“The Apprentice” scrutinises Roy Cohn’s role as Donald Trump’s mentor | | |
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Roy Cohn was a zealous, unethical lawyer best known, before Donald Trump’s presidency, for his work with Joseph McCarthy, a demagogic senator, and his reputation as a fearsome private attorney in New York. Cohn was disbarred shortly before dying from AIDS-related complications in 1986. He was a closeted, gay homophobe; Tony Kushner, an American writer, made him a central figure in “Angels in America”, a play about the AIDS crisis written in the early 1990s.
That would probably have remained the zenith of Cohn’s posthumous fame. But now “The Apprentice”, a new film, is scrutinising Cohn’s formative role as Mr Trump’s mentor in the 1970s. Sebastian Stan plays the ex-president as an ambitious, fame-hungry but naive young man from the provinces (ie, Queens). With coiled, twitchy malevolence, Jeremy Strong offers a genuinely unsettling performance as Cohn. (No actor does “I’m dead inside” better.)
Viewers learn that Cohn is an amoral schemer and that Mr Trump is an ambitious climber: that is nothing new. But Mr Trump’s attorneys tried to block the film’s release, lambasting the film as “election interference”. It is not hard to imagine their gleeful reaction had it been the other way around. What if a director had made a film about Kamala Harris’s relationship with Willie Brown, a politician from California with whom Ms Harris was romantically involved some 30 years ago?
The interference comment is silly for two reasons. First, candidates constantly vie for pop-culture validation, usually in the form of endorsements. Ms Harris has earned the
support of Taylor Swift; last weekend Mr Trump appeared by video at a Jason Aldean concert and brought Elon Musk onstage in Pennsylvania.
Second, pop culture’s effect on elections, though difficult to gauge, is almost certainly minimal. Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing American journalist, famously remarked that “Politics is downstream of culture.” That sounds appealing but is hard to prove. Malcolm Gladwell argues in his new book that “Will & Grace”, a popular sitcom featuring a kind, appealing gay man, was at least partly responsible for Americans supporting gay marriage. Maybe. But it is more likely that some numinous shift in sensibility was responsible for both.
Mr Strong claimed in a recent talk-show appearance that “The Apprentice” was not “an anti-Trump movie”. That is—as the current president would say—malarkey. Yet if any voting preferences are actually changed owing to “The Apprentice”, or Mr Trump’s appearance at Mr Aldean’s concert, or Bruce Springsteen doing his regular-guy shtick while endorsing Ms Harris (in a fetching flannel jacket), I will eat my socks.
Has a piece of pop culture ever changed your views on a candidate, or on politics more broadly? (And do you know where Bruce Springsteen got that jacket? Because it’s getting cold in New York and I love dark flannel.) Write to us at plottwist@economist.com.
Elsewhere in The Economist this week: | | |
Editor’s picks
Must-reads this week | | |
The Economist recommends
What to watch, see and listen to | | |
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What to see: “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” at Gagosian Davies Street, London. Born in 1995, Anna Weyant has been feted as the “millennial Botticelli”. Her works often experiment with shadows and reflections and usually have a darkly playful aspect to them. For her first exhibition in London, Ms Weyant has produced seven new works. One is a painting-within-a-painting: a portrait of a round-faced woman rests, upturned, against a wall (pictured). In another a reader stretches out a huge, blank newspaper—rendering them unaware of an approaching figure. As the fairy-tale title of the show attests, these paintings tell stories.
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What to listen to: “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast”. On October 5th the Lonely Island returned to “Saturday Night Live”, the show that made them famous, for the first time in six years. They had made a name for themselves by making pre-taped sketches combining catchy melodies, silly conceits and celebrity cameos. The trio heralded a new age of internet comedy; their work, which coincided with the launch of YouTube in 2005, went viral. (Their five most-popular videos have more than 1bn views combined.) In this podcast, the group reflects on the successful skits, the duds and the serious business of making people laugh.
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What to watch: “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” on Netflix. True-crime shows often lure armchair detectives. That is certainly true of a new drama about the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents in 1989 and were sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1996. The show has accumulated some 45m views since it was released in September; a petition to free the pair has amassed 400,000 signatures. The Menendez family say Ryan Murphy, the show’s co-creator, “never spoke to us” as part of his research. Netflix released a documentary about the case this week, which foregrounds the brothers’ perspective. It offers yet more evidence for amateur sleuths to scrutinise.
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