The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism

by Shawn J. Parry-Giles

Overview

Contrasting strong women and multiculturalism with portrayals of a heroic white male leading the nation into battle, The Prime-Time Presidency explores the NBC drama The West Wing, paying particular attention to its role in promoting cultural meaning about the presidency and U.S. nationalism. Based in a careful, detailed analysis of the "first term" of The West Wing's President Josiah Bartlet, this criticism highlights the ways the text negotiates powerful tensions and complex ambiguities at the base of U.S. national identity--particularly the role of gender, race, and militarism in the construction of U.S. nationalism. Unlike scattered and disparate collections of essays, Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn J. Parry-Giles offer a sustained, ideologically driven criticism of The West Wing. The Prime-time Presidency presents a detailed critique of the program rooted in presidential history, an appreciation of television's power as a source of political meaning, and television's contribution to the articulation of U.S. national identity.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252092091
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	10/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	479 KB

About the Author

Trevor Parry-Giles is an associate professor of communication and an affiliated scholar with the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, College Park. Shawn J. Parry-Giles is an associate professor of communication, affiliate associate professor of women's studies, and director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their past collaborations include Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics.

 

Read an Excerpt

The Prime-Time Presidency

The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism

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By TREVOR PARRY-GILES SHAWN J. PARRY-GILES

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn J. Parry-Giles
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-03065-6

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Introduction

The Presidency, Prime-Time Popular Culture, and U.S. Nationalism

Let me tell you something. We can be the world's policeman. We can be the world's bank, the world's factory, the world's farm. What does it mean if we're not also.... We've made it into the New World, Josh. You know what I get to do now? I get to proclaim the National Day of Thanksgiving. This is a great job. -President Josiah Bartlet, "Shibboleth"

ON DECEMBER 13, 2000, millions of Americans turned to their television sets at 9:00 p.m. EST to view a program about presidential politics. NBC promised viewers that Wednesday evening a gripping and insightful exploration of an assassination attempt on senior White House staff members. Not only were eager viewers to learn about the psychological toll of presidential assassinations but they were also to experience, as they did every week, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what life is like in the West Wing.

Those millions of viewers that cold winter night may have been disappointed when their weekly encounter with presidential politics on The West Wing (TWW) was replaced by the "real" politics of Campaign 2000. Instead of the soothing, surrogate presidency of Josiah Bartlet, viewers saw instead the compelling oratory of Vice-President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush as they responded to the Supreme Court's decree halting the Florida recount. The strange coincidence of December 13, 2000, when the quest for the presidency preempted the dramatic exercise of presidential politics on TWW, points to the powerful collusion of reality and fiction in contemporary U.S. political culture.

Americans are increasingly finding fictionalized representations of presidents and the presidency in literature, film, and on television. In the 1990s alone, thirty-one films featured presidents or members of their family prominently, from box office successes like Dave and Air Force One to less popular but more artistically adept films like Jefferson in Paris. These fictionalized presidents, as well as those found in many novels and on television, regularly engage serious issues and define presidential leadership in powerful and meaningful ways, reflecting the cultural preoccupation with this institution and its place in our national culture. Sometimes the depictions are humorous, other times quite serious. But whatever their tone and purpose, such fictionalized depictions of the U.S. presidency provide a commentary on the nature of presidential leadership.

A fictional depiction of the presidency offers what we have previously called a "presidentiality," or a discourse that demarcates the cultural and ideological meaning of the presidency for the general public. Some presidentialities are fictional, some are not, and the presidency's meaning emerges from the many different voices and divergent texts that use as a referent the office of president of the United States and the individuals who hold that office. A given presidentiality is thus responsive to context and collective memory, and it defines, in part, the national community by offering a vision of this vital office of the U.S. political system. Given its constitutive character, each presidentiality invites the continued scrutiny of the ideologies and boundaries that circumscribe the presidency and presidents in U.S. political discourse.

Created by Article 2 of the Constitution, the U.S. presidency has developed over two centuries and continues to evolve. Presidents are the men who have occupied this office and the women and men who will eventually assume the role. In addition, the presidency is, arguably, the most important and symbolically meaningful institution of the U.S. system of government. No other branch of the federal government-not Congress, not the federal courts-is the focal point of public discussion, cultural angst, or political hope in the same way.

Simply put, individuals who occupy the presidency embody the national polity. "The president became the most visible landmark of the political landscape, virtually standing for the federal government in the minds of many Americans," notes political scholar Fred Greenstein. These leaders thus represent the United States internationally and become the expression and receptacle of communal ideology. On a symbolic level the president also functions as a "signifier," Anne Norton concludes, and in this role "the President calls up not only the American nation, the government, the executive branch, and the triumphant party (already a rich-and variable-assemblage of images) but the mythic and historical associations that attach to the office and to its past and present occupants."

