Sounds of Freedom: The Biden Years On-Screen, Part Three

The third installment of ‘The Biden Years On-Screen’ considers the cinematic fallout of cancel culture, the overruling of Roe v. Wade, and the 2022 midterm elections.

By Brendan Boyle, Adam NaymanJanuary 21, 2026

• Film

• Television

• Politics

THE MATERIAL CONDITIONS under which half or more of the United States population lived shifted dramatically on June 24, 2022, when—behind a “nonscalable” eight-foot fence erected weeks earlier—the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning a national right to abortion and confirming the draft opinion which had leaked in early May. “Trigger” laws banning most abortions in the first and second trimesters went into effect in 13 states, while old bans became enforceable again in nine more. Despite nominal Democratic control of two branches of government, an infernal machinery of retrenchment, operated by a decades-old conservative movement Donald Trump had accelerated, chugged along in the background, pulling reality out of sync with itself. President Joe Biden, a Catholic uncomfortable with simply discussing abortion, delivered only brief remarks that day, urging Americans to vote for a Democratic Congress in November’s elections, and waited another two weeks before taking any executive action at all. But executive orders protecting medication abortion, and similar stopgap measures at the state level, could only be, at best, a Band-Aid. An act of Congress would be required to correct this harm; as president, Biden lacked both the means and the will to meet his moment.

This disturbing vibe shift had echoes in a number of prestige-minded features that fall season. Premiering in theaters and on Netflix in September 2022, Blonde adapted Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe, elaborating upon the book’s fictional devices—abbreviating or changing many names, and referring to second and third husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller as “the Ex-Athlete” and “the Playwright,” respectively—in a phantasmagoria that included surreal dream sequences featuring the distorted faces of leering fans and the voice of Monroe’s aborted child. “I had always wanted to do a story about childhood trauma and how that shapes an adult’s perception of the world; to make a film from within a person’s mythology,” director Andrew Dominik told Deadline. “My original idea was to do that for a serial killer, but when I read Blonde I thought, well, I could do this with an actress and it should be slightly more sympathetic.”

Yet in imagining the life of Norma Jeane Mortenson as a passion play, adapting many iconic photographs into slow-motion moments of horror, Dominik’s version of sympathy seemed to confine Monroe to, rather than liberate her from, the already accepted understanding of her image. In her biographical study The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), Sarah Churchwell had noted that between Oates and Norman Mailer (author of the 1973 biography Marilyn), despite the supposed contrast between the former’s feminism and the latter’s “renowned misogyny,” “neither […] estranges Marilyn or offers an alternative to the myth. Instead, each of them reincarnates the stereotype.”

Dominik did himself no further favors with fans of Monroe, film historians, or women generally by, during an interview for Sight and Sound, referring to Monroe and co-star Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) as “well-dressed whores.” These and similar comments circulated with outrage online, and set Blonde up to be quickly dispensed with following its release (given limited theatrical bookings, the black-and-white, 166-minute feature was already a hard sell to the habitually disengaged Netflix audience). The film’s main hook was its glamour and controversy, pegged to the salable figure of Havana-born star Ana de Armas, whose breakout as a hologram companion in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was followed by winsome turns as the wrongly accused nurse in murder mystery Knives Out (2019) and a brief but well-received cameo as a Cuban CIA operative in the James Bond feature No Time to Die (2021). Blonde tested de Armas’s acting ability while largely trading on her beauty. No one could have expected Dominik to direct a performance that captured the real Monroe’s Method-inflected vulnerability, but de Armas struggled to do more than pose against the stark limitations of the material. The Academy duly rewarded her with an Oscar nomination, legible mainly as a consolation prize for having suffered the film’s drawn-out production and disastrous reception.

Despite no discernible efforts to read Monroe’s life story through a feminist lens (or to make use of any of the scholarship Dominik claimed to have read), Blonde did align with presentist attitudes in its pre-Epstein depiction of a rapacious American elite. The scene where an unnamed John F. Kennedy receives Norma Jeane in his bedroom, only to press her into fellatio as he continues a phone call, rhymes both with modern perceptions of JFK as a handsome cipher (see Caspar Phillipson’s silent performance in 2016’s Jackie) and with a wider paranoid theory connecting Hollywood, financial elites, Prince Andrew, and the White House in a sex trafficking ring that encircled the globe. Here was an Infernal Machine!

