What Would The Movies and TV of the Biden Era Look Like?
The movies that come out in 2021 are going to look weird. Crowd scenes are going to be out, conventional sex scenes will be risky, and fight scenes are going to be tricky to stage. On top of all that, budgets are going to be inflated by precautions to try and stop a set from turning into a petri dish. It’ll look uncanny, as rooms will feel sparse and empty, and characters find excuses to avoid showing physical affection. I guess it’s good news for that one specific weirdo who has a script about a twitch streamer with mysophobia and intense social anxieties, living in an post-apocalyptic world where everyone settles their differences via a pistol duels (It’s Barry Lyndon for the TikTok generation!). But it’s disheartening for everyone else.
Let’s say that the best-case scenario plays out. Early 2021, Fauci rolls out a vaccine, and they have enough of it to go around, and enough people take it to form a meaningful herd immunity. Business as usual fully resumes in March of 2021, meaning the first, truly post-Coronavirus movies and TV are going to hit theaters and streaming services (assuming the former still exists) in the Fall of that year. Then what kind of stories are we going to tell, as we confidently crawl out into the world, mask-free? Well, in my highly-unsolicited opinion, I think the key lies in the rictus grin of our inevitable 46th president.
It’s not controversial to say that Joe Biden is going to win in November. At this point, Trump isn’t running a campaign, so much as a Typhoid Mary tour, where he’s trying to see how many of his own followers he can kill from Covid before the end of the second quarter (I’m genuinely surprised no enterprising grifters have tried selling Make America Great Again coffins yet). With Biden’s double digit lead in most key states, it seems the only way Trump can secure a second term is with election tampering so bare-faced that it would delegitimize the country’s entire democratic process. And if that happens… let’s just say we won’t need entertainment to make life interesting.
But let’s get back on track. It’s 2021, Biden just got inaugurated, and America is free from the twin scourges of Covid-19 and malarkey. First, we’ll still be seeing movies and TV from 2020, with editing seamlessly covering up the six-month production gap between certain scenes. But after that, we’ll start to really notice a change, as the scripts written close to, or during, the Covid period start to catch up. These projects are going to feel weird, not so much because of the issues they tackle, but rather the ones they ignore.
The people I’ve talked to who’s job security hasn’t been hit by Covid paint an odd picture. When looking for new series to pick up, most major streamers have one major requisite: they don’t want to bum people out. The logic is that America, and the world at large, has been so battered with devastating news and crippling uncertainty, that the last thing anyone wants is a series that will make them feel worse. Even some writers, and the agents and managers who represent them, have agreed, expressing this presumption that because the conditions of Covid have affected every facet of society, it’s almost trite to create a project that actually confronts it: why tell people what they already know?
Anyone who’s done so much as a cursory glance of film critical theory knows the broad arguments about how presidential terms affect cinema. The Nixon era saw the rise of paranoid thrillers and ultraviolent war-on-crime fantasies. The Regan era brought ultra-nationalist ‘America Fuck-Yeah!’ action movies, and slasher movies that played with the insecurities of a comfortable, suburbanized middle class. The 90’s were a cluster-fuck of Neo-Liberal, end of history insecurities: ‘yay, we just beat the Soviet Union, but oh no asteroids/aliens/society!’ The Bush Era was a jabbering nightmare of War on Terror paranoia. The films of the Obama Era would take a separate essay to get into, but I’d sum them up as main-stream cinema being consumed by a series of alternate universes, each installment of which found ways to smooth over the ugly ridges of modern America’s empire.
The movies of the Trump era are a little harder to define. That’s partly because we’re still in it, partly because it’s proving to be comparatively short, and partly because ongoing cinematic monopolies have collapsed time into a homogenous superstructure. Also, a lot of the most dramatic changes since 2016, like a greater push for intersectionality in media, had already been in the works since the Obama years. But hey, no broad cultural analysis is perfect.
