HOLLYWOOD'S WEST WING: FLIGHTS OF FACT, FICTION, AND FANTASY

HOLLYWOOD'S WEST WING: FLIGHTS OF FACT, FICTION, AND FANTASY Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, eds. Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2003. 441 pages. $32.00 hardcover.

My mother, who hates politics and yawns at the nightly network news, found the film Primary Colors (1998), which we recently watched, captivating. "Clinton was a good president," she remarked as we followed Jack Stanton, an idealistic, Machiavellian, flesh-pressing, womanizing, junk food-consuming southern governor, in his campaign for the White House. Such is the power of a superb cast, headed by John Travolta, a clever screenplay, by Elaine May, and a near seamless blending of fact, fiction, and fantasy by legendary director Mike Nichols. Her response to this film was 'not unique. "As badly as Hollywood often presents the presidents," the historian Richard Shenkman asserts in Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, "it has had an enduring impact on how we see them, on how they behave, and even, in a few instances, on who we elect" (xi).

This eclectic, uneven mass of essays addresses an important and much neglected subject: the representation of presidents, real and imagined, in film. Hollywood's White House has all the earmarks of a published collection of conference papers, with familiar strengths and weaknesses of that genre. Some of the pieces are rock solid, that is, they are either firmly grounded in history and film studies or path-breaking in the topics they consider. Other essays are insightful and thoughtful while a few are simply witty and provocative. Unfortunately, this volume also contains a number of chapters of marginal utility and a few that seem out of place. At its worst, Hollywood's White House struggles to define what exactly constitutes a "presidential" film. At its best, however, the book provides an abundance of themes for reflection.

The volume's most valuable chapters weave together tightly its subthemes: "presidency," "history," and "film." Scott F. Stoddart, for example, considers television's The Adams Chronicles (1976) in the context of the 1970s and the emerging feminist movement. The docudrama "domesticated" the nation's first political dynasty by placing the Adams women front and center and by depicting John Adams "as a warm, loving husband who just happens to be the second president" (42). Also noteworthy is Bryan Rommel-Ruiz's essay on the portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith's Lincoln, Rommel-Ruiz shows, reflected the prosouthern, even racist, biases of early twentieth-century scholarship. In this film, the Great Emancipator is a forgiving national "unificator," to borrow a misword from Will Ferrell's George W. Bush, not an antislavery egalitarian. Another fine piece, by Robert E. Hunter, explores changing views of the White House through the fictional presidents in Fail-Safe (1964) and Colossus (1970). Although both films consider issues of technology and atomic weapons, the former, released before the Vietnam War had eroded public trust in the presidency, is more optimistic than the latter about the ability of a chief executive, of good character, to be the steward of the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Other chapters, especially those covering the works of directors, producers, and film moguls, are quite insightful and thoughtful. Deborah Carmichael's essay explores a variety of themes present in Gabriel Over the White House (1933), released by William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Films. Above all, the depression-era film, in depicting a "reborn" activist president unafraid to adopt fascist solutions, reflected Hearst's mercurial politics. As Carmichael observes: "Hearst may not have been a 'self-proclaimed' fascist, but he certainly respected the authoritarian regimes of both Mussolini and Hitler" (163). Loren P. Quiring's chapter on Aaron Sorkin shows how the intellectual force behind The American President (1995) and television's The West Wing has used language to elevate audiences' perceptions of this office and political discourse in general. "Words must be true, never cheapened or wasted or plain wrong," Quiring, paraphrasing Sorkin, stresses (240). In analyzing Sorkin's views, he helps to explain why The West Wing has been so popular, especially among educated Americans. Like Quiring's study of Sorkin, Donald M. Whaley's essay on Oliver Stone takes seriously the thoughts of this most controversial director. The reoccurring "Beast" in Stone's movies, Whaley illustrates, is neither a capitalist establishment, assailed by Marxists, nor a conspiracy of elite white males who meet routinely to decide the nation's destiny. Instead, the "Beast" is more amorphous, primal, and pervasive. It is the sum total of the darker impulses of American politics and society, from which even national leaders are not immune. "The Beast is not extraneous to Nixon" he writes of the 1995 release. "It is a key to understanding the film" (285).