The delayed Hollywood zeitgeist was still working in overdrive to absorb half a decade of sordid allegations against cultural and political power brokers. It had taken almost five years from the publication of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s Harvey Weinstein bombshell in The New York Times for an American feature to fully articulate this rush to accountability and ensuing backlash.

The eponymous heroine of Todd Field’s TÁR (2022) is a self-made woman, a conductor (Cate Blanchett) consciously chasing her idol Leonard Bernstein’s musical accomplishments and cross-cultural celebrity. Field had developed the character years earlier to examine a fall from power, but only settled on her profession once he began writing the script itself in 2020. As a powerful out lesbian in the world of classical music, Lydia Tár’s identity at first shields her from scrutiny of her questionable affairs with protégés, including a young prodigy whose breakup with Lydia may have contributed to her suicide. This conceptual gambit allows Field to probe “cancel culture” dynamics while wrong-footing the viewer’s prejudices. The film’s surfeit of ambiguous art-house touches (unexplained noises on the soundtrack, narrative red herrings, and bursts of dream imagery influenced by both Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Stanley Kubrick, who directed Field in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut) further muddy the truth of which crimes Lydia has committed, closing the borders of the film’s rhetorical battleground while leaving it open to accusations of bad faith.

Possessed of Blanchett’s high-definition cool and poise, pacing first serenely then furiously through the mise-en-scène as if caught in 4K, Lydia has more in common with a brute like Harvey Weinstein than meets the eye. Despite her commanding ability to hold forth on the history of music—as in the standout long take of her Juilliard master class—Lydia is less an artist than Bernstein, who had his own bona fides as a composer. As a conductor, she primarily interprets the work of other artists. She spends much of the film strategizing and curating her own image, and, in the key Juilliard confrontation, assumes the role of a multifaceted campus ogre: a queer woman in a university setting who is nonetheless a defender of Bach and other “problematic” dead white artists, guilty of transgressing ethical and physical boundaries with her students, if not much worse. Lydia is a perfect victim for Field’s shaggy-dog parable (call it the Rube Goldberg Variations) because she’s a perfect perpetrator, giving and getting it from both barrels.

Outside the theater, the content of classroom discussions had become a driving issue of midterm election coverage. Florida’s Senate had passed a bill in March restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools; a PAC calling itself the 1776 Project spent more than three million dollars during the 2021–22 election cycle to elect school board members opposed to “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in over a dozen states. TÁR depicted a rarefied, specialist field consumed by culture war; in the prestige film business, even ripples from the past foretold a Red Wave. The Auteur Memoir resurfaced that fall with a handful of offerings, first Armageddon Time, limning the childhood of filmmaker James Gray, a Rebel on the Backlot—to use Sharon Waxman’s term for his generational Sundance cohort, including peers Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino—whose debt to neorealists from de Sica to Visconti belied his popular ambitions. Set in 1980, the film follows Gray’s stand-in Paul (Banks Repeta) as he attends a tony New York prep school at the behest of his generous zayde Aaron (Anthony Hopkins) but finds it infested with Trumps, played by John Diehl (as Fred) and Jessica Chastain (as his daughter Maryanne, Donald’s sister). The real Gray attended Donald’s primary school, Kew-Forest, and the rigid dramaturgy charts a straight line from the dog-eat-dog Reagan era to the Trump moment, stumbling slightly when imagining a tidy fable involving Gray’s memories of a less fortunate Black playmate (Jaylin Webb).

Webb’s performance as Johnny, lit with a mischievous glow that dims all at once when his meager future rushes up to meet him, keeps Armageddon Time from merely being an exercise in liberal guilt. Yet it’s a trio of father figures who make the strongest impressions: Fred Trump, Aaron, and Paul’s papa Irving, played by Jeremy Strong in what Gray called a close if not exact replication of his father’s accent. Gray’s own talent for storytelling, vocal impressions, and interview anecdotes comes through in Strong’s almost-too-much interpretation of Irving as a big spirit overflowing out of a small man. The beating Irving doles out to Paul after he’s caught smoking a joint with Johnny expresses an inability to master his own house, diminished in contrast by his children’s energy and his father-in-law’s warm gravity. The only resources he has—besides the toolbox with which he pries open Paul’s locked bathroom door—are his proximate whiteness as a middle-class Jew and his chance familiarity with a police officer who holds Paul’s fate in his hands. In the film’s final scene, we see Paul, having been spared a criminal record, trying to till his own path away from the flawed institutions that birthed him. The suggestion is that this prematurely world-weary (and streetwise) kid will grow up to be a filmmaker with the means to revisit and revise his own sentimental education.

