American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations

2009

2009 Movies, a Nation, and New Identities DANA POLAN It is a perhaps inevitable and unavoidable temptation for the historian writing about any specific year to argue that his/her chosen slice of time was somehow especially meaningful and consequential: loaded with events that decisively altered the flow of time from then on. As the title of a book published in the year under consideration here would have it, 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Kaplan). And insofar as any year, inevitably and necessarily, is the ground through which large currents of politics and culture pass and coalesce, it would be easy to make any particular year seem the one that did indeed alter everything. Yet it would be no exaggeration to say that in the year that saw the inauguration of Barack Obama as forty-fourth president of the United States, something momentous, something unprecedented, something extraordinary had happened in the country. Power and governmentality in America had been redefined to include a new racial identity at the top. Years of racism and disenfranchisement had not been wished away, but this new presidency meant that the meaning of power in the country—who had it, who could aspire to it—had changed decisively. This seemed to be a new America, one in which diverse constituencies might begin to have more of a say and in which there might be new tolerance and new social goals for American peoples. But even if the inauguration itself was an electrifying occurrence, it was only a punctual event in a larger history (which includes the long history of racial and ethnic struggles in America). Indeed, Obama’s victory in November the previous year was probably the more spectacular happening (spectacular both in the sense simply that a black man was elected president and in the euphoric celebrations in the streets when the news came through), with the January inauguration itself coming both as a confirmation, albeit an inspiring one (here was a president who could indeed give rousing speeches redolent with signs of change), of an already anticipated hope and as a signal 216 that now it was time to get down to work and to the negotiations and even, it must be said, the inevitable compromises and pull-backs of realpolitik. Indeed, for all the change that the Obama victory heralded, there could be no absolute fresh start. On the one hand, the Bush presidency left the new administration with a complicated, even foreboding legacy: for instance, the dismal endurance of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a banking and mortgage crisis that would eventuate in an international recession marked by home foreclosures, drastic rise in unemployment (and especially in length of unemployment for many Americans), budget slashing in both the public and private sector, failures of some nation’s economies, and on and on; and an image crisis around America’s standing in the world after all the revelations about torture, prisoner abuse, and general violation of human rights in the name of the so-called War on Terror. Key to the ensuing right-wing assault on the Obama presidency was the role of media, including the Internet and, especially, shock-jock AM radio and right-wing TV (such as Fox News), which relentlessly went after Obama, harping on his every vacillation (even if some had been caused by the very desire to conciliate and not move too quickly in support of one faction over another) and painting him with broad strokes that ranged from the farcical (he was depicted as a traitorous socialist) to the racist. This was a battle waged over representation and public image, and if Obama’s election had shown how much the politics of race were now on the agenda of America, the media assault made clear how much that politics for conservative white America was still fixated around the image of the racialized Other. It matters, then, that two of the biggest news stories of the year, ones that led to endless debate and discussion in the media, were also about the position of the charismatic black man in American life: the death of entertainer Michael Jackson in June and the budding sex scandal toward the end of the year around golfer Tiger Woods. (We might add to this list the arrest of black Harvard intellectual Henry Louis Gates in July at his home in Cambridge : here, too, was a story around race, less connected perhaps than the others to broad issues of celebrity but one...