ABSTRACT
The chapter certainly focuses on two recently released movies that featured presidents, Contact and Air Force One. It shows how Air Force One's hard president gave viewers a way to 'experience presidential democracy's affective foreclosures as our own innocent victimization'. In the movie, the president's capitulation to the terrorist demands comes in the moment they threaten president's daughter. The chapter argues that the United States had updated and modernized that Renaissance philosophy, splitting the US president into two different bodies, one soft the other hard. It describes the two White House movies as interchangeable: the same movie and indeed, White House Down could as easily have been called Olympus Has Fallen. Especially in the moment when, as President Sawyer puts it, "Good ol' Abe took a second bullet" to protect Sawyer's life, it is clear that the White House, like Olympus, is a home for a special kind of god: the spirit of the US presidency.