The unmistakable resonances between the endings of Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans—which opened several weeks deeper into prestige-cinema season in accordance with its maker’s brand-name status, and features the young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) similarly strutting off to meet his future as an image-slinger—were not lost on critics. “Perhaps the two properties were destined to end up mirrors, composed by directors, both of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, in reflection on family, art, and identity,” wrote MUBI Notebook’s Kelli Weston in a joint review that duly limned Gray’s themes of white guilt (and nominal absolution) while smartly breaking down The Fabelmans’ most pivotal passage: the moment when Spielberg’s on-screen surrogate flatters-slash-flattens his antisemitic high school tormentors into faux-Riefenstahlian sight gags, the caméra-stylo proving mightier than the sword.

There’d always been a revenge-of-the-nerd aspect to Spielberg’s ascent in the 1970s and ’80s: a narrative complicated by the world-beating success that made him a wide and necessary target for filmmakers, reviewers, and (especially) leftist commentators given to punching up. The deepest source of intrigue in The Fabelmans’ hazy Arizona bildungsroman came from watching the director take himself and his skill set to task even more assiduously than his critics: Sammy is perceptive enough to notice—and then surreptitiously record—evidence of his mother Mitzi’s (Michelle Williams) affair with avuncular family friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), but not enough to foresee the effect that revealing it will have on his parents’ already shaky marriage. Spielberg’s script, co-written with Tony Kushner, implies that Hollywood’s greatest popular fantasist cultivated his spare-no-expense menagerie of sharks, extraterrestrials, and dinosaurs in order to sublimate the lingering guilt over a series of lo-fi home movies.

Another point of convergence between Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans is that both beat the deadline to be shut out at the 2023 Academy Awards. The big winner that year was “Daniels” Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, a Marvel-style multiverse-of-madness saga with a timely (and not entirely disingenuous) immigrant-assimilation narrative sandwiched between Epic Bacon-style sight gags and set pieces; surely, the only comedy ecumenical enough to gesture with equal reverence to Wong Kar-wai and Pixar worked as a standard-bearer at a moment when major corporations kept cannibalizing one another’s streaming libraries. The Daniels’ exuberance was vouched for by none other than Spielberg himself: “I learn actually more from young filmmakers today than I do from some of the older filmmakers […] because some of the new filmmakers are doing such audacious work,” he said magnanimously. His reward for keeping up with the kids was getting zinged in close-up during the Academy ceremony by Jimmy Kimmel, who referred to him and Rogen as the “Joe and Hunter Biden of Hollywood”—a curious and ultimately incomprehensible joke that (unconsciously) complicated the incestuous-slash-Oedipal subtext of The Fabelmans by recasting Sammy as his step-uncle Bennie’s benevolent Daddy.

Placing Spielberg in a presidential context was old hat. A decade earlier, in 2012, he’d angled Lincoln as an election-season allegory in support of Barack Obama and subsequently crafted a spoof mini-biopic for #44, joining the winner’s circle of in-(White)-House entertainers alongside the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda. As for invoking Hunter, that was low-hanging fruit—a handy release valve for a late-night shtickster like Kimmel to hold on to his self-image as an equal opportunity offender in the wake of the November midterms. The results had proven only semi-salutary for the Democratic Party; the Dems’ strongish showing in state and senatorial elections, buttressed by a wave of Trump fatigue and Dobbs anxiety, was somewhat offset when the wounded and regrouping Republicans managed—as a by-product of the redistricting derived from the 2020 census—to regain control of the House of Representatives. Morning-after stories about the Red Wave That Wasn’t belied the fact the election results were only heartening in contrast to the expected nationwide rebuke. “He’s a president who understands the moment,” said a victory-lapping Donna Brazile, “and when we look back at this period, we’re going to see him as ‘steady Joe,’ someone who was able to stabilize the country and move us forward.” In April 2023, Biden officially announced his campaign for reelection.

