Donald Trump: Just Another "Face in the Crowd"?

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A television producer takes a chance and builds a program around a man with no TV experience. The program is a hit, propelling the star into public consciousness. He strikes a powerful populist chord, and intoxicated by his ratings, imagines himself as a shaper of opinion and a political force. Although initially the establishment believes they can use him, it soon becomes clear he is unmanageable. His egotism is boundless, and his megalomania frightening. In the end, his own intemperate words prove his undoing. Oh, and along the way he dumps the woman who helped him rise, to marry a glamour girl about half his age.

Is this the backstory of a 2016 presidential candidate?

Actually, it's the plot of A Face in the Crowd, a brilliant movie made nearly sixty years ago. Written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan--both giants in their day--the film marked a stunning acting triumph for Andy Griffith, in his first movie role, as the central character, Lonesome Rhodes. Patricia Neal superbly plays the producer and a young Walter Matthau forms a one-man Greek chorus, commenting on the proceedings and foreseeing their ultimate conclusion.

The artists behind A Face in the Crowd created their masterpiece in 1957. Although small black-and-white television sets had appeared in American living rooms only a short time before, their power was obvious to Schulberg and Kazan. With phenomenally prescient perspective, they imagined the potentially poisonous intersections between mass media, celebrity, and political power.



At the time it was released, the film garnered neither critical nor popular success. In the New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther doubted that the Lonesome Rhodes character "demonstrating his eccentric personality--his gusto, his candor, his shrewdness, his moral laxity......his thirst for power" had much credibility. The creators of this "raw, vulgar, roughneck, cornball" are "hypnotized" by their creation, losing their "intellectual reason and...the potentiality of their theme." In the real world, "this type would either have become a harmless habit or the public would have been finished with him!" Little did he know.

Crowther also identifies what he views as an obvious hole in the film: "What he symbolizes in society is barely hinted or discreetly overlooked," he wrote. But is Crowther's focus skewed by his disbelief in 1957 that this character could be real? Should he instead have asked: What does this phenomenon say about our society? Why is this man loved? In 2016 when we know he is far more than symbolic, can we find the answers? Some pundits blame the Trump electorate: xenophobic, racist, sexist, and uneducated. But Trump's supporters may see themselves as helpless victims, whose jobs have been exported to Mexico or China, or whose wages have been driven down by competition from migrants. Perhaps the contempt of the "elites" for Trump voters, combined with Trump's contempt for the "elites" may be part of his secret sauce. Indeed, there is no consensus on why the American people--or at least an apparently significant portion thereof--find him appealing. Did Kazan and Schulberg give us a hint back in 1957?

In the film, they provide not a social reasoning--although they give us a grim view of a society that, as one character points out, has a short memory and is eager to adore again--but suggest the seductive power of media as at least one force that has propelled us into our current state of affairs. In one of the opening scenes we see the undiluted thrill in the radio producer's wide-eyed realization that she's just uncovered a media treasure trove in the raw, brash voice that says what it wants in defiance of authority, bawdy laugh and all. It is monstrous but that means success, and her eyes tell us the repercussions simply do not register in her mind at that moment.

Whatever the public's rationale for its attraction to a Lonesome figure, the role of media then and now--especially with its current transformation into social and reality TV realms--cannot be denied. According the filmmakers' original vision, however, its power holds the potential to facilitate both good and bad--or truth and deception. And if Schulberg and Kazan are to be believed, what seems like a dismal state of democracy in the United States may just be saved by the same mechanisms that helped create it.

"A demagog [sic] with a commanding rating could menace our democracy," Schulberg wrote in the June 1957 issue of TV Guide. "But a moment of televised truth, a single shot of conspirational whispering behind hands, can prick the conscience of a nation more effectively than a dozen righteous editorials."

On a similar note, Kazan told Michel Ciment, for Kazan on Kazan, that part of their original intention was to draw the public's attention to what the faces on the screen actually say: "Television deludes some people, exposes others."
Three months into 2016, and several high-profile, media-salivating missteps later, Trump has not followed the Lonesome Rhodes character arc, yet. Then again, it takes a 42-floor elevator ride down for Lonesome's career to sink. Trump Tower has 58 stories.

Often "political art" is a predictable reaction to the headlines of the moment. But sometimes artists see things in the zeitgeist that the rest of us miss or perceive but dimly. With A Face in the Crowd, Schulberg and Kazan create a stellar example of art presaging the reality of a distant future with uncanny accuracy.

You can see the film on Netflix DVD, Amazon or Warner Archive, Vudu, or from your local library. And you should. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.












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