But neither its institutionality nor its history fully defines what the presidency means. A complete understanding of the nature of presidential leadership and the relationship between presidents and their publics demands attention to discourses about the executive branch that circulate outside political campaigns, the news, and the academy.

Many presidential commentators who assess the nature of the institution and individual presidents ignore the symbolic importance of the presidency as a cultural force in U.S. political life. Their focus, rather, is on leadership, greatness, and strength as barometers of institutional/political power rather than on the depictions of the presidency in cultural life or the impact of such depictions on questions of national identity, governmental performance, or presidential behavior. Consider, for instance, political scientist Stephen Skowronek who masterfully rereads presidential history and discerns "the politics that presidents make." His telling of this history is, as might be expected, a search for the "institutional logic of political disruption" as he challenges sacrosanct notions of structural order to reinscribe a vision of the nation's chief executives.

Taking nothing away from Skowronek's important work and the work of so many others, we suggest that to completely appreciate the ideological meaning of the presidency requires engagement with the vast collection of discourses that also figure in the cultural meaning of the office and the people who occupy it. In other words, and borrowing from Bruce Miroff's definition, we see the U.S. presidency as a "spectacle" in which "particular details stand for broader and deeper meanings." Understanding that spectacle completely means critiquing the various texts that contribute to its construction, whether they emanate from the White House itself, from the CNN Center in Atlanta, or from the Warner Brothers' back lot in Hollywood.

Mimetic Presidentialities in Popular Culture

Foretelling the increased attention to the aesthetic dimensions of rhetoric, Thomas Farrell argued in 1986 that "rhetoric is the only art responsible for the imitation and expression of public thought." As a powerful and accessible rhetorical form, popular culture is intensely influential in its imitation of public life-it functions, in Farrell's words, as a "rhetorical resemblance." Increasingly, rhetorical forms that are technologically sophisticated and highly mimetic in their portrayal of public thought dominate postmodern culture. Popular culture engulfs contemporary life and has come to possess a central role in the definition and expression of political culture as well.

The ancient concept of mimesis begins to explain the meaning of fictionalized presidencies emanating from popular culture for contemporary political discourse. Mimesis refers to the ability of a discourse to imitate, or copy, actual experience. The mimetic experience is a meaningful one, generating "a world of appearances, of semblance, and the aesthetic." Although it might be tempting to dismiss mimetic renditions as mere replicated fakery because they belong "to a nonempirical order of knowledge," such dismissal would be a mistake. The mimetic process creates a material reality and ultimately "designates not a passive process of reproduction but the process of creation, representation, or enactment."

Mimetic representations of the presidency frequently offer audiences new realities of this political institution or new renditions of the biographies of the men who have served as America's chief executive. Such representations work precisely because of their ability to approximate a reality of the presidency that is persuasive and credible-they are, in other words, mimetically efficacious.

Fictional presidencies vary greatly in their mimetic capacity, and that variance explains the relative power of some such representations to influence larger meanings of the presidency and the relative weakness of others. For instance, Jack Nicholson's president in Mars Attacks! is clearly a caricature, and the part is written largely for comic impact. As such, this portrayal would be mimetically distant from the reality of the presidency for most viewers. Harrison Ford's president in Air Force One displays more of the behaviors and nuances of "real" presidents but is still mimetically distant in his role as action hero when he saves an airplane full of people from Russian terrorists. Other fictional presidents, such as Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact or Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd in The American President, behave in more conventionally "presidential" ways and may be said to be closer imitations of the reality that most viewers understand.

These portrayals are really several steps removed from the reality of the presidency. They are representations of representations in that for most citizens the presidency is only and always a representation, an image of a reality that can never be known. In this way, when film and television depict a fictional presidentiality they are adding yet another representational text to the range of representations of the U.S. presidency and function as another example of the hyperreality of American politics. Nonetheless, popular culture, as it represents political activity and the presidency in American politics, must strive for a high degree of perceived mimetic verisimilitude to secure audience acceptance. As Lee Sigelman notes, the "mimetic aspect is the key to the popularity and the political significance of the Washington novel." The same is true of portrayals of presidential politics in film or on television. There must be a certain plausibility to a fictional depiction of the presidency, a believability in the characterization of the president and his staff, for the text to function as a compelling and ideologically relevant reflection.

