Vintage Sand Episode 25: Election Day Special: Our Favorite American Political Films

Vintage Sand

With the most important election of our lifetimes upon us, Team Vintage Sand celebrates its Silver episode by exploring our favorite political films Made in the USA. “Political film” is a very difficult term to define, and we try to examine the idea through a number of different lenses. After all, one might argue that in a sense, all films are political. There are films that deal with specific historical figures, from Lincoln to Huey Long to W. There are films that focus on the political process, from "Mr. Smith" to "Advise and Consent" to "The Candidate". You have more conventional comedies and dramas that use politics as a background, from "State of the Union" and "Born Yesterday" to "Dave", "The American President" and Eastwood’s "Absolute Power". Occasionally, the “political film” takes the form of satire, in works ranging from "Duck Soup" to "Dr. Strangelove" to "Idiocracy". Politics also frequently appears under the umbrella of genre, particularly horror and science fiction, as exemplified by films like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Get Out". And finally, there’s what we refer to as the Gatsby films, which don’t focus explicitly on politics but more on who we are as Americans and the nature of the American character. Don’t forget–the working title for "Citizen Kane" was, simply, "American". Any way you look at it, politics has made a great topic for American filmmakers (we exclude foreign filmmakers simply in the interest of brevity; after all, we could, and probably should, do an entire episode of the sociopolitical allegories of Bong Jun-Ho. We hope it makes great listening for you as well, as we brace ourselves for the Election of 2020 and its aftermath. And whatever happens, we’ll all probably end up saying the same thing that the surprise electoral victor Bill Mc Kay (Robert Redford) says at the end of "The Candidate": What do we do now?