Autocracy, Apocalypse and the Blue Glow: The State of America in Film |
Still from Moonlight. (A24)
An American friend visiting London last week asked me to recommend some “movies” to him. Only later did I realise how loaded a question it was. Cinema has always been a mirror—sometimes polished, sometimes cracked—held up to the culture that produces it. American films, and the rest-of-the-world epics reflected on US screens, don’t just entertain; they heighten romance, corruption, resistance, bewilderment, and hope. Looking again at the United States today after my friend returned to New York—the fractured politics, social unrest, ICE fury, climate dread, and yet a stubborn yearning for reinvention—I saw not policy headlines but fragments of its history shimmering through “movies” I hadn’t even named, ones he would have seen anyway, from Hollywood’s golden age to its more unsettled visions.
As an old sheep farmer friend from Northumberland reminded me, one need only hear Humphrey Bogart murmur to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942), “We’ll always have Paris,” to sense the bittersweet nostalgia America clings to in times of uncertainty. The film’s smoky interiors—watched by millions again recently on the BBC—perfectly capture a nation perched on the edge of global conflict, trying to summon courage and moral clarity. Today, in a world riven by authoritarianism, Rick’s Café feels like Washington, D.C. itself: half cynicism, half desperate hope. Very different from the city I knew before Trump, and different again from the one I imagine now.
Two decades later, the sweep of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962)—a British story but unmistakably a Hollywood production—offers another metaphor for American ambition. The desert, stretched in vast golden silence, becomes a screen for hubris. Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence, though British, whispers, “Nothing is written.” That immortal line, shimmering against the horizon near Jordan’s Wadi Rum, resonates with America’s self-image as a country forever rewriting its destiny. Yet Lawrence’s descent into violence anticipates the........