wakanda's throne. As an adult, Killmonger's experience as a black operations soldier in the regime changes wrought to Iraq and Afghanistan reinforces his endorsement of a kind of Pan-African vindicationism, crystallised in a plot to overthrow T'Challa and use Vibranium technology to "arm oppressed peoples all over the world".

Despite how Black Panther relates Brands' dichotomy to a subtext of African American resistance and condemnation of colonialism, its motifs of black self-governance have been interpreted by several 'Alt-right' critics as allegoric of the need for a world governed between culturally homogenous ethnostates. This reading counteracted reviews which foregrounded Coogler's "prismatic perspectives on black life and tradition" (Smith n.d.) . John Nolte of Breitbart (2018) claimed that Black Panther was Donald Trump's "big screen avatar", because of "the healthy form of nationalism" in Wakanda. A YouTube user known as Black Pigeon Speaks (2017) noted that Wakanda's leaders presided over a conservative "hereditary monarchy" and an "anti-globalist society", which had "little interest in sharing its wealth and resources". Yet both progressive and reactionary endorsements of Black Panther neglect how Coogler's production arrives at an interplay of the realist and idealist schools respectively attributable to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's campaigns in 2016, restoring the politics of the kaleidoscope.

Coogler's picture climaxes with the defeat of Killmonger's unrestrained interventionism and consequently restores a semblance of political equilibrium. This is explicit in an epilogue where T'Challa finishes his father's interrupted speech for the UN by proclaiming "the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers", updating the address to rebuke Trump's nativism. Unlike the liberal interventionist and neoconservative policies corrosive to America's recent reputation, however, Wakanda's progressivism will not be spearheaded through militarism, nor will it veer wildly between exemplarist rhetoric and vindicationist practice. By constructing an outreach centre in South Central Los Angeles as the first cautious step on the road to global engagement, T'Challa hints that Wilsonian internationalism is best applied pacifically, tempered with the prudence of the Jeffersonian.

If Black Panther typifies the reconciliation possible in diplomatic allegory, Joker (2019), another comic book adaptation, attests to the collisional framing and disarray applicable to the Trump years. Like No Country for Old Men, director Todd Phillips's origin story for Batman's most iconic opponent is set at the dawn of the Reagan era in the early 1980s and evokes disjunctions between the Jacksonian and Hamiltonian schools. The film opens with the mugging of outcast protagonist and aspiring stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck by a gang of delinquents, focalising a Gotham City curiously redolent of pre-Giuliani New York in its anarchy. 6 Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Fleck invokes the troubled men ingrained in American cinematic lore by director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro in the 1970s and 1980s, echoing Taxi Driver's (1976 vigilante Travis Bickle and The King of Comedy's (1983) wannabe comic Rupert Pupkin in his portrait of maladjustment. The first half is devoted to Fleck's isolation and the foolhardiness of his attempts at launching a comedic career in imitation of his idol, TV host and funnyman Murray Hamilton. 7 These efforts are hindered by a complex neurological disorder which causes Fleck to laugh at inopportune moments and marks him out as easy prey for Gotham's criminal classes. As the narrative develops and Fleck's aspirations repeatedly meet harsh reality, Hamilton, in the eyes of Fleck, increasingly takes on the aura of a patronising liberal indifferent to the crime wave afflicting Gotham, catalysing a Jacksonian animus "profoundly suspicious of elites" (Mead 2001, 224) . In a dramatic confrontation with Hamilton which forms Joker's climax, Fleck, dressed in clown garb and realising his identity as The Joker, speaks resignedly to a landscape of anarchic realism by describing an environment where "nobody's civil anymore" and "everybody just yells and screams at each other".

Throughout Joker, Phillips contextualises this Hobbesian state with indications of Fleck's alienation from neoliberal mores. Implicitly jettisoning the kinship between Jacksonian populism and Hamiltonian finance forged under Reagan, the downtrodden Fleck's first descent into criminal vigilantism sees him shoot three drunk yuppies employed by Wayne Enterprises on Gotham's subway. The shootings of the men, which are initially driven by self-defence as the Wayne Enterprises employees physically attack Fleck, inspire a revolt amongst much of Gotham's citizenry. Public demonstrations against Gotham's moneyed classes glorify a crime which poses a reimagining of the atavistic Jacksonianism conveyed by the New York subway shootings carried out by Bernard Goetz in 1984, celebrating a violence which punches up as well as down. 8 To CNN's Jeff Yang (2019) , Joker "is the story of the 'forgotten man'" who "has been crushed underfoot by the elite" as well as "climbed over by upstart nonwhite and immigrant masses", a mixture of antipathy which offers "an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring Donald Trump to power".