The dismal tide instead broke upon the shores of the small screen in that spring’s fourth and final season of Jesse Armstrong’s prestige victory Succession, which depicted the last days of a presidential campaign—partly bankrolled by the Roy family—to elect Jeryd Mencken, a blood-and-soil fascist played by Justin Kirk with a sibilant smirk and not a hint of Trumpian antics. In the season’s eighth episode, “America Decides,” a three-way conflict emerges between bereaved Roy siblings Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Shiv (Sarah Snook), each still reeling from the unexpected death of father Logan (Brian Cox) even as they oversee the election-night coverage on their conservative news network. With the conflicted Kendall caught between his nominally liberal sister and his brother, a right-wing troll pushing to call the race prematurely for Mencken, the episode ultimately skewered not only the 0.01 percent’s disinterest in democratic norms but also the centrist ethos of triangulation represented by Shiv. Despite her appeal to Kendall’s moral vanity, Shiv loses the race—and the country—when her backroom dealings with the firm’s prospective buyer (Alexander Skarsgård’s Lukas Matsson, a Nordic gloss on Elon Musk by way of Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson) blow up in her face. Snook’s cool-customer affect as Shiv short-circuits, leaving her stammering about “the state of the republic,” a caricature of inauthentic liberals from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris. The scene of this final insult, during which Roman and Kendall watch Mencken’s victory speech with their distraught sister frozen out in the corner, had an even nastier, more gendered edge than Armstrong and his writers had originally intended: for this and the final two episodes, they’d written Snook’s real-life pregnancy into the script.

Five episodes earlier, Logan’s cardiac arrest on the toilet of his private jet had suggested his death as a luxurious banality: a man too emotionally constipated to live nevertheless died in style. Below, as the wedding ferry in honor of true eldest boy Connor (Alan Ruck) and his sweetheart Willa (Justine Lupe) pulled away from port, Kendall helplessly worked the phones in search of an “airplane medicine expert”; the world’s richest people were passengers in their own lives. In the penultimate episode, primarily set at the St. Ignatius Loyola funeral mass, Kendall eulogizes his father as the 20th century’s essential man, a builder of “ships, steel hulls, amusements, newspapers.” His phrasing counters the opening salvo by Logan’s brother Ewan, played by James Cromwell in a tribute to the actor’s own radical bona fides, delivering Armstrong’s thesis on the vanishing giants of capital who had “drawn in the edges of the world.” Roman gave a blunter summation days later, at the finale’s board vote during which the siblings’ alliance fractured and failed for good: “We are bullshit.” Unlike their father (who in his last meeting with his children called them “not serious people”), they did not make decisions or set agendas but reacted to events and chased trends. The machinery that earlier generations had built, reenergized by the coming consolidation of media power at the service of an authoritarian state, required no hands at the controls. Old allies found them wanting and ultimately superfluous. The board voted to sell. The closed-loop system ejected the Roys from its perpetual revolution; the Infernal Machine moved on.

In addition to being less than resounding, statistically speaking, the midterms’ apparent public rejection of Republican extremism did little to deter the steady stream of invective being directed Biden’s way, often through familial proxies. For all their influence as power brokers, the Roys didn’t have direct access to the Oval Office. Yet the tawdry saga of Hunter Biden—like his older brother Beau, a child-age passenger during the car accident that killed his mother and their younger sister Naomi, and, over time, a symbol of his father’s devotion in the face of both personal tragedy and the demands of public service—suggested several seasons of Succession on shuffle. It’s easy, for instance, to imagine a subplot where Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) had to run interference around the confiscation of a water-damaged MacBook Pro laptop containing state secrets: the epicenter of a real-life international incident in 2020 with echoes of Joel and Ethan Coen’s earlier, scabrous, spy-versus-spy satire Burn After Reading (2008). In that underrated and geopolitically astute film, a disgruntled and disavowed ex–Cold Warrior (tetchy, disheveled John Malkovich) threatens to write a tell-all memoir about his days as one of “[George] Kennan’s boys,” only to be appalled when the material is found (having been left lying in a gym bag) by a moronic personal trainer (Brad Pitt). The latter, who is “not ideological,” decides to try a little extortion; “I thought you might be worried about the security of your shit,” he mumbles Deep-Throatedly over the phone. No doubt Hunter—once a Pitt-style hunk, more lately a bipartisan avatar of nepotistic corruption and incompetence whose actual culpability in leaking sensitive information to the Russians was less important than the apparent plausibility of such a snafu given his history—felt the question deep in his bones.

