I watched the fine film Arrival recently and was struck by the fact that, while there are still several weeks left to go before Donald Trump's inauguration, a major cultural shift is already under way. I predict it will hardly be the worst calamity to come out of Trump's time in office, but it felt to me, seated in that theatre, that the notion of the involvement of "the president" as a measure of the gravity of a situation had begun to lose all meaning.
As far as advancing the narrative of a film is concerned, this is worse than the loss of the answering machine. Time was, a protagonist could walk into his apartment, loosen his tie, push a button on a large rectangular object in his hall and any variety of exposition would be efficiently supplied directly to the viewer.
The now obsolete answering machine was a fount of plot, character and context. Once upon a time, all your basic back story needs could be met in the form of a few always slightly comical messages from your leading man's mother, a woman whom he hasn't called back.
In the olden days, if you wanted your character to have an air of mystery about him, perhaps a hint of pathos even, or maybe felt those unwashed dishes artfully stacked in his sink also needed a back story, all this could be accomplished in the time it took your man to broodingly pour himself a drink. Back in the day, one click and the voice of a highly attractive-sounding woman he has also not called back would come echoing across his bachelor pad and all would become clear.
Then, it being time to get this plot rolling, all you needed was a third message: "You've got to help me, Jake, they've found … arrrgh! Click." and you were ready to go.
Whatever your information-dumping requirements, the old-school answering machine had your back. Movies have barely recovered from our advances in answering automation because, regardless of how chiselled his features, a guy keying in his voice-mail PIN will never be sexy; and if, once he's in, the viewer can hear the voice of the highly attractive-sounding woman wondering where he is, she's too loud for him anyway. He can do better. Or at least quieter.
Currently, the only way to get the bare facts of your loner hero's heroic loneliness out on the table is to give him a friend and then have the two of them joke about his loner status, at brunch, and this may be why we're stuck in the era of the bromance. Also, having a doomed former colleague text "…arrrgh! :(" or tweet "They're onto us, @Jake #beingstabbed" will never convincingly drive your plot.
Detective movies and thrillers are still reeling from this narrative setback, and now our science-fiction and disaster films are about to take a hit. I think we can say goodbye to a time when referencing "the president" as someone who needs to "be informed" or who is, more dramatically still, "on the line," means pretty much one thing (that being, shit just got real) to all viewers.
Bringing "the president" (reverential tone) into your story used to be worth a thousand armed extras on the march. Get "the president" into your dialogue, it was understood, and you could forgo a good 90 seconds of dramatic, budget-eating, iconic-landmark destruction.
The sense I got watching Arrival was that something has shifted in our filmic shorthand. The mention that the "the president" has been informed of, or has an opinion about, an event – in this case, first contact with a number of seven-limbed creatures from outer space – added nothing to the plot and seemed to send the audience's collective mind reeling.
Invoking "the president" in the context of a crisis, bringing "the president" into the story, is now merely distracting. Drama drained straight out of that screen.
Viewers have traditionally understood that whatever else was about to go down in the film unfolding before them, the intrepid hero wasn't just going to end up walking away from what should be its denouement, shaking his head in confusion and wondering what on earth his commander-in-chief had been trying to say anyway. That's just not the case any more.
If the film you're watching is Arrival, the crisis situation is very quickly this: 12 spaceships have suddenly positioned themselves around the globe. You've got no idea why the seven-limbed guests aboard them are here. You've got no idea what made these heptapods choose to land in the places they did and, most important to the film's plot, you have no idea how to ask them these questions. The world is struggling to find a way of communicating with these betentacled star-travellers, beyond blinking prime numbers in their general direction. America has a top linguistics professor (excellently played by Amy Adams) on the case!
It's riveting, even thought-provoking, and then the writer goes and brings the notion of the "the president" into the situation as, to be fair, any writer would. The almost obligatory mention of "the president" shows up right on cue in this global crisis, and normally the spectre of "the president" would satisfyingly up the ante for our heroine and for the people who brought her in; the president is watching! This must be big!
This is familiar sci-fi territory, but this time I could almost feel the audience react to this bit of drama-heightening with a concerned "Oh, dear, aliens. Aliens with whom we should communicate. They're here on Earth and now the man whose method of handling a delicate international relationship involving weapons of mass destruction is to tweet 'North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won't happen!' is involved."
Suddenly, understanding the aliens didn't seem like humanity's greatest challenge any more. An important story-enhancing device has been lost and there's every indication that the phrase "aging like a president" will shortly lose all meaning as well. Very soon, saying someone is doing anything "like a president" will conjure up such a random, disparate, orange and bizarre collection of behaviours in the minds of many that it will fall from use.
Donald Trump is going to be to figurative presidents what a few uncastrated adult males of the species Bos taurus making meticulously researched consumer purchases at high-end ceramics stores, choosing to use their low-interest-rate credit card, and then politely requesting extra Bubble wrap to ensure their treasures get home safely to their pens would be to "like a bull in a china shop."
I don't mean that Mr. Trump will be so unconventional, will shake things up in Washington so much, that he'll forever redefine the role of president. There's no indication that's going to happen at all. What I mean is that, on top of everything else we're seeing and about to see, we're looking at total idiom-killer here, and our universal fictional president may have hung up his red phone for the last time.