The Long Take: Obamacore was Cringe
How the era's overconfidence radicalized our tastemakers.
I’m more interested in culture rather than the pure mechanics of politics, but through my experiences in both, I learned that the two have a relationship that’s as inseparable as a car and its engine. Andrew Breitbart once said that “politics is downstream from culture,” which meant that to change politics, one must change the culture.
In August 2024, New York Magazine published a long list of pop culture items that were definitive of the Barack Obama era from 2008-2016. This is what they call Obamacore. (As I write this, I attempt to type in “Obamacore” twice before Google docs completely gave up on autocorrecting it to Obamacare, the legislation promising some sort of single payer healthcare in America). These include, but are not limited to the following:
Girls
Parks and Recreation
The Fight Song
Katy Perry
TuNeYaRds
Hamilton
The Daily Show
The Buzzfeed listicle
The Good Place
Regardless of whether or not its political subtext was intentional (after all, most of these entries would have already identified with the overt liberal orientation of pop culture), it is pretty clear that the Obama period gave these people license to exert their cultural powers and make it their own. Ideas like “cultural appropriation”, “rape culture” and many more crept into the mainstream, as we indulged in the victimhood of its creators.
In response to the overconfidence of this type of identity politics, the backlash against the tide has been remarkable, whether it’s the incomprehensible phenomenon of Gamergate or how it manifests itself in YouTube compilations of colored hair feminists losing their minds. We can either laugh at this trend and move on with our lives or embody a new political identity. Or you can do both. That’s at least how it's analyzed by mainstream institutions like NYMag, which identifies, but not fully understands how it led to Donald Trump then becoming the next President of the United States.
Trump’s election win in 2016 should have caused much more introspection from the broader Left and immediately, the reactions were very split. Mark Lilla and Jonathan Haidt say that their embrace of identitarianism and their abandonment of classical liberalism or class analysis is what resulted in Trump’s win. Jamelle Bouie, who seemed more happier watching and talking about movies than he does as a political pundit, strongly disagrees, saying Trump’s supporters are, at the end of the day, white nationalists.
The bitterness of the Left losing to Trump, meant that Obama’s legacy (which had a mixture of more highs and lows than one could have imagined) was brushed aside like a copywriter being made redundant after three years working at a desk job making ineffective slogans. What that means for the pop culture of 2012-2016 is that something like Hamilton, which was immensely popular at the time among theater kids and liberal normies, looked more questionable in hindsight.
Obviously, the induction of Trump meant that film critics also need to have a say in what they really think. Indiewire held a symposium of how critics and filmmakers should react to the upcoming Trump era. And not to waste your time, the answers are very underwhelming, from one saying that critics would need to check their privilege to another asking that their media literacy needs to be improved. David Ehrlich, ever the banal critic at Indiewire, says that they need to survive, because of their resentment to Trump and resist anything that he does. Instead, I’ll leave you with the best input coming from Vadim Rizov, an editor at Filmmaker Magazine:
It is obviously true that every film is, or can be, a political object, but don’t force it. However, I’d suggest that when you’re forced to write about the week’s big garbage release, that you dive in. Hollywood films are overloaded with useless subtext: all that money, all those resources, contribute all kind of unintended frissons. Do the plot summary as fast as you can, then get to what’s actually interesting. J. Hoberman’s idea that any film can be treated as a “found object” is useful. Avoid or engage with authorial intent at will: this is all an exercise anyway.
The point, I think, is that analytical and critical thought is something we just don’t teach very well in this country. Be rigorous with your thoughts, avoid cant, and, when the moment is right, go deep in some weird direction. The point is not NOT NOT NOT NOT to latch onto the most obvious thing that’s Wrong with a movie – its latent sexism, casual imperialism, all those CGI extras dying by the hundreds, whatever – but to demonstrate some kind of ability to think something through. I know this sounds frustratingly vague, but it’s important to be able to demonstrate that original paths of thought are available. And if you can call out embedded hegemony, that’s fantastic, but be clear and targeted. The worst kind of liberalism is the kind that knows exactly when your ideal reader is going to nod in useless agreement.
The reason why this is an excellent answer is because those tics in thinking remains a challenge in cultural criticism. The reader can interpret the nuances however they like, but the critic has to determine these nuances and persuade them to give it a chance. Whenever I read a long or short review of a film, I get underwhelmed by the fact that there is none of it happening and Rizov’s thesis is proven again and again. The unfortunate thing is that these cardinal sins are exactly provoked by an essay in Filmmaker Magazine.
The symposium was inspired by a screed of an article called “All Movies are Political Movies. We Need to Do Better”, written by Jane Schoenbrun, who would go on to direct We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow. Schoenbrun’s prose in this piece is shrill and her arguments are very simple: all films should be political and that their utility in entertaining the audience is to be weaponized. So essentially:
Doctor Strange is a political film. Trolls is a political film. Sausage Party is a political film1. Hacksaw Ridge is a political film. Finding Dory is a political film. Suicide Squad is a political film. Sully is a political film. Star Trek Beyond is a political film. Deadpool is a political film. Ride Along 2 is a political film. Don’t Breathe is a political film. Zootopia is a political film. Captain America: Civil War is a political film.