Hunter’s long list of concrete and reputational transgressions—dubious business dealings in Ukraine, well-publicized struggles with drugs and alcohol (the stuff of a best-selling memoir), outright tax evasion, a child fathered out of wedlock (denied in the aforementioned memoir), a handgun purchased under false pretenses of sobriety—placed him in the tradition of other high-profile black sheep in the White House fold. Hunter was a mirror image of Trump’s own stubbly failsons, Don Jr. and Eric (Awesome Show, Great Job!), as well as Andrew Giuliani, whose pop had led the charge to liberate the secrets of Hunter’s computer. In the late summer of 2022, around the same time that Armageddon Time was impressing liberal critics with its withering depiction of Fred, Maryanne, and the gang, actor-turned-director Robert Davi released My Son Hunter, a crowdfunded docudrama featuring Laurence Fox as the disgraced Biden scion and canceled ex-MMA star Gina Carano as a Secret Service agent assigned to his detail. The film marked the first foray into distribution by the conservative echo chamber Breitbart, whose previous connection to film culture had been via the dyspeptic reviews of one John Nolte (not a fan, incidentally, of The Fabelmans—“a soulless, mediocre, episodic, overlong TV movie”). Now, with Showgirls alumnus Davi at the helm and a script designed to publicly shame its namesake for crimes and misdemeanors real, imagined, and hilariously, hyperbolically exaggerated, the website’s founders resolved to fight the culture war on the front lines. Or at least from the edges of the battlefield: At the movie’s Los Angeles premiere—held inside an office building on Sepulveda Boulevard—viewers were treated to bottled water and bags of “Corn Pop.” Despite being invited, Jon Voight (never one to miss a photo op) did not attend, leaving Dean Cain as the biggest star in the room.

The film’s polarized reception wrote itself. In Slate, Dana Stevens likened My Son Hunter to “an attempted red-pilling in real time”; in National Review, Armond White (once a titan of against-the-grain interpretation) claimed Davi’s wing-nut fantasy “serve[d] a muckraking, restorative function.” But if a filmmaker rakes muck in a forest and nobody is around to see them, has any mud been slung? By releasing My Son Hunter online, Breitbart was trying to do an end run around a liberal media establishment they figured—correctly—would show little interest in promoting their product. The movie’s actual popularity with its target audience proved as difficult to gauge as any Netflick, however. “Although ‘My Son Hunter’ prides itself in being a film that liberals ‘don’t want you to see,’ it often seemed like Breitbart didn’t want me to see it, either,” wrote The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry in a bemused report from the field. “[A]ccessing the movie was an hours-long Via Dolorosa of error messages, unsent ‘watch codes,’ and seemingly endless log-in attempts, all for the rather steep price tag of twenty-two dollars. (So much for the efficiency of private enterprise.)”

If the ultimate upshot of My Son Hunter was a grim fait accompli—something about failing to dismantle the entertainment-industrial complex using its own tools—the lessons of the following summer’s surprise blockbuster Sound of Freedom were more sobering. Like My Son Hunter, the film—a muscular, by the numbers procedural based on the exploits of Donald Trump’s anti-child-trafficking adviser Tim Ballard—was backed by a crowdfunding campaign, but the money was being used differently: to get the production into theaters and people into seats. Originally, Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s thriller had been purchased for distribution by Twentieth Century Fox, only to be shelved after the company’s purchase by Disney (a situation that placed Sound of Freedom in the same purgatory as The Empty Man). Producer Eduardo Verástegui—a conservative anti-abortion activist, prospective Trump appointee (on a committee evaluating “Hispanic Prosperity”), and signatory on the anticommunist Madrid Charter—bought the movie back from the House of Mouse and offered it to the “values-based” Angel Studios, named for its “guild” of private investors as well as the biblical thrust of its content. On March 31, Angel released His Only Son, a dramatization of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, buoyed by over a million dollars in distribution funds from its backers; the movie made almost 14 million dollars worldwide. For Sound of Freedom, the company scared up five million dollars’ worth of marketing muscle, including executive producer credits for Mel Gibson, Tony Robbins, and convicted Medicare fraudster Andrew McCubbins. It also scored a perfectly patriotic opening weekend slot: the most profitable American movie of 2023 was born on the Fourth of July.

