STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
What Trump, Brexit, and the Golden Globes have in common, and what it says about the current state of political alliances and shared interests
When the world gets knocked off kilter you really find out who your friends are. And sometimes it turns out they’re not who you thought they were.
The 2017 Golden Globe nominations were announced this week and for the first time in a long time the major Hollywood studios find themselves on the outside looking in. The blue bloods of the movie business — Disney, Warner Bros, Fox, Sony, Paramount and Universal — received a grand total of zero nominations in the marquis drama motion picture category. And they didn’t fare much better in the comedy category, nabbing just two of the five available noms (for Deadpool and Florence Foster Jenkins).
It’s possible that the major studio shut-out is an anomaly or an extension of the ongoing fragmentation in the entertainment industry as Netflix and other online outlets capture more and more of viewers finite money and attention and expand their media horizons in the process.
But when viewed in the context of broader trends, the Hollywood opinion-makers’ lurch toward independent films takes on a larger significance and marries it with movement that would, in almost any other setting, be considered its ideological opposite.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
In June, voters in Britain decided it was in their best interest to leave the European Union and restore their independent nationhood. In November, voters in America decided their president should be a first-time politician who flouted the conventions of traditional campaigns and promised to do the same for traditional government. In both cases, we were told the decision represented a populist revolt — a group of traditional people with traditional lives who longed for a simpler time got fed up with the new-fangled way of doing things and decided to make their voices heard; to stand athwart history and yell stop!
But what if it’s something else? What if it’s not just a bunch of old white guys releasing one last barbaric yawp before they throw themselves on the ash heap of history? What if the decisions to retreat from the EU and to elect Donald Trump were the result of something deeper and more universally-applicable than stereotypical demographic presumptions?
This week we got an important clue about the depth and universality of the driving force behind the Trump/Brexit vote when a group of educated, artistically-inclined, globally-aware writers and critics decided that the work product of their industry’s traditional and long-standing institutions was not worthy of award or commendation and cast their lot instead with the “independents”; the up-starts and up-and-comers with fresh ideas and fresh ways of doing things.
Like their counterparts in the Trump and Brexit “revolts”, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the academy that hands out the Golden Globe Awards) took a hard look at the establishment and found it lacking. Whether it was because the traditional power-brokers were stale and out of date, were pressing an agenda that no longer felt relevant or were simply out of touch with the interests of their audience, the organizations that a generation ago spoke boldly and decisively for the masses were no longer worthy of their vote. And seeing a preferred alternative, the voters chose to take it.
NOT MY TYPE
Since Donald Trump won the presidential election, we’ve been told that the typical Trump voter is a boorish, racist, xenophobe with a middle-American address and middle-American values who wants to retreat from the world and drag his country back from what he considers the moral fringes of society. The same labels have been slapped on the Brexit voter: old, white, isolationist, hate-filled.
The typical independent film-goer, we’re told, embraces the fringes. She lives on one of the coasts in a multi-racial urban setting surrounded by culture and art. She is worldly and open-minded, she is inclusive and accepting, she is young and is ready to turn the page of history from yesterday to tomorrow.
These two groups, according to conventional wisdom, could not be more dissimilar from one another and yet they are acting out in very similar ways. As Judi Dench said in a wonderful and award-winning independent film, something is out of joint.
Is it possible that Trump/Brexit voters share a kinship with Hollywood opinion-makers? Is the Trump crowd more erudite and the indy-film crown more down to earth than we’ve been led to believe? The answer is almost certainly yes. After all, fringe groups with obscure ideas may have pockets of influence in an isolated election cycle, but they don’t have broad and lasting impact that reaches across borders, industries and demographics.
That two groups from opposite ends of the political spectrum independently decided to reject their respective establishments suggests a cultural trend that runs deeper than the typical political fault lines.
But the more intriguing possibility is that these two groups are not so opposite after all; that the stereotypes we’ve all been fed about them are over-simplified, under-refined, and wrong; that, as Maya Angelou says in poems and iPhone commercials, we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.
BUILT TO LAST?
Looking forward, if the Trumpsters and Globe voters are both animated by a common interest that has pushed them to act out similarly within their own spheres of influence, is it a common interest that is likely to last as they jointly usher in a new era of cultural and political influence? Or are they simply ideological ships that nod recognizingly at one another as they pass on a sociologist’s trend chart?
These aren’t questions we can answer at the moment. And it’s possible that the Oscar nominations will come out in a few months and sink the whole theory.
But for now, it’s worth considering that the election of Donald Trump is not the result of a bunch of backwater hicks flexing their racist muscle, but a well-considered and thoughtfully-calculated response to a set of institutions that have lost touch with the real and valuable interests of honest, hard-working middle class citizens. Similarly, the shift toward independent films by the Hollywood press corps is not the petulant flailing of cloistered elites but the justifiable realization that establishment studios have lost touch with what actual, engaged audience members consider to be entertaining and valuable art.
Both groups have made their opinions known and the messages seem to be ringing in harmony. It remains to be seen whether anyone is ready to listen.
