Evidence no.1 A young, non-white and unknown presidential candidate talking of “hope and unity” and winning the election: Obama’s campaign in 2008? No, The West Wing, 2005, NBC.
Evidence no.2 A wife publicly standing by her famous husband after he admits he’s involved in a sex scandal, trying to save her family and life from gossip and humiliation: Hillary Clinton after Bill confessed his “improper physical relationship" with Monica Lewinsky? New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s wife after he got caught in a prostitution scandal and held a press conference to apologize? Both stories match, but it’s Julianna Margulies in The Good Wife, 2009, CBS.
Evidence no.3 A charismatic leader coming out of the blue, bringing a message of hope and change, using youngsters’ enthusiastic support to spread the message around, and promising – you guess? – universal health care: this time must be Barack Obama… No, it’s Anna, the leader of the Visitors, the humanly-disguised aliens landed on earth - and on ABC in autumn 2009.
What are we trying to prove? That sometimes TV fiction is able to capture reality to the point of anticipating it? That life imitates fiction? That some authors of TV series have psychic powers? Maybe we’re just mad men, but a bit of all this.
Let’s take the West Wing case: the introduction of the Obama-like character is 2 years prior to the announcement of his candidacy for president. But to shape the figure of a young outsider, an idealistic and telegenic candidate coming from an ethnic minority and speaking with Obama’s words, the writer and producer Eli Attie (now working on House) didn’t travel through time: former speechwriter for Al Gore, Attie saw a young politician from Chicago, not even a Senator yet, giving an inspiring speech at the democratic convention in 2004. He then asked Obama’s collaborator David Axelrod to tell him more about that man and started modelling his fictional character on him. No coincidence nor fortune-telling then, just intuition and good knowledge of the environment he was writing about. Somehow it’s always the good old advice by Hemingway: only write on things you know well.
An interesting counterpart on the side of non-fiction is HBO’s documentary By The People – The Election of Barack Obama, a unique day by day insight into Obama’s staff and family from 2006 until the election: watching on TV that same democratic convention in 2004, young filmmaker Amy Rice discovered this interesting character and so in 2006, a year before Obama announced his run for the White House, she decided to tell this behind-the-scene story, because she thought “he could be the first African-American president”. That’s not enough to ‘step into a Barack Obama’, you need to recognize the potential of the character and start working on him.
Back to (science) fiction. Because maybe the most interesting part of the West Wing affair is how the scriptwriter Elie Attie prefigured the continuation of the story, anticipating reality to the point of divination: first his ethnic minority candidate struggles not to be defined only by race nor underestimated for his scarce political experience, then has to face strong internal opposition from a more established Democratic figure, finally runs against a veteran Republican candidate who’s not a Bush follower, a maverick not beloved by the conservative base. But of course, our charismatic outsider ends up winning the White House. Written in 2004, aired in 2005, actually happened in 2007-8.
A bit of the same happened to husband-and-wife team Robert and Michelle King, who created and executive-produced The Good Wife (along with Ridley and Tony Scott, among others): they started working on the project soon after Eliot Spitzer resigned from New York Governor in march 2008, drawing inspiration from similar cases (the Clintons, the Edwards).
They simply asked themselves the right dramaturgical question: what happens to these good wives after those embarrassing press conferences where they stand at their unfaithful husbands’ side? First of all a slap on the man’s face just outside the flashes of cameras – it’s the striking opening of the series, no matter if truly happened or not, it’s the perfect way to let us know that this woman is going to fight to regain her life and dignity – and then back to the job they’ve left for years to focus on the family and children. So, just as the writers had imagined for the character played by Julianna Margulies, with bills and rent to pay, an unemployed husband and three children, Silda Spitzer reentered the market job after 15 years in autumn 2008. In Michelle King’s words: “We’ve been pulling from the headlines, but lately they’ve been pulling from us!”.
As you may have noticed, the only explanation that we’re excluding is maybe the first and most obvious that would come to the old European critic’s eye: that these stories are carrying an ideological and political message. Take 24, often accused by the liberal media of justifying violence and even torture, and thus judged as a TV surrogate of the Bush doctrine; or take the Obama-like leader of the Visitors, promptly quoted by Fox News to show that the president’s approach is evil and ‘alien’ to America: of course you can analyse the ideological and ethical side of such stories, but reducing them to political barometers, you’d miss their primary essence of narrative machines and television products.
In 24, Jack Bauer and his Counter Terrorist Unit go far beyond law and human rights in their one-day-rush to avoid the catastrophe because the narrative structure requires an justifies it, and in 24 the “real time” mechanism and the urgency of action are everything. As somebody noticed, it’s a bit like in those cartoons where characters fall from a precipice, get hurt in many ways and even die, but always re-appear fresh and clean in the following scene, their pain leaving no emotional trace.
So it’s for the ‘Obamian’ leader of the Visitors: of course authors and producers are winking at the audience when they make the leader of alien invaders speak like the president of the USA, but the real point is that they’re just trying to engineer the most agreeable, charismatic and convincing figure of a political guide. In 2009 he/she must speak and behave a bit like Obama.
We think we can restore ethic matters only for a final remark: our considerations cast a dark shadow on how easy it can be to predict and therefore to influence public opinion and electoral behaviour, in a media-dominated scenario. As soon as scriptwriters and creative producers will turn into political speechwriters and strategists, and actors and show business men into candidates, it will be too late for the human race. Or has it already happened? Do the names Reagan and Berlusconi say anything to you?
by Sebastiano Pucciarelli
Selected resources
video “Life Imitates The West Wing”:
www.slatev.com/player.html?id=1434027921
video preview of tv series The Good Wife:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_OtrYgMnCU
video on TV series V (Visitors):
www.tvtalk.rai.it/contributi.asp?tipo=3&ID=574
on the production history of documentary By The People:
www.documentary.org/content/long-trail-people-follows-obama-white-house
“Jack Bauer and the ethics of urgency” by Slavoj Zizek:
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