As a piece of filmmaking, Sound of Freedom is significantly more accomplished than My Son Hunter. The common denominators between Monteverde and Spielberg were that both had worked with actor Bill Camp and won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award—Spielberg for The Fabelmans; Monteverde for 2006’s pro-life melodrama Bella, one of the strangest selections in the festival’s history. “[Y]ou needn’t hold extreme beliefs to experience Sound of Freedom as a compelling movie,” noted Variety’s Owen Gleiberman—although, to paraphrase the old ad about Jewishness and rye bread, it wouldn’t hurt. The film’s story of a rogue Homeland Security agent (former Son of Man Jim Caviezel) staring down a ruthless cabal of pedophiles is standard-issue stuff adorned with reactionary flourishes, including an implicit acknowledgment of the “adrenochrome” myth embedded in Pizzagate rhetoric (you know, the one about celebrities smuggling and eating babies to rejuvenate their own bloodstreams). “‘The movie is for normies. Done in a way not to be revolting and push newbies away,’ said one member of a message board called Great Awakening,” as The Times of Israel reports. In the end, enough normies and newbies were awakened—or at least passably entertained—alongside the dutiful armies of true money-where-their-browsers-are believers for Sound of Freedom to gross over 180 million dollars at the North American box office. That the numbers were supposedly juiced by a “pay-it-forward system” encouraging satisfied customers to subsidize tickets for other patrons didn’t negate the scope of the movie’s popularity, fact-checkers be damned (ditto the multiple complainants filing lawsuits alleging Ballard as a sexual predator). Here was an honest-to-goodness, word-of-mouth hit to be mentioned in the same breath—and written about in the same Hollywood Reporter pages—as the likes of that summer’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, even Barbenheimer. Sound of Freedom had joined the club, whether or not its makers wanted to be members; on July 19, Trump himself held a special screening at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster (Tom Cruise’s invite must have gotten lost in the mail).

Beset by endless delays both in and out of their control, Cruise and his pet director Christopher McQuarrie had been prepping the first half of a two-part Mission: Impossible installment since 2019. “I’m on the phone with every fucking studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies,” Cruise had screamed at his crew in a widely circulated audio leak, purportedly overtaken by raw, emotive exhaustion from enforcing still-new COVID-19 protocols on the M:I set. The awkward, out-of-character tirade hearkened back to the couch-jumping incident, a seemingly spontaneous outburst that looked more like a controlled launch. With its focused personal shaming and use of profanity to make a point, the rant was a classic Scientology-inflected PR stunt—yet a hit, nonetheless, with a public appreciative of efforts to keep the industry on track, and of Cruise’s unswerving commitment to The Movies. But the film that arrived in 2023, then titled Dead Reckoning Part One, suggested that the Cruise-McQ model was running on fumes. The success of the previous summer’s Top Gun: Maverick, shot several years earlier, had been an afterimage that captured their collaboration at its apex; Dead Reckoning’s sprawling production (with a second half still to be shot and edited) had failed to yield a coherent product.

The common knock on the series, ever since Brian De Palma’s 1996 opening salvo, was that the antagonists lacked sufficient gravity to counter the magnetic hero Ethan Hunt, armed as he was with gadgets, good fortune (or “plot armor”), and the shaping influence of Cruise as star producer. Even a formidable thespian like Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing an arms dealer in the third installment, had only functional threats to offer; these baddies served as straightforward obstacles, flying objects for Ethan to dodge, more than characters. McQuarrie’s treatment for Dead Reckoning cut the knot in his signature Gordian style by substituting the nonentities of the past with “the Entity,” a superpowered artificial intelligence with infinite resources at its disposal, including Gabriel (Esai Morales), a retconned nemesis on hand to keep things personal. These inflated threats only served to highlight the series’ plastic emotions, however. Characters pledged their loyalty to Ethan and the Impossible Mission Force in a bizarre ritual dubbed “the Choice,” a cultish bit of screenwriting nonsense with no link to human relationships, let alone the franchise’s past. The consolidation of this apocalyptic narrative around Ethan, introducing another dead lover in flashbacks to his IMF origin, subordinated all the female characters to sidekicks and casualties: Hayley Atwell’s globe-trotting pickpocket Grace steadily lost her appeal as she fell under Ethan’s spell; Rebecca Ferguson, fed up with the interminable production, left the series and had her fan-favorite character Ilsa Faust killed off; in the climax, a box contained Vanessa Kirby’s disembodied face. The 54-million-dollar opening weekend was only a little softer than 2018’s franchise peak Fallout, but the domestic gross ultimately would fall short of any series entry save the third, a financial low point. Most distressingly, Cruise had begun to age.

