Will movie presidents now be white, asks Donald Clarke
Earlier this week Screenwriter spent some time brooding in the lavatory. That small room provides welcome privacy - vital when cooking up facetious, mean-spirited columns - and, in the days following a Certain Great Event, it offered up a remarkable artefact that demanded study.
Hanging on a spindle, bound together in a perforated roll, were several dozen sheets of paper, none of which contained printed musings on the cultural significance of Barack Obama. Just look at these astonishing, absorbent documents.
No tear-stained essays by middle-aged poets who, jilted by America after a love affair that took place to the strains of early Bob Dylan, now feel able to return to their chastened lover. No creaky speculations on the coming of An Even Newer Frontier. This spool of Comfy Wipe must be the world's longest piece of paper containing no mention of the president-elect. It should be installed in a museum.
Instead, I began scrawling down ideas for a column on what Barack means for the movies. For a start, we might see the end of the recently established convention that demands that presidents - or, rather, a disproportionate number of them - be African-American. Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert have, it seems, cleared the path for people of colour and no further positive discrimination is necessary.
That's just a start. One can only imagine the civilising impact that Obama's win will have on the movies. The nationwide elevation of tone will lift all cultural boats and propel them towards a beautiful new horizon. If you think you saw Jesse Jackson blub last week, wait until he's put in front of the enriching, inclusive films that are set to characterise the coming decade. Those rolls of Comfy Wipe will really come in useful then.
By the time I emerged from the loo with my scrolls of wisdom, 146 other film writers had already penned the same article. The Sunday Timeshad, for example, already considered the Haysbert/ Freeman axis and come to similar conclusions as Screenwriter. By the time you read this, the What- Obama-Means-for-Cinema piece will seem as decrepit as the Spenserian sonnet.
The truth, of course, is that Obama's win will change little. Glance at the mainstream films that emerged in the years following earlier "landmark" elections and you will find scant acknowledgement of the new president's character or policies. In 1961, the first year of John Kennedy's presidency, the Oscar for Best Picture went to West Side Story,a translation of a Broadway musical. No sign of the New Frontier there.
Twenty years later, following Reagan's recapture of the castle, the award went to a sweet film about English athletes. Does Chariots of Firesummon up any flavours of Ronnie's Morning in America? I think not.
In 2008, the year Mamma Mia!conquered the world, Amanda Seyfried's version of ABBA's I Have a Dreamwill mean more to the moguls than Obama's frequent references to a similarly themed speech by Martin Luther King. Change we need? Only if that change is rattling in the till.
dclarke@irish-times.ie
