Spicer World: Five Movies to Help Navigate the Alternate Fact Universe

The words ‘President Trump’ sound like something from an alternate reality, but it really is happening. Honest. With a political career steeped in falsehood – from birtherism to gaslighting – Trump’s presidency looks set to continue in the same key. In his first meeting with the press, the new White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, spouted a series of easily disprovable untruths and was defended by Kellyanne Conway as the possessor of ‘alternate facts’. We’re in for four long years of doublethink and newspeak – the films below could prove useful preparation before we find ourselves being frog-marched into the Soylent Green vats.

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1984 (1984)

The attendance numbers of Trump’s inauguration shouldn’t really be a controversy. As well as photographic evidence, verifiable statistics were provided by the Washington Metro. But who are you going to believe, Sean Spicer or your lying arithmetic?

Winston Smith writes that “freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4,” yet, in the granddaddy of dystopias, George Orwell’s 1984, 2+2=5. Michael Radford’s sombre adaptation – only slightly marred by an appallingly inappropriate Eurhythmics theme song – boasts a tortured performance from John Hurt and a scene-stealing Richard Burton in his final big screen appearance. Spicer could take notes from Burton’s softly-spoken and icily-convincing apparatchik O’Brien, but as far as 2+2 equalling 5 goes, Spicer’s got that down cold. 2+2=1.5 million. Period.

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The Conversation (1974)

You hear what people say but do you hear what people really say? Before Edward Snowden revealed the global reach and intimate grope of the NSA, Francis Ford Coppola gave us the dark heart of the snooper and his comeuppance. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert in a dirty mac who tapes a conversation between a man and a woman with potentially deadly consequences. Caul’s technical wizardry allows him to refine the tapes until he can hear exactly what is being said, but his mistake is only to listen to the words and not to appreciate what is going on between the lines and the dark powers that move around him.

Sandwiched between the first two Godfather films, The Conversation is an audio-based riff on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. Brian de Palma would go on to do something similar with John Travolta in 1981, but Blow Out lacks the exhausted desperation of Coppola’s hushed masterpiece.

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The Parallax View (1974)

Staying in 1974, a bumper year for paranoia and distrust, Alan J Pakula releases The Parallax View. Inspired by the Kennedy assassinations and the alleged cover-up of the Warren Report, Warren Beatty stars as a reporter who uncovers a sinister company – the Parallax Corporation – which specialises in political assassination. One of the most powerful scenes sees Beatty infiltrate the company and undergo a brainwashing session. It’s a startling five-minute sequence in which the audience is subjected to a barrage of propaganda designed to play on core values of FAMILY, COUNTRY, ENEMY and LOVE. Nowadays, they’d just fast forward through Fox News.

The Parallax View was the second part of what would become Pakula’s political paranoia trilogy, which began with Klute in 1971 and would end, more hopefully, with All the President’s Men in 1976. The latter film waved goodbye to Nixon, who – for those of you too young to remember – used to be thought of as the most dishonest president of modern times.

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They Live (1988)

With Nixon gone, Reagan gave America a sunnier version of deregulated capitalism. But John Carpenter’s They Live stripped away the veneer to show what was really going on behind the ‘Morning-in-America’ smiles. Professional Wrestler turned actor ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper plays John Nada, a drifter who happens across a pair of sunglasses. While wearing the shade, John can see the world as it really is: subliminal messages order the masses to CONSUME and OBEY; and the ruling class are revealed to be a bunch of skull-headed aliens.

A subversive and angry B-movie, They Live isn’t exactly subtle, but as John might say, “I’ve come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” However, the film today is a tricky one to pin down. After all, Trump won the election largely because he set himself up as an outsider – the first blue-collar billionaire raged against the skull-headed alien Hillary Clinton and her global elites. If only we had those sunglasses again…

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The Matrix (1999)

So, which pill are we going to take? The blue pill or the red pill? And a million memes popped into existence!

The Matrix came out at the turn of the millennium. Directed by the Wachowskis, their whip-smart science fiction mind-bender is post-modernism at its most hip, Baudrillard gets name-dropped and learning Kung Fu means basically downloading an app into your head. Reality is a mere illusion, a simulacrum controlled by our machine-overlords and filled with narratives to distract us from our roles as mobile phone chargers. Did you hear what I said, or were you looking at the girl in the red dress?

Unfortunately, actual reality in the film is a drab, smelly existence that resembles the latter stages of Das Boot and two grindingly dull sequels depleted the original’s cultural cache. But it is heartening to muse now and then that maybe Donald Trump is just a glitch in the Matrix and someday Morpheus will turn up and offer us a trip down the rabbit hole.

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Follow John Bleasdale on Twitter at @drjonty