Amerika-Institut
at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
SoSe 1999

Proseminar: The Representation of the American Presidency in Contemporary Hollywood Movies

Presidents Under Pressure
or how fictional presidents handle situations of extreme crisis in the movies
Deep Impact, Independence Day, and Mars Attacks!

by

Uwe Sperlich

Thesis Statement: 
Ficticious presidential characters in Hollywood movies are very often unable to handle situations of crisis.

I. The President in Hollywood’s history
A. Early Beginnings
B. Present Day
C. Back to the Future
D. Ficticious presidential characters

II. The public’s expectations of the President
A. Addressing the Nation
B. Moral Leadership

III. Reactions of the President in a situation of crisis
A. Deep Impact
B. Independence Day
C. Mars Attacks!

IV. Evaluation of the President’s performances.
A. President Beck
B. President Whitmore
C. President Dale

V. Adaptation of the ficticious actions to real-life

The President of the United States has been a subject of many movies in Hollywood history. From the earliest days of cinema, in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Fighting Roosevelts (1919) or Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), to the present day, in films such as Nixon (1990) and Dick (1999), many real-life U.S. presidents have been portrayed in the most different ways. In the years before crises like Watergate, Vietnam and the growing media coverage have demystified the presidency, most of these reallife portrayals have shown the President as a wise heroic man, almost like a saint (Edelman 323). In the years after these events, Hollywood lost its respect for the presidency discovering that the man in charge was human and that he also makes mistakes (323). Since Hollywood likes to adapt politics, it is no surprise that politics adapted Hollywood, too. The simple fact that Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 was subject for several jokes in one of the most successful movies of 1985, Back To The Future. In this time-travel film, Marty McFly (Michael J.Fox) accidentally travels to the year 1955 where he tries to find the inventor of the time machine, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), to help him get back to 1985. After having found him, Doc Brown does not believe Marty’s story. In order to find out, if Marty’s story is true, Doc asks him the following question:

Doc Brown: Then tell me, Future Boy, who’s President of the United States in 1985?
Marty McFly: Ronald Reagan.
Doc Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor? Ha! Then, who’s Vice President?
Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady and Jack Bennetty is Secretary of Treasury !
Marty McFly: Doc, you gotta listen to me !
Doc Brown: I got enough practical jokes for one evening. Good night, Future Boy.

And later in the film, when Marty shows Doc Brown the recording of his camcorder, Doc Brown is amazed about this technological invention and cries out: “No wonder your president has to be an actor, he’s gotta look good on television.“

In the 1980s and 90s an increasing number of films with a ficticous presidential character were made, despite the fact that “politics is neither interesting nor important. What is important and interesting for film purposes are people’s immediate circumstances“ (Gianos 3). However, this certainly had one advantage: The depiction of an event —in the present or the future— does not have to be historically accurate any more and lies only in the hands of the creative minds. Now, we no longer get to see, how a president has reacted, but rather how he might react under certain circumstances. It is especially interesting to see the President‘s reaction in an extreme situation of crisis, because that is a situation that does not occur every day and that many of us rather would not like to see happening. For this paper, I am going to focus on the presidents depicted in the films Deep Impact (1998), Independence Day (1996), and Mars Attacks! (1996) and how they react differently under these extraordinary circumstances. The three films were chosen because they all do have two things in common: The President is only one of many characters. The storyline concentrates on several different people and their fates, the President being just one of them. In each film the importance of the President varies, however. This will be examined later in this paper. Second, all three films —although different in genre— tell science-fiction stories. Deep Impact is a mainly a serious disaster-drama with science-fiction elements, Independence Day is an actionadventure- science-fiction blockbuster with comic elements, and Mars Attacks! is mainly a satire of the B-movies of the 1950‘s and 60‘s.

Before taking a closer look at each depicted president, it is important to know how we as the public expect the President to react. The only way we can assess his reaction is by the way he addresses the American people. A study of presidential addresses showed a strikingly consistent pattern for all presidents, no matter which party they belonged to (Hinckley 27). The pronoun “we“ is used in almost every speech. It refers either to the nation, to the American people or the presidential administration, however it is used interchangeably and frequently within the same sentence (27).

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