The Debt Ceiling Goes to the Movies

Streep in "Sophie's Choice"

Film Friday

Columnists have been turning to popular movies to talk about the drama of the debt ceiling debate that is currently paralyzing Congress and threatening the credit rating of the United States, not to mention anyone who depends on getting paid by the federal government. The examples prove once again the power of film narrative to articulate the crises that we are undergoing.

I start with the New York Times’ Charles Blow, who sees the economic catastrophe that we will experience if the debt ceiling isn’t raised as “the great evil” that is hurling towards the earth in The Fifth Element. I haven’t seen the film but apparently such an event occurs every few millennia.  Fortunately, there are gentle aliens out there who monitor the situation and always save the earth. This time, however, their spaceship gets shot down by simple-minded warriors, the Mangalores. Though not bad themselves, the Mangalores work for, and are manipulated by, by an evil industrialist who sees money to be made in destruction.

Blow draws two parallels between the current fights and the film:

First, there is no reason that we should be in this pickle. The debt ceiling has been raised numerous times with a simple vote. But Grover Norquist’s Tea Party pledglings shot that down. And now they can’t agree to a “grand bargain” because of their Faustian pact with big money. We shouldn’t have to wait till the last minute to see the light and prevent cataclysm.

Second, and more broadly, is the degree to which some people, like the Mangalores, allow themselves to be used by those who don’t have their best interest at heart. A report released Friday by the Pew Research Center found that the Republican Party has made tremendous gains in party affiliation among whites since President Obama took office. This would be understandable if the largest gains were among the wealthy, but they weren’t. They were among the poor, the young and less educated — many of the same people who would be adversely affected by G.O.P. policies. (Blacks held relatively steady, and Hispanics fell.)

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, meanwhile, invokes two films.  First, she imagines that President Obama must be longing for the time machine in Back to the Future where the character can return to a less contentious and more civil time. (She doesn’t mention, however, that Obama would have had no chance of being elected president in that society.)

She also talks about the Harrison Ford-Daniel Craig movie Cowboys and Aliens, through which lens she sees the Obama-John Boehner negotiations that broke down last Friday. She says that the Right views Obama as an alien, an emotionless Dr. Spock if not worse, whereas they themselves have been acting like cowboys.  Dowd writes,

Republicans, growing more optimistic in the last 90 days that they can make Obama a one-term president, want to use the budget battle to mark him not only as alien, but too weak to run cowboy nation.

Finally, there have been two dueling movies. Boehner, trying to strong arm Tea Party Republicans into voting for (at that point) a fairly vague budget plan, showed them a clip from the heist movie The Town.  In it Ben Affleck tells a confederate,

“I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.”

We’ll see if the film works.  As I write this post Thursday night, is hasn’t yet: a vote on Boehner’s bill has been postponed yet again because he can’t round up the necessary votes.

The White House meanwhile has invoked the film Sophie’s Choice (based on the William Styron novel) to describe the situation the president will face if the debt ceiling is not raised.  If the government’s borrowing authority is limited, which bills will it pay and which not?  Here’s a Washington Post account of how White House spokesman Jay Carney “waxed poetic” about the film:

“It’s a Sophie’s Choice, Carney said, referring to the 1982 movie starring Meryl Streep as a mother who must choose which of her two children is to be gassed and which is to live at a Nazi death camp during World War II.

What Carney meant was that if the United States is unable to borrow more money after Aug. 2 and defaults on its credit obligations, Obama will have to choose which of the country’s bills go unpaid.

“Who do you save? Who do you pay?” Carney asked at his daily press briefing. “That’s an impossible situation this country has never faced and should never face if Congress does what it was elected to do.”

I’m concerned that a number of the members of Congress have become so accustomed to action adventure blockbusters that they either think that (a) there’s going to be some miraculous Hollywood ending or (2) the chaos that will ensue if the ceiling is not raised will somehow call out American heroism and allow them to come in, pick up the pieces, and impose their own version of America.

This, incidentally, is how I imagine that Part II of the new Atlas Shrugged film, due to be released next year, will end. Led by John Galt, all the Nietzschean brains leave society, which falls apart.  Then they return to create a utopia.

Just how much do you trust Ayn Rand with the future of the country? And does the Right really believe that Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann will be our John Galt?

Addendum

Of course, one movie genre that the situation is the hostage movie since the Rightwing is making demands of America by holding a metaphorical gun to its head.  If the prototypical example of the genre is Die Hard, then we have reason to be worried even with a happy ending.  Bruce Willis may save hostages but the skyscraper is all but destroyed in the process.

In the movie, incidentally, the hostage-takers never intend to negotiate–the negotiations are just a cover for the theft of the money in the building’s vault. Given how many concessions the Democrats have made, always without effect, that seems to be the case here as well. How does one negotiate with people who have a different agenda?

As blogger Jonathan Chait of the New Republic puts it, it is as though the Tea Party Republicans are saying, “To get your child back, you must give us $100,000 and your other child.”

Addendum 2

And one more film/novel reference, this one by a John McCain furious at Tea Party Congress members who managed to sabotage a Boehner proposal that had a chance of being accepted by the Senate. As he saw it, they were living in a Tolkienesque fantasy world:

“The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue and the public will turn en masse against Barack Obama…. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea party hobbits could return to Middle-earth having defeated Mordor.”

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