The summer box office rebounded with the July 21 opening of two marquee films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, a historic act of counterprogramming that boosted media coverage of both pictures: one an all-ages comedy and activation of a traditionally girl-oriented brand, led by a female writer-director, Greta Gerwig, and star-producer, Margot Robbie; the other a three-hour historical biography about the father of the atomic bomb, sold as a new vision from Christopher Nolan, the rare auteur figure with a sterling box office record. The Barbenheimer phenomenon was an accidental happening that became Biden-era Hollywood’s signature pseudo-event: after Nolan had taken the Oppenheimer project to Universal Pictures, owing in part to his dissatisfaction with Warner Bros. Pictures’ handling of its theatrical slate during COVID-19, spurned WB chairman Toby Emmerich booked the long-gestating Barbie for the same opening weekend. Ultimately grossing a combined 2.4 billion dollars, both films were exceptions that proved the rule, a double exposure creating a mirage of vitality in a diminished creative field.

Waking into Technicolor life like a hallucination born out of pent-up pandemic brainstorming, the Barbie that arrived after years of effort by Mattel, Inc. to generate a film franchise was the eccentric creation of Gerwig and her husband-slash–creative partner Noah Baumbach. Gerwig’s particular elder-millennial reference points and Catholic school upbringing expressed themselves in a fantasy Barbieland with its own feminized theology, the beefcake Kens (primarily, Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu) orbiting a diverse cast of Barbies, currying favor and vying for their attentions each day before their nightly dismissal in favor of an infinite no-boys-allowed slumber party. Like previous fantasy-to-reality adaptations The Muppet Movie (1979) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), both of which made their subtextual step up to the “big leagues” of feature filmmaking into text, Barbie obliged a journey to the corridors of creative power—here, the Mattel corporation as filmed in present-day Santa Monica, California. The limited-hangout style of comedy featuring Will Ferrell as the company’s anxious, ineffectively antagonistic CEO suggested the new geography of Hollywood, trading earlier depictions of movie magic conjured on antic backlots for the vertically integrated high-rise, where Robbie’s Barbie discovers pockets of corporate history (like trailblazing co-founder Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Pearlman) secreted away behind office doors like the infinite warehouse in Monsters, Inc. (2001). This physical architecture summarized the imaginative confines of Gerwig and Baumbach’s conceit: Barbieland’s utopia could not be reconciled with the obligations of a third-wave feminism that problematized its innocent premise beyond repair. The final gag returned Barbie to Santa Monica for another journey, this one toward humanity and beginning with a visit to her gynecologist, blithely skirting gender essentialism while trading fairyland for one more glass-walled office.

If Barbie was imprecise and ultimately confused by its political identity, Oppenheimer benefited (or suffered) from Nolan’s characteristic didacticism (or pedantry). The source material was American Prometheus (2005), a decades-in-the-making biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin, whose breadth and depth of engagement with its subject’s roiling intellectual, political, and sexual lives made for a revelatory read. Nolan’s screenplay faced the daunting task of condensing nearly every global development in the first half of the 20th century into a digestible three-hour narrative with a single central character, played with a cool blue stare by repeat collaborator Cillian Murphy. It was captivating as a history lesson, but less so as drama; the near-consensus critical acclaim derived from Nolan swapping out pretend end-of-the-world spectacle (à la Tenet) for the real thing. The women, not unusually for Nolan’s films, get the worst of it: Florence Pugh’s love scenes as doomed radical Jean Tatlock are painfully written and blocked, while Emily Blunt’s performance as Oppy’s second wife Kitty buckles under the histrionics of the material. The pointillist narrative reduces every role to a walk-on, hence the cast of instantly recognizable faces, notably Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, David Krumholtz, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Peck, and Rami Malek—a deep bench of yesterday’s male ingenues breathing down Murphy’s neck as he ages decades in a single matinee. “It was compelling,” President Biden said after seeing Oppenheimer in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on a date with the First Lady. A positive review, but worth considering in context: just a few weeks earlier, the White House had hosted a private screening of the Cheetos corporate origin myth Flamin’ Hot.