Our purpose is to examine the presidentiality emergent from the NBC drama TWW. Recognizing the power of television in the formation of cultural beliefs about the presidency, we take TWW seriously as a meaningful discourse about presidential leadership and identity. Increasingly, as Murray Edelman notes, "Politics now has to be seen as multivocal and manipulable." Politics comes from a variety of sources; political meaning is derived from a myriad of texts and discourse. We agree with Edelman when he concludes that the "meaning of every action, claim, promise, and threat is contingent on its level of abstraction, the plans of the actor or speaker, and the audience's aspirations, anxieties, and fears, themselves at least partly learned from works of art."

Certainly, given its reach and popularity, the political messages broadcast in television programs like TWW have more impact than other forms of artistic politics-paintings, museum exhibits, and literature, for instance. As Allen McBride and Robert K. Toburon remind us, "The images that are saved and broadcast on magnetic tape [on television] provide clues about the cultural bias of our society in social, political, and economic terms." From the talk shows on twenty-four-hour news networks to the Sunday morning news programs, from C-SPAN to prime-time serial drama, Americans learn about politics and understand their political culture via television. Indeed, as political scientist Diana C. Mutz remarks, when trying to understand political communication fully, "the traditional distinctions between news and entertainment content are no longer very helpful."

Although there is forever a tendency to diminish and degrade the role of television in social and political life its increasing presence as a popular and artistic discourse demands continual criticism without jaded cynicism. Unlike other artistic discourse, television is decidedly a medium that must by definition express dominant cultural perspectives to be successful. This perspective reflects the formulation of television as a cultural forum articulated by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch in 1987, when they concluded that the focus of television criticism might profitably be "the cultural role of entertainment" that works parallel with "a close analysis of television program content in all its various textual levels and forms." Seeing television in this way validates its central importance as a source of symbolic action and meaning for a community, as a serious medium of cultural understanding.

Taking television as a cultural forum also motivates analysis of the nature and valence of the meanings emergent from texts in that forum. Television's programming is complex, with a range of options for viewers that Newcomb and Hirsch could hardly have envisioned. Channel proliferation alone means that the forum is bigger and broader, with an array of programming that is almost overwhelming. Newcomb and Hirsch could speculate that "it would be startling to think that mainstream texts in mass society would overtly challenge dominant ideas," but such a possibility is more likely today, given the alternative channels, oppositional programming, and polyglot of voices that frequent the airwaves.

At the same time, much television programming still puts forth a largely dominant message, a "commonality of viewpoints and values" that Larry Gross identifies as "mainstreaming" in conventional television fare. Mainstream discourse embodies a dominant ideological perspective even as it contends with oppositional perspectives and orientations. With an ever-expanding range of channels and technologies, television has the potential, notes John Street, to be the "site of the liveliest and most radical of political exchanges, certainly when compared to the political discussions which are heard in many representative assemblies or which litter daily newspapers." From this negotiation emerges the cultural force of television's discourse, where "contemporary images and narratives appear to be crystalising around distinctive clusters of meaning."

The challenge for a television critic is to navigate the uncertain terrain between television's tendency to mainstream its message to achieve popular success and the occasional articulation of opposition and divergence in the televisual text. The television critic thus explores what Sarah Projansky calls the "media's intricacy" to offer an argument about meaning. Indeed, a television critic enters the stream of conversation that flows through and around the discourse, offering another perspective, a new argument, an alternative reading that embraces the "socially situated" communal readings of television that occur all the time.

From a critical standpoint, then, entertainment television is an art form with considerable reach that, in the case of TWW, offers a popular, critically acclaimed, and compelling vision of the U.S. presidency. This vision is complicated, offering viewers messages about the presidency that are rich in detail, often contradictiory, and filled with ideological meaning for U.S. political culture.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Prime-Time Presidency by TREVOR PARRY-GILES SHAWN J. PARRY-GILES Copyright © 2006 by Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn J. Parry-Giles. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Presidency, Prime-Time Popular Culture, and

U.S. Nationalism

1. The West Wing as a Political Romance

2. Gendered Nationalism and The West Wing

3. Racialized Nationalism and The West Wing

4. Militarized Nationalism and The West Wing

5. The West Wing's Prime-Time Nationalism

Appendix: Episode Directory

Bibliography

Notes

Editorial Reviews

"The Prime-Time Presidency is a fine example of research, argument, and insight that elucidates the intersections of political culture, commercial media, and national mythologies in The West Wing. It should be read by fans of the program, by scholars concerned with the power of the presidency in U.S. culture, and by critics interested in the ways that popular culture draws upon and reinvigorates ideologies that define Americans as citizens in and consumers of a nationalist project."--Bonnie J. Dow, author of Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement since 1970

 

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