On Trump
It is twenty-six years ago. The movie is called Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) has been separated from his family at the airport (through misadventure, not border security), taken the wrong flight (this is pre-9/11) and is now lost in New York City. He needs a place to stay, so naturally he finds his way to the lushest and most rarefied of digs: the Plaza Hotel. Upon entering the building’s magnificent foyer, he turns to a man who happens to be walking by. “Excuse me, where’s the lobby?” The man replies, “Down the hall and to the left.” The boy thanks him, and goes on his way.
I watched this movie every Christmas while growing up, and I always regarded this encounter with vague uncertainty. I did not know who the stranger was; still I took note of him. There was gravity to his appearance, a signaled importance. (Children can detect a cameo even if they do not know who it is they are seeing.) He lingers in the background as Kevin walks on, watching after the precocious youth with something like bewilderment. I sensed this was not out of concern for the boy’s well-being; even as a child, I could tell the man was surprised that the little boy had not known who he was.
My first impression of Donald Trump is one shared by millions of people my age — not as a real estate mogul or reality TV star, but as a passing figure in a childhood fantasy. Comedian John Mulaney, who was ten years old when it was first released, has commented on Home Alone’s misleading glamour: “I remember in that movie the kid gets into a stretch limo on Fifth Avenue with a large cheese pizza and I thought, ‘This is the height of luxury!’” Disillusionment is a part of growing up, and for anyone who was raised on this movie (and who has subsequently moved to New York City), there is still in the back of our minds a lingering question of just when we can expect to find ourselves chauffeured around Manhattan, eating a steaming pizza and spending Christmas Eve at the Plaza Hotel.
How terribly perfect that coupled with this broader disillusionment should be the man whose celebrity has recently emerged as everything to scorn about American idealism. Sometimes life deals a hand that confounds all preconceptions one has about the world in which one lives; when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, an assumption I’d unconsciously formed over the course of my twenty-one years of life (that authority was discernible, that this country’s population would elect a leader who at least affected qualities of leadership) was irrevocably destroyed. The worst part of it was that he’d always been there: pointing the way, harbinger of a future that could not have been detected even by the most prophetic child observer.
Retrospection is much easier than prophesy. For the last ten years, I've maintained a fascination with American movies released after 9/11 — not because I personally suffered as result of the attacks (I didn't), but because I was an oblivious child who grew up in their wake. My outsider’s perspective has driven me to seek some resolution between my censored upbringing and the awful reality of what impact those events had on the world in which I've been raised. As a result I've come to think not only in terms of a post-9/11 cinema, but of cinema itself as an expression of its time: a capsule for contemporary zeitgeist, an augury of historical potentiality.
This sociocultural view of mine got a run for its money after the 2016 election. I was behooved to think of more than one or two movies from recent years that could have anticipated Trump’s ascent. It left me grappling, at a loss; my code for historical evaluation was temporarily suspended in the fever of a supremely disturbing event. For the first time, I knew what it meant to live through a national disaster.
Since then, however, my perspective has returned, strengthened. In fact, American cinema has pointed to the circumstances behind Trump’s rise — but with subtlety, and over a much longer period of time. He’s there in Home Alone 2, to be sure; he is also in Billy Madison and Working Girl and Network. He is in the work of D. W. Griffith, Frank Capra, and John Ford. He’s in the films of Oliver Stone and Adam McKay. His presidency is rooted in the very fabric of our national consciousness, his presence diluted from a broad tradition of cinematic iconography. He’s always been around — just in lighter or milder or less dangerous forms. It is now our responsibility to own up to this fact, to not merely account for but to understand his historical inevitability.
This blog will be partially devoted to tracing Trump’s rise through the history of American cinema. It is the movies' greatest gift that through them we can witness the evolution of human behavior, while perceiving the ways in which people have always been the same. We are as ignorant today as we were when Mr. Trump and Macaulay Culkin filmed that scene at the Plaza Hotel. But at least we are more aware of ourselves — conscious of our ignorance, perhaps, and ready to pay closer attention to that which escapes our immediate understanding.