Oppenheimer’s history written with atomic lightning found partisans across the political left and center. David Klion, writing for The New Republic, marveled that “the rich and tragic history of American leftism is very rarely depicted in blockbuster movies, but Oppenheimer is a striking exception—not since Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981) has a mainstream Hollywood historical epic portrayed American Communists with such sympathy and nuance.” Tragic was the operative word. The central theme of the Nolan corpus is regret, filtered through a scrambled narrative chronology that pieces together a picture of a ruinous mistake out of scenes whose orphaned context simulates a blinkered vanity. The fallout of these guilty secrets had scaled up gradually, from the multiple “John G” killings in Memento (2000) to the hundred Hugh Jackman doppelgängers in The Prestige (2006) and, most recently, the doomsday device in Tenet (2020) sent to obliterate the past. The swift A-to-B-style storytelling of Oppenheimer’s first two hours depicts the Manhattan Project as a rollicking sizzle reel for the creation of another deadly apparatus: the US national security state, birthed in a time of enormous possibility in the fields of art, science, and politics. Murphy plays the father of the atom bomb as a preternaturally assured dilettante, a suave and stylish administrator at the controls working to set a straight and narrow course for the future. The movie’s third hour takes place in a cramped room where an interrogator (Jason Clarke) conducts hearings for the renewal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, a witch hunt orchestrated by Downey’s Lewis Strauss, the Salieri-like chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. (Downey acts the material with a choking venom, like there’s an Oscar caught in his throat.) The scope of the narrative sees Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer eventually feted in horrible old-age makeup by LBJ before returning to a vision of raining bombs, a moment of clarity from younger years suppressed by the weight of time and American prestige. Its thesis gave another name to the Infernal Machine: a chain reaction.

On October 6, the streaming release of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial provided a very Nolanesque flash-forward to the imperial state in decline, incarnated by Kiefer Sutherland’s senile Lieutenant Commander Queeg and with Jason Clarke on loan again as interrogator. Previous screen adaptations of the play and its source novel The Caine Mutiny, both by Herman Wouk, depicted the captain as mentally unstable, deeply insecure, and paranoid; this adaptation, the final film directed by William Friedkin, updated the text for an American gerontocracy. Grilled by Clarke’s defense attorney Lieutenant Greenwald, Sutherland’s grimace of discomfort recalls not only 24’s Jack Bauer but also Dick Cheney and the current president, wringing his hands as he rambles about a precious store of strawberries. The contemporized references to Queeg’s war service invoke, rather than Greatest Generation valor, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, preserving the play’s structure while seeming to endorse a failed, neoconservative foreign policy. The abrupt final gesture scorned Lewis Pullman’s Lieutenant Keefer as a representative of an effete liberal class with no credibility to impugn Queeg’s character.

As a B-side to Oppenheimer’s theatrical phenom, Caine Mutiny made little waves with the critical press, except for those noting its dedication to both Friedkin and actor Lance Reddick, who had also died before its Cannes premiere. Time weighed heavily on both films, images of heroes cast aside by the American project. The two shared a core theatrical device, each centering a courtroom crucible whose defendant was an embattled officer and gentleman, transfigured by his failure once more into the man in the arena. To these “few good men” we can add Lydia Tár and Margot Robbie’s Barbie, star witnesses all subject to cross-examination (on-screen and off) about their identities and ideologies, and whether they can handle the truth. Biden’s apparent midterm victory and bid for reelection had closed, at least for the moment, the argument about his presidency. There would be no competitive primaries, no televised contests against dissenters within the party. The meaning of the moment had been settled. Yet the movies spoke to a restless thrum of ambivalence, a dissatisfaction with the terms of the United States’ self-conception: the need for a great debate about the future.