America has been experiencing a lot of firsts recently. Sometimes it’s hard to understand these firsts, and that’s totally understandable. Film is often used to make sense of our world. Below are some movies that can help make complex political ideas feel a little more digestible. These 4 films are great examples of political satire and drama. Don’t Look Up is on this list because I wanted to make sure I didn’t totally waste 2 and a half hours.

Dave:

Dave is a 1993 political satire and romance film centered around the namesake of the film, Dave Kovic, a presidential impersonator with an uncanny resemblance to the president Bill Mitchell. Dave is hired by the White House chief of staff Bob Alexander to simply walk from backstage at a venue to the car parked outside while the real president avoids the eyes of the press and sneaks off to meet one of his many extramarital lovers. During his late night rendezvous, the president suffers a catastrophic stroke that leaves him in a deep coma, likely to never wake up. Now Dave finds himself in the middle of a political nightmare. With the vice president in Africa, Alexander uses Dave as a puppet to get his political agenda passed. This agenda mostly involves cutting spending on homeless shelters in the name of balancing the budget. Dave quickly realizes the power he holds with the bully pulpit, and uses it to televise a chief of staff meeting where he successfully cuts 650 million dollars of the federal budget. 

This film plays with the fantasy everyones has when watching news: It seems like there’s simple solutions to problems that Congress and the president don’t see. Dave uses his power over the media to force Washington bureaucrats to either admit they don’t want to help Americans on live TV or buckle to Dave’s man-of-the-people approach to lawmaking. Behind the scenes of these political games, Dave grows closer to the wife of Bill Mitchell. Even after finding out the true identity of Dave, they move forward together to try to make a better America. Bob Alexander attempts to tear down the president he created by implicating him in a scandal that could get him impeached. The only problem is that it’s entirely true, except that the real criminal was Bill Mitchell. To set the record straight, Dave goes on live television, implicating Alexander in the scandal as well, before collapsing on the ground from a fabricated stroke. He switches roles with the real president, who dies in his coma not long later. Dave slips away in the chaos and goes back home. He goes on to run for city council, with dreams of once again becoming president. Dave shows what would happen if a common man with ideals became president. The film’s end inspires the average person to pay attention to their community and helps them realize the power they have to make the world a better place. 

The Ides of March:
The Ides of March is a 2011 political drama film starring Ryan Gosling as Stephen Meyers, a junior campaign manager for Governor Mike Morris. It’s late into primary season, Morris and his primary opponent (Ted Pullman) are both seaking the endorsement of Franklin Thompson, a 3rd candidate trailing behind the others but with enough delegates to swing the race in favor of whoever he endorses. Stephen, a young idealist who truly believes in the work he does, finds himself in the middle of this. He recommends the Governor to not seek the endorsement of Thompson, fearing it would jeopardize the integrity of the campaign. Morris’s campaign manager disagrees, saying an endorsement from Thompson would end the primaries now. Stephen and Morris seem like the good guys here, rejecting the opinion of an older, more traditional campaign manager who isn’t afraid of some back door dealing to get his guy in the oval office. 

As the film progresses, Stephen becomes more and more jaded with the world of politics. After getting fired from the campaign for meeting with Pullman’s campaign manager, Stephen tries to sabotage the Morris campaign, but fails after the Pullman campaign denies him. He then goes directly to Morris and shares the dirt he has: The Governor slept with an intern and got her pregnant, then paid for her abortion with campaign funds. This intern also happened to be the daughter of the chairman of the Democratic National Convention, who died, possibly of suicide, not long after. It’s important to note Stephen’s choices here; not only did he sleep with the same intern, but he also lies about having a suicide note, which backs up his claims. Stephen tells Morris his demands: Fire the campaign manager and replace them with himself, then accept Thompson’s endorsement. This directly contradicts Stephen’s more idealistic view earlier in the film. This entire scene is done with Stephen and Morris’s faces covered in shadow down the middle, this represents both of their shifts into morally questionable decisions. Morris accepts, stabbing his campaign manager in the back and hiring Stephen to replace him. The film closes with Morris accepting Thompson’s endorsement while giving a speech about integrity. The camera cuts to Stephen sitting by himself, about to be interviewed as the new senior campaign manager. As he’s introduced the shadow across the left side of his face grows darker and darker.