I can push back this argument easily with something that I wrote in The Critic:
Anyone who has written about or engaged with pop culture should be tired of hearing that the landscape should be politicised. The refrain that “all art is political” hides a deep dishonesty that misleads its followers. While art can be used for expressing political thought, what the slogan usually expresses is that it ought to be political — and not just political but partisan and progressive.
Reading this argument, it makes it clear that film critics can be weary of films that have certain political tendencies that they disagree with. How many reviews of Dragged Across Concrete have to put up with the monologue about “political correctness being the new McCarthyism”, before they dissect what they think are the motivations of S Craig Zahler. Is he a crypto-MAGA supporter? Who knows. But it’s the responsibility of the critic and filmmaker to be honest with their readers and viewers. And what happened is that viewers would have missed out on a very honest, but brutal, piece of cinema, because the person they trust has told them it’s secretly a propaganda film that either repels or brainwashes you.
Tastemakers are more politically motivated than ever and the agenda they proceed with, make their content harder to read. Radicalised, but often with the touch of a feather. One example I would touch on is Michiko Kakutani, formerly a book critic for The New York Times. She was surprisingly ubiquitous; Her critical pans were widely read, even to the point where she took a stab at fictional characters like Brian Griffin and Holly Golightly. Immediately after Trump’s victory, Kakutani quit her gig that she held since 1983 so she can write a book about his failures. Her most recent book The Great Wave, which is about how much she despises Trump, was slammed by Slate for its incoherent use of pop culture references and her simplifying complex moments of history.
Another example is Brie Larson, an actress who bemoaned that her movies like Captain Marvel are overly reviewed by straight white male critics. This, of course, created a culture war that was unnecessary on Larson’s hands, since creators like the Quartering made content that benefitted from anything she says just so he can purchase a shed to own her2. One can argue that it’s overkill to depict Brie Larson as a villain in their reviews, but it wasn’t as if her outspoken cause wasn’t a cause for all of the useless criticism against her. If the critic is the stereotype of the tasteful hater and the creator represents dreams, then these two merged as someone who despises other people.
Being outspoken is all well and good, and expecting a backlash, regardless if it’s in good faith, is an expected consequence in doing so. Cultural criticism has been divided into political factions, where virtue and vice-signalling is rewarded and gratified, but refuse to grapple with the implications of their published content if it turns out to be misleading. Thus, as Rizov notes in the symposium, it “is currently defined more precisely as the process of aggregating trending topics with zero reference to anything that can’t be found on Google in 30 seconds flat.”
So what does it mean, once the United States votes in their new president? Are we going to see a repeat of Obamacore if Kamala Harris wins or when Trump is able to get into office again, the content creators will double down on wokeness?
At the moment, I will say that for the past four years, some entertainment has softened a bit on the woke stuff. Shows and films like The White Lotus and Tar are really good at capturing the moment, and allowing the viewer to be challenged, by challenging itself when their characters use progressive platitudes to self-fulfil and harm others. Rather than being a screed about the woke, they integrate these politics into something really insightful about our human psyche.
And however you feel about its qualities, songs like “Rich Man North of Richmond” and “Try That in A Small Town” do prove that anti-establishment counter-narratives can be popular. But entertainment remains institutionally left wing and modes of criticism will follow along as well. However, its relationship become increasingly disparate, when it doesn’t really complement the specificities of the writer’s personal ideology.
Trump has been influential on our pop culture way before he became President. Hip hop is a fascinating influence; rappers love to reference him, because he carries a lot of wealth and surrounds himself with beautiful women. Now they’ve turned their backs against him, despite some artists endorsing him for whatever reason it benefits them. Likewise, there’s a sense of shame from spectators that it has to end up like this, that they don’t want to give The Apprentice a chance, in spite of how it had no right to be surprisingly solid in depicting Trump as a complicated human being.
That could be said about the Obama period as well. Progressives who spent much of their hours writing the next think piece on their politics or the last piece of pop culture they consumed feel dread that the products of that era did not prevent Trump or any of his acolytes from winning. It’s why John Oliver’s Drumpf schtick made him look like an idiot. It’s why Parks and Recreation is seen purely as a product of that era, because Leslie Knope’s influence is Hillary Clinton. Presuming that Trump wins again, this needless despair is bound to repeat itself again, except this time, asking why Knives Out: Glass Onion didn’t speak truth to power enough. But if Kamala Harris wins, there won’t be introspection before it’s too late to do so.
The Obama era is filled with disappointment from left-wingers who were ecstatic in voting for him in 2008. The economy is still running on a free market basis, conflict in the Middle East continued, and was not the moderate coalition builder he believes himself to be. This sequence of despair is not circular. It’s a perpetual slope. The late Andrew Breitbart once said that “politics is downstream from culture”, and by that logic, culture is derived from material conditions that influence them, which means that it has a circular relationship. Politics is a cutthroat art that artists and critics probably won’t understand. And you don’t get to achieve what you want, just by calling a Presidential candidate “brat.”
Sausage Party received a review from Autostraddle, an LGBT oriented pop culture site. But its apology for the positive review - because Salma Hayek’s hot dog character evoked Latina stereotypes and the review overlooked it - is more notorious than most reviews that usually get hundreds, if not, thousands of clicks.
“I was giving the people what they wanted” has to be the most honest, yet banal defense ever made by an internet commentator.