If I had to point out one trend that has stood out, it would be the rise of what I’d describe as pre-apocalyptic cinema. These are usually movies in the medium-budget independent sphere, where the overwhelming feeling is that the center cannot hold, and the contradictions of the modern world are inevitably driving us somewhere terrifying. The big ugly beast might be institutionalized racism (Get Out, The Last Black Man In San Francisco, Watchmen), class inequality (Sorry to Bother You, The First Purge, Us, Parasite), or just society’s uncaring shittiness (Joker, Assassination Nation, Years and Years).
Obviously, there are drastic differences in the philosophies of these movies. Some, such as Watchmen and Sorry to Bother You even offer hopeful glimmers that we can pull ourselves out of this mess. Yet, they all offer a common consensus that we’ve reached a tipping point. After decades of willfully ignoring the crises of racism, income inequality and climate change, all our chickens are coming home to roost. It would be reductive to claim that Trump was the only inspiring force driving these films. However, I do think that that the overwhelming feelings of dread and shame that have marked our national identity these past four years at least helped the impact of these films, if not the formation of their voices.
Jumping back to June of 2020, the entire world has pretty much spent the past six months confronting just how bad things have gotten. Millions are unemployed, a virus has killed more Americans than the Vietnam war, and the brutal murder of George Floyd has forced the country to look its racist legacy in the eye. And, for what’s it’s worth, the Overton window is shifting. We’ve moved past arguing whether cops can sometimes be a little racist or not, and are instead seriously considering defunding police, if not outright abolition. The entertainment world is also rapidly taking note. NBC is taking down poorly aged episodes of 30 Rock and Scrubs, and white actors have vowed to stop voicing characters of color. Cops has been cancelled (the show, not the concept), and episodes of the upcoming season of Brooklyn 99 have been utterly scrapped, so that the series can meaningfully deal with police as they are, not as we’d like them to be. This is all promising, but it begs the question: will it last?
Most Biden voters don’t see their candidate as a vanguard for change, but rather a means of getting Trump out of office. Biden himself seems to recognize this, as his overall strategy seems to be quietly waiting out the clock as Trump’s approval rating continues to drop. If Biden wins in November, the mood will nevertheless be ecstatic. Trump’s reign of terror is over! Ding dong, the witch is dead! Our economy will recover, life will resume its pre-covid pace, and our president will finally return dignity to the white house. Things will go back to normal. And in a way, that’s a horrifying prospect.
What if people are so overjoyed over the getting the racist Cheeto out of office, they refuse to be bummed out by hearing that there’s more work to be done? What if the media tries to spin a Biden win as a victory for the Black Lives Matter movement, and enough minor reforms are tossed out to masquerade as meaningful change? What if the economy recovers just enough to reduce unemployment, so people just try to keep their heads down and rebuild their lives, rather than griping about inequality or the looming climate catastrophe?
People won’t want to be bummed out. They know that the world is heading in a scary direction, and that America’s systems are deeply unfair, and that the president isn’t offering a vision of meaningful change. But that’s the way it is, and what can you do, but try to make the most of it? Sure, the changes we’ve seen are here to stay: stories will take a stronger anti-racist stance, and the police will be viewed as a highly corruptible power-structure. But after a while, these ideas will be normalized. They’ll be the butt of the joke in lesser SNL sketches. They’ll be topics used to make viewers feel better about the changes that have been made, rather than the ones that are desperately needed.
This analysis might be off. Maybe the arbiters of power have been genuinely shaken by this moment, enough to put their money where their mouth is. Maybe, even though Covid has disproportionately hurt independent filmmakers, enough passionate voices will emerge with the urgent case for change, and refuse to let this moment succumb stagnate. But every time I try to find a reason for optimism, I keep thinking back to this 1920 speech by Warren G. Harding:
“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”
Harding beat Woodrow Wilson in that year’s election, taking office in the wake of both World War 1 and the devastation of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Just like Biden, Harding knew that what the American people craved, above all else, was to feel normal again. And if that mood becomes the predominant mindset as we enter the age of our 26th president, maybe the stories that get told will just cater that mindset. Who wouldn’t want a pat on the back, rather than a push forward? Because, hell, who actually wants to feel bad about things?