Yet the incarnation of billionaire Thomas Wayne in Phillips's film compromises this populism through its suggestion of a repetition of the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian collisions promised catharsis by Trump's campaign. Bruce Wayne's father, far from the gentle patriarch of noblesse obliges sentiment played by Linus Roache in Batman Begins, is this time a vulgar ideologue who enters an election race for Gotham mayor soon after learning of the subway shootings. Decoupling the configurations of Trumpism as much as Reaganism, Wayne's pursuit of political power, which is justified with the moral observation that "Gotham has lost its way", shows intentions of consolidating the hegemony of his corporate class. In rhetoric which prioritises deference to the rich in lieu of protectionism for Jacksonian America, Wayne foregrounds the preeminence of "those of us who've made something of our lives" and laments the contemptibility of individuals "envious of those more fortunate than themselves".

In a further reversal of Trump's reputation as the 'blue-collar billionaire' tribune of the Jacksonian proletariat, Thomas Wayne exposes the false solidarity at the heart of the strong man persona when he rejects requests for help from Fleck, who, at one stage in Joker, believes himself to be the magnate's son. This disconnect becomes moreover tangible when a red herring in the form of a letter provided by Fleck's mentally ill mother, Penny, alleges that her troubled son is Wayne's illegitimate child and sparks a set of transformative revelations in the third act. Upon accosting Wayne at a public campaign event, Fleck is told by the plutocrat that his mother is mentally ill and in fact not his biological parent. Shortly after being punched in the face by Wayne for an incongruous laughing fit, Fleck researches records on his mother in Arkham Asylum and discovers that he is indeed an adoptee, burdened with a history of childhood abuse which gave him brain damage. Fleck's subsequent full embrace of the Joker identity and unleashing of political upheaval hinges on the Trumpian Thomas Wayne's facilitation of antagonisms between the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian, creating a broader allegory for the truly kaleidoscopic nature of post-2016 America.

The somewhat cacophonous critical reception of Joker has attested to this polychromatic picture. Critics such as The New Yorker's Richard Brody (2019), interpreting the shootings in Gotham's subway as hewing closely to the racist overtones of Goetz's shooting of four African American youths in 1984, argued that Phillips "whitewashes Goetz's attack, eliminating any racial motive and turning it into an act of self-defense gone out of control". Fleck's mugging by a gang of teenagers at the start of the film, meanwhile, foregrounds "an attack on an isolated and vulnerable white person by a group of young people of color" (ibid.). Joanna Robinson (2019) of Vanity Fair viewed Joker as synergetic with the anxieties of "the incel", catering to an "ongoing cultural reckoning with toxic masculinity and the violence perpetrated by angry, young white men". Phoenix's representation, "a downtrodden, mentally ill man", made his Joker the "perfect clown prince to haunt the Trump era" (ibid.).

Other critics gauged an allegory left wing in purpose and instead implied that Joker focalises the injustices wrought by the Hamiltonian more than it rationalises the cause of the atavistic Jacksonian. Micah Uetricht of The Guardian (2019) contended that a plot development involving Fleck losing access to a social worker and counsellor because of government austerity showed how these characters' interests were "intertwined against the wealthy billionaire class and their political lackeys who are slashing public services". Kyle Smith (2019) of the conservative National Review summarised Phillips's production as "positively Jacobinic" because of its setting in 1981, the same year "Reagan was shot … by a warped loner much like Fleck". Christina Newland (2019), another writer for The Guardian, disputed readings of Joker as "a reactionary call for incel vigilantism" by instead emphasising "the severe cuts to mental health services affecting Arthur's stability". Fittingly, the conclusion of Joker encompasses the deaths of both the limousine liberal Hamilton and the brash billionaire Thomas Wayne (the former is directly killed by Fleck, the latter by an individual inspired by Fleck's violence), illuminating a narrative which culminates in the fragmentation evident in There Will be Blood and The Dark Knight.

Will the spirit of contradiction remain a feature of American cinema beyond Trump's presidency? The mid-term elections of 2018, which marked the best Democratic performance since the fallout from Nixon's pardon in 1974, seemed to herald a liberal apogee in the eyes of many commentators. No less a figure than David Frum (2018) , the former Canadian-American speechwriter for George W. Bush, acknowledged the Democratic advance "in suburbs and among better-educated voters", corroborated "in won seats such as the Seventh Congressional District of Texas, a seat won by George H.W. Bush in 1966". The purging of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey from Hollywood memory, meanwhile, served to outline a new foundation for a revivified progressivism. Liberal opposition to Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2018 built on the goals of the 'Me Too' movement and underlined its comprehensive ambition. Upon release from the strictures of the Coronavirus pandemic which followed Trump's impeachment trial and acquittal, filmmakers will likely pontificate about the more lethal consequences of Hamiltonian globalisation and cite recent market shocks as the death knell for neoliberalism's existence.

