And once you flip the script, it may not be possible to flip it back.
It was clear that something significant was going to happen in Tulsa last weekend. If you were pitching the Trump rally as a movie premise, you’d stand a good chance that the studio executive would want to hear what happens next. First rally in months… Coronavirus cases spiking across the country, including in Oklahoma… Campaign officials bragging that a million of the faithful plan to attend… Racial wounds still raw… Rally was originally scheduled for the anniversary of a race riot and massacre, and now it’s moved just one day after… Trump threatening state violence against peaceful protesters, in the aftermath of a police murder that ignited weeks of protests… Trump needs his adulation fix, and his campaign needs a boost… You can see the studio suit sitting up, suddenly more attentive, asking, “Yeah, and what happens next?”
A good movie premise leaves you with the sense that virtually anything can happen, once you’ve bought into the premise. It’s the rare movie that capitalizes on that uncertainty to move not only the plot and characters in unexpected directions, but shift the entire feel, even the genre, of the movie. If you saw Alien for the first time the way I did, as a teenager — not knowing exactly what sort of movie it was going to be — you might have thought, from the first few scenes, that it would be a space exploration movie. Quickly, it turns into a horror movie that followed a haunted house motif. When you start watching Baby Driver, you might think it’s a standard caper movie. Later, you realize that it’s also a musical. Few movies try to make this sort of shift, and even fewer make the transition successfully.
For many people who are not Trump devotees (loyalists, adherents, acolytes, call them what you will), the last few years, and the last few months in particular, have felt like a horror movie. We watched helplessly as the creeping doom advances on things you care about — the rule of law, economic inequality, racial inequality, America’s standing in the world, the environment, the Constitution, you name it — with the determination of Jason murdering teenagers, or Dracula slowly draining his victims, or the xenomorph from the Alien franchise stalking blue collar workers and grunts. Some tried to stand in the path of the monster, but they failed. One by one, the body count increased. Suddenly, the story shifted into high gear. The first half of 2020 has felt like the climax of the movie, after the villain has swept past the cop or the colonial marine or the priest armed with just a crucifix or the scientist or whatever else seemed like the last line of defense.
This period, near the end of Trump’s first term, seemed to follow a parallel path to one of two typical climaxes to a horror movie.
