Palin, Bachmann, and All about Eve

Baxter, Davis in All about Eve

Film Friday

I don’t normally write about the early jockeying to be a presidential nominee—like many Americans I think the process goes on for far too long—but Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post has been writing columns comparing Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in a way that reminds me of the Betty Davis film All about Eve.  The parallels are so delicious that I have to share them with you.

Palin and Bachmann are the two Republican flamethrowers who have become Tea Party darlings for being sexy as they blast Democrats. All about Eve is the 1950 classic where Margo, an aging actress, hires the seemingly innocent Eve as her secretary, only to discover that Eve is willing to do anything to take her place.

Palin, as I see it, is Eve.  Her meteoric rise began when a group of influential neoconservatives got off a cruise ship in Alaska, had dinner with the former-beauty-queen-now-governor, and were wowed.  At the same time the cranky John McCain, having locked up the Republican nomination, appeared to be going nowhere fast.  As some pundit noted, if had chosen Joseph Lieberman to be his running mate (as he initially wanted), we would have heard crickets chirping at the Republican Convention.  Word got to him about Palin and he did a cursory background check and then selected her.

Palin interjected instant energy into the race. McCain seemed not only a daring maverick for having chosen her but also activated the archetype of the old man capable of winning a young woman.  Suddenly he seemed potent again and his poll numbers climbed.

The rub came when he discovered he couldn’t control his running mate.  He assumed that this pretty young thing could be shaped into doing his bidding (shades of Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”), but his team discovered that she was uncoachable and had a mind of her own.  On the night of his defeat, he barely was able to prevent her from upstaging him by giving a speech of her own.

Jump ahead to the present, where we are experiencing the situation shown at the beginning of All about Eve.

A banquet is underway and Eve is receiving an award for best actress. (The film is told through an extended flashback explaining how she got to this point.)  Margo, like McCain, has a place at the table, she as revered actress, he as elder statesman of the Senate. All the attention, however, is on Eve.

How these people crave attention, both in the film and in life.  As Margo describes it at one point, “If nothing else, there’s applause…like waves of love pouring over the footlights.”  Palin, with her “hometown girl from Wasilla” folksiness, her cheery bravado, and her perpetual sense of grievance against elites and the media, does not seem to be able to get enough of the love.  One can say about her what a character says about Eve: “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent!”

Where does Bachmann fit in?  Well, at the end of the move following the awards banquet, Eve goes back to her room and finds a young ingénue in her room.  She is prepared to have her arrested but is disarmed by her flattery.

Maybe she’ll keep her around, Eve thinks.  It’s nice to bask in her adulation.  Surely there’s no harm.

Will Bachmann displace Palin as the new darling of Tea Party Republicans, as Capehart is predicting? To quote the most famous line from the film, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

 

Bonus film allusion from the pre-presidential race:

Indiana Republican governor Mitch Daniels has elected not to run, but when he was in the final stages of deciding, New York Times columnist Gail Collins made the following parallel.  It demonstrates the descriptive power of an apt allusion:

Some party leaders are looking hopefully at Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, who’s promised to make up his mind this month. If he runs, one thing you are not going to get from Mitch Daniels is the politics of joy. Have you ever seen “Game of Thrones” on HBO? It’s about a mythical kingdom that sends some of its young men to the remote tundra to live in perpetual celibacy and guard a 700-foot-tall wall of ice. Their reaction is very similar to the way Mitch Daniels looks when he talks about running for president.

And another:

This is from The New Yorker, May 23, 2011:

[In a speech explaining his role in Massachusetts’ health care plan, Mitt] Romney, who titled his recent campaign autobiography No Apology, did not apologize.  He defended what he did for Massachusetts far more convincingly than he attacked what Obama has done for the nation.  Since the two approaches are so similar, he necessarily had to put himself in the ridiculous position of pretending that a policy which in one state is a triumph for decency and “personal responsibility” becomes a monstrous collectivist tyranny as soon as you bump it up to all fifty.  For Romney, inconstancy has been as big a problem as apostasy.  His attempt in Michigan to solve both problems at once was the rhetorical equivalent of Steve Martin’s performance in The Man with Two Brains.  Maybe he’s betting that two are better than none.

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