Nevertheless, fissures will inevitably resurface within liberal America. The rival presidential campaigns launched in 2019 by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who are respectively centrist and socially democratic, hint at a friction which could outlast the euphoria of a Republican defeat in 2020. Conversely, if Trump transcends the collective trauma and economic devastation resultant from the Covid-19 outbreak by winning reelection, the Democratic Party could be compelled to embrace the kind of homeostasis emblematic of the centrist Clinton era. Neither, however, will Trump and the Republican Party be immune from similar alterations. A Trump victory in 2020 could further escalate the schismatic dynamics observable in his first term and which were corrosive in George W. Bush's second, nullifying aspirations of Jacksonian supremacy. The vagaries of the fragmented kaleidoscope are, in short, liable to deny partisan apotheosis. As I look forward to what American filmmakers can proffer in response to this ceaseless landscape, the dramatic changes, but also recurring tensions of the last four years tell me that contradiction is here to stay. NoTes 1. Thorough analyses of the simultaneously individual and interlocking purposes of films part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (commonly abbreviated as 'MCU') are provided by McSweeney. The Film Studies scholar describes how cycles of films are divided into phases and "culminate in something more than a sequel. … A cinematic 'mega event'" (McSweeney 2018, 18) . The excitement around this 'mega event', embodied in the numerous superheroes taken from various stand-alone films and placed together in The Avengers instalments, is further juxtaposed with allegorical resonance. McSweeney speaks of the MCU's "cultural function" (ibid., 20) and its addressing of "particular crises of national identity which emerged in the wake of the trauma of 9/11" (ibid., 27). 2. The successive allegorical shifts of pictures containing Iron Man are synergetic with the broader patterns outlined in the second half of this book. Iron Man, released in 2008, purveys the Wilsonian-Jacksonian breakdown located in The Dark Knight and Avatar through billionaire protagonist Tony Stark's decision to abandon weapons manufacturing and collusion with the militarised regime change championed by neoconservative ideologues. By employing the Iron Man suit to combat insurgency in lieu of American troops, Stark encapsulates the liberal opinion that the United States should cease 'boots on the ground interventions' following the second Gulf War. A scene where Stark stops a terrorist takeover of an Afghan village with minimal collateral damage also foreshadows the Obama administration's view that judicious use of military power, coupled with respect for cultural difference, could reform the damage inflicted on America's international reputation by Bush. This contrasts with the productions analysed in this chapter. 

/11 era", namely through public reveals of the illiberal cover-ups hatched at the end of The Dark Knight and a climax encompassing a return of the WMD threat foregrounded in Batman Begins

The Atlantic journalist Rosie Gray (2017) noted the dissent of individuals such as the "alt-right leader

sardonically defined the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as "the crown jewel of the Trump presidency

This sought to ameliorate the memory of "the fiscal crisis that had rendered the city bankrupt in the 1970s" and "the deterioration in relations between the police and some ethnic groups" (ibid., 263)

The casting of De Niro as this figure ironically references The King of Comedy, where De Niro essentially played the role occupied by Phoenix as Fleck in Joker

According to Michael Schwirtz (2013) of The New York Times, one of the adolescents, Darrell Cabey, "was paralyzed and sustained brain damage". Goetz told the police that he "had been mugged in the past" and "feared being robbed again" by the young men

America's War For The Greater Middle East

Donald Trump Under Fire for Mocking Disabled Reporter

What Captain America Has to Say About the NSA. Common Dreams

Black Panther: A Hero the #AltRight Deserves? YouTube. Last modified

What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy

The Avengers: Not Unlike An F-16 Stunt Run. The New Yorker

Trump's One Legislative 'Win' Is Actually a Failure. Intelligencer

Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen

Marvel's Civil War: An Allegory of September 11 in the American Civil War Framework. Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill

There Is No Progressive Majority in America. The Atlantic

Trump's Disillusioned Supporters. The Atlantic

American Ideals Versus American Institutions

Filming & Production

The Speech That Made Obama. The New York Times Magazine

The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power

The City Personified: The Geopolitical Narratives of Rudy Giuliani

The 'War On Terror' And American Film

Avengers Assemble!: Critical Perspectives On The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge

Civil War

Incel' Violence Is Horrific

Nolte: Pro-Trump 'Black Panther' Breaks Box Office Records Without Breaking New Ground. Breitbart, 20 February

Selling Marvel's Superheroes Through Militarization

The Shape of Water: An allegorical critique of Trump. The Conversation

This Is the Joker the Trump Era Deserves-But Not the One We Need Right Now. Vanity Fair

Boyhood Is a Stunning Experiment in Filming Time

Bernard Goetz, Man in '84 Subway Shooting, Faces Marijuana Charges. The New York Times

The Politics of Joker

The Revolutionary Power of Black Panther. Time Magazine

Joker Isn't an Ode to the Far Right -It's a Warning Against Austerity. The Guardian

Joker --a Political Parable for Our Times

Directed by Rob Reiner. USA: Sony Pictures

Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Black Panther

Directed by George Stevens. USA: Warner Bros. The Hurt Locker

Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA: Sony Pictures. There Will be Blood