By javier @Adobe Stock
To Do: Suspend Belief, Swallow Hard, Pull Lever
What makes a good movie? Well, for one, explains Gerald Baker in the WSJ, a healthy dose of willingness to suspend disbelief helps mightily. Viewers need to buy into improbable plot twists, physically impossible stunt acts, and the ubiquity of dreamily beautiful characters, all bearing little or no resemblance to the reality of each of our own human drama.
But we waive our incredulity because we feel that somewhere beyond the preposterous embellishments is a core truth that speaks credibly to our hopes and fears.
Believe Your Lying Eyes
Which leads Mr. Baker to write about America’s upcoming presidential campaign. Of all the implausible events we are promised, who dares to believe them? But don’t dare not to believe:
No candidate is the model of national leadership they all purport to be. To commit one’s vote to an inevitably flawed person and endow him with powers that include the still more or less unique capacity to blow the world to pieces requires a leap of faith in someone most of us can’t ever really know.
Cheap Fakes: An Imperfect Choice
Has there ever been a campaign in American history, asks Mr. Baker, in which so many were required to suspend so much disbelief in such daunting circumstances as the 2024 election?
What makes this contest especially unusual is that this must be the first contest in which those close to the two main protagonists know only too well more reasons to doubt the fitness of their man for office than do the voters at large.
President Joe Biden:
… the louder the protestations we hear from his aides that his age isn’t a problem, the more we can be certain that it is. “Behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping,” as a Journal article put it recently.
Hidden in Plain Sight
The energy Democrats exert rebutting the story is all you needed to know about its accuracy.
… the inner-sanctum fiction we have been sold for the past few years is that Mr. Biden isn’t the fumbling, mumbling, stumbling geriatric on display every day on our screens. Behind closed doors, he is as sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, fresh as a daisy.
The effort to persuade us to suspend our growing disbelief in his capabilities that we derive from the evidence of our own eyes isn’t only risible. It is an act of disreputable and irresponsible dishonesty from those who know best.
Former President Donald Trump
But the fictions we are being asked to believe about Donald Trump are equally far-fetched. Though he too is showing indications of age-related decline, it’s not his competence that’s primarily at issue but his character.
The public has had a good chance to see the measure of the man by now and most continue to think it unsuited to the presidency. As it is with Mr. Biden’s closest associates, you can rest assured that those who have worked closely with the man are swallowing doubts so large they have lumps the size of basketballs in their throats.
Gerald Baker still has his injury from whiplash: Many people who served in (DT’s) first administration and have sworn, public or privately, that they will never work for him again. Baker got whiplash from the exercise of listening to Republicans say lacerating things about Trump in private and then spinning around to hear them extol his peerless virtues in public.
Two Untrustworthy Candidates
As in “The Picture of Dorian Gay,” the gap is wide between the “portrait painted of the candidate and the reality locked away in an attic.”
This time, more than producers will suffer, Mr. Baker reminds us.
But in politics, as in the movies, the suspension of disbelief can go only so far. Movies fail when the fictions we are being asked to credit become simply too large and improbable for even the most credulous eye.
When that happens, when a film bombs, only the producers suffer. But this is a plot line in which an entire country’s future is at stake. Our disbelief in the story no longer suspended, the reality we must deal with will have to be seen to be believed.
