ABSTRACT
This chapter represents a development of my research into the presidency in film and television, focusing primarily on the most recent examples of the institution’s representation in popular culture. In my book, The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation (Frame 2014), I came to the conclusion that mainstream film and television have, over the course of the past twenty-five years, become two of the presidency’s support mechanisms: in facing the complexity and intractability of many post-Cold War conflicts, and the hostile partisanship of domestic American politics, the presidency has revealed itself to be rather impotent. To varying degrees, however, film and television continue to shore up the impression that the president is an all-powerful superhero, able to bend the world to his will. Since President Obama was elected in November 2008, popular cultural
representations of the presidency have shifted once again, a development touched upon only briefly in the conclusion of my earlier book. In the fullness of time, it is clear that film and television are showing the office to be under even more strain, but in oddly contrasting ways. If anything, popular culture is finding it substantially more difficult to provide the necessary buttress to what is beginning to be the rather weatherworn construct of the heroic presidency. My intention here is not to determine whether the presidency is actually in decline in terms of its influence, but to demonstrate how popular cultural representations of the presidency are beginning to question whether there is any power in the office beyond its symbolic significance. In this chapter, I explore Shonda Rhimes’ hit ABC drama, Scandal (2012-present) and Netflix’s House of Cards (2012-present) as symptomatic of the impression that the presidency is in decline in its power and influence. Although these texts contrast wildly in terms of style and tone, both shows evince certain anxieties and uncertainties about the strength of the presidency in the 2010s. While my concern here is primarily with these televisual representations, I precede this analysis with a brief consideration of the ‘president-in-peril’ narrative in recent Hollywood cinema, as this is a vital additional construct to understand the decline of the presidency in popular television. As with earlier popular cultural examples, many of these anxieties coalesce around particular questions and definitions of masculinity, which are also explored.