Wag the Dog

If you’re a fan of dry deliveries, dark comedy, and American politics, Wag the Dog is what you should be watching. The president gets uncomfortably close to an underage girl two weeks before the election, so what are you gonna do? Deny deny deny? According to this rag tag group of PR guys, songwriters, and a film director, it’s to fabricate war between the United States and Albania. When I say fabricate, I don’t mean create a fake justification to go to war, I mean pretend there’s American troops actively going to war in Albania. This movie is so effortlessly hilarious, every single line delivery is said with such real concern while being totally absurd. The lengths they go to are totally insane; they go as far as making up a folk song from the 1930s and pretending like it was there the entire time. The operation hits the fan when the CIA starts to get involved, they figure it out and realize there’s no war. The CIA decides to fake their own ending to the war, but the election isn’t over yet, and our favorite crackpot needs to get that war going again. The only logical solution, of course, is to take a guy out of the prison system and pretend you just saved an American war hero from behind enemy lines. This is seriously one of my new all time favorite films of all time. I don’t want to spoil much more of this since I believe everyone should watch this movie and just let it happen to them, embrace the absurdity.

Don’t Look Up:

Leonardo DiCaprio has been a long time environmentalist, he was declared a “UN Messenger of Peace” and even delivered the opening speech for the UN Climate Summit back in 2014. In 2021, DiCaprio released the film Don’t Look Up, a movie with the subtlety of a newborn on an airplane. If you’re a fan of bottom of the barrel SNL skits from 2018, then they made a movie just for you. The basic premise of the film is that there’s an asteroid hurtling towards earth and nobody’s listening to them; it’s a clear satirization of the real world struggles facing climate scientists. It begins to fall on its face when, an hour in, the satire begins to become about Donald Trump. It’s so painfully obvious and already played out. There’s good ways to satirize serious issues in America, and this is far from one of them. 

You especially begin to lose your feelings for these characters once you realize they all fundamentally suck. Of course there’s the characters you’re supposed to hate, like the president and her son/White House chief of staff, who’s played by Jonah Hill. It’s good to have characters to hate, but it’s very obvious that all of these characters were just written to be annoying and stupid. What makes it near unwatchable, though, is that our main characters are also insufferable. DiCaprio’s character cheats on his wife with a news reporter that won’t even take him seriously. Out of everything in this film, that seems to be the most unrealistic part: That Leonardo DiCaprio would sleep with a woman over the age of 25. Luckily for us though, all their missions to get rid of the asteroid fail, and it crashes into earth destroying life as we know it. Thankfully, they allowed Jonah Hill to suck all the tension out of what should be an impactful scene minutes before the earth is destroyed. This film is almost a parody of itself in a way when you consider DiCaprio’s real life private jet. By the way, all the worst characters escape Earth on a big private spaceship.

Irresistible:

Jon Stewart is one of the greatest living comedians. Beyond the jokes, he’s been very politically active since even before his professional career. This genuine passion and skepticism of both Republicans and Democrats has elevated him to a position where he’s not only a legendary comedian, but also a source of political insight. In 2020, Stewart directed and wrote Irresistible, a film which delivers Stewart’s trademark comedy and political satire. The film stars Steve Carrell playing Gary Zimmer, a democratic strategist in DC looking for a way to rebuild the Democratic Party after the 2016 election. In 2016, the state of Wisconsin voted Republican for the first time since Ronald Reagan swept the nation in 1984. Zimmer takes a trip to the small town of Deerlaken, Wisconsin to meet with a former Marine, Colonel Jack Hasting, after seeing a video of the man defending immigrants in front of the small town’s council. Once Zimmer arrives in Deerlaken, he’s quickly noticed as an outsider. He’s given the nickname of “DC Gary” and is welcomed into the town. Gary sees Jack as potentially the new face of the Democratic Party. He wants to prove to not only Wisconsin, but the rest of America, that Democrats care about, or at least he wants them to think Democrats care about, small towns. 

Jack begins his candidacy for mayor as a Democrat with Gary as his campaign manager. It’s not long before the Republican National Committee sends reinforcements to make sure the town doesn’t vote blue. As Gary gets more and more donations from the elite of New York City, he brings on more of his own team. As the teams of both the Democrats and Republicans grow, they begin to grow more and more out of touch with the town themselves. They even accidentally send pro-contraceptive pamphlets to a group of nuns by accident. At the end of election day, the votes are tallied, and it’s a tie. 1 to 1. It turns out the town orchestrated the entire thing. The town needed the funding to keep their high school open. The film shows the foolishness of election industry that’s been built up in America. Over 14 billion dollars was poured into the 2020 election; that money could have been spent on feeding people, or getting people out of debt.