The Irishman and the Empty Man: The Biden Years On-Screen, Part One

In the first installment of a quarterly series, Brendan Boyle and Adam Nayman use two films as a lens on the Biden years.

By Brendan Boyle, Adam NaymanFebruary 15, 2025

• Film

• Politics

There is no such thing as disunity. There is only the great binding nothingness of things. At one time we were one. We will all be one again. This message comes to you directly from … the Empty Man.
—The Empty Man (2020)

AMONG THE NORMS CLINGING to life in American democracy, a few weeks into 2025, is the negligible and sentimental tradition of US presidents leaving behind notes of good wishes for their successors. Having received what he described as a “very generous letter” from Donald Trump in 2021, departing president Joe Biden kept the faith, with a short missive duly deposited in the Resolute desk. As paraphrased by Trump, the message contained only pat sentiments: “Just basically, it was a little bit of an inspirational-type letter, you know? ‘Enjoy it, do a good job. Important, very important, how important the job is.’” Reprinted in news reports, the full text, a scant three sentences, did not further illuminate the 46th president’s feelings about the coming four years. It can, rather, be read as a case of projection: the hope that, despite whatever stubborn realities he was faced with, Biden’s decision-making during the previous four might play out for the best.

With the opportunity now to consider his public career fully in hindsight, Biden’s legacy includes one peculiar pop culture citation: he is the first US president to have been played by nine different actors on Saturday Night Live, more than any other whose term began during the program’s run. Although this statistic exceeds even the bombastic profile of his predecessor—and now successor—in the Oval Office (seven SNL performers have played Trump to date), it only partly reflects on Biden’s longevity in the public eye. Of these performances, only Kevin Nealon’s one-off portrayal in the early 1990s predates Biden’s surge to national stardom in 2008 as Barack Obama’s primary competitor, then running mate in the general election, and eventually vice president. For those eight years, he was embodied as the blustery, loose-lipped Uncle Joe archetype by Jason Sudeikis, a former jock and proficient straight man.

After Sudeikis’s exit, Biden impersonators proliferated in Studio 8H: drop-in cameos by Woody Harrelson, John Mulaney, and Jim Carrey, plus short stints each by ensemble players Alex Moffat, Mikey Day, and James Austin Johnson, a revolving-door routine signifying a certain failure to capture the president’s deteriorating public image. In the end, it was another former cast member, Dana Carvey, who managed to draw blood, skewering the lame-duck Biden with a meandering and addled catchphrase: “But guess what? And by the way …” That Carvey’s impersonation had more than a little of his acclaimed George H. W. Bush to it made a certain amount of sense: one single-termer deserves another.

While the latter part of Biden’s presidency saw a serious erosion of his approval ratings—drastic enough that SNL’s ostensibly left-leaning writing staff felt safe punching upwards instead of suckling—earlier portrayals were already waffling in their characterizations, even when the opportunity came to reenact a universally criticized scandal. In the 2016 HBO feature-length film Confirmation, Greg Kinnear plays then-senator Biden, presiding over the 1991 confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas for associate justice of the Supreme Court. Bowing to pressure from Republican colleagues, his reactionary instincts for tacking to the perceived center, and some presumably retrograde personal biases on the subject of sexual politics, Biden consistently undermined Anita Hill’s testimony on the harassment she experienced working for Thomas—not least by allowing the nominee to speak first. Kinnear’s performance takes its cues from Rick Famuyiwa’s perfunctory direction, itself a hair more anonymous than previous Jay Roach-helmed docudramas Recount (2008) and Game Change (2012). An erstwhile comedian himself, Kinnear struggles as so many imitators would to capture his subject’s recognizable essence, falling back to a side-of-the-mouth verbal affect and an exasperated disposition that renders Biden as more haplessly overwhelmed than deliberately neglectful, all the while nursing a toothache—poor, poor pitiful he.

Examining the Thomas hearings in his 2020 polemic Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden, Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic noted the contradiction between Biden’s public statements of liberal principles and the actions he took to sabotage those same principles:

It was not just a case of egregious insensitivity about a pernicious and all-too-common injustice suffered by women, but a grave tactical blunder: after voting against Thomas, Biden had warned that a “fervent minority” in the GOP was “engaged in an open campaign to shift the court dramatically to the right”; his failure to hold Thomas to account helped lead that campaign to victory.

In recounting Biden’s long career in the Senate, and then as vice president, Marcetic attempted to resolve the dilemma of Biden’s legacy for Democratic voters—who, at the time of his book’s publication, were poised to nominate him for the presidency (the eventual result, indeed, of a primary season more tumultuous than most had imagined)—by using episodes like the Thomas hearings to demonstrate that old principles of bipartisan comity had led Biden and the Democrats disastrously astray throughout his career. Electing him to serve as the opposition to the Trumpist Right, Marcetic argued, would badly misread the will and vision required to meet the moment—a conclusion that, two presidential elections removed, seems self-evident to the point of redundancy.

With the benefit of hindsight, Marcetic’s reading suggests another reason for the inability of imitators like Kinnear or the recent SNL cast to arrive at a convincing take on Biden: an insubstantial personal character, which, during his period of mental decline, further dissipated into nothingness. His notoriety for gaffes and flip-flops—a recurring problem predating John Kerry’s more mythologized propensity for equivocation, and temporarily recast in Biden’s favor when his mistimed public statements pushed the Obama campaign into a more progressive line on gay marriage—seems, when viewed in toto, less a case of an undisciplined public speaker than of a figure with few political commitments (with only one glaring exception in the Middle East) or moral redlines, eager to advocate for whichever view would best position him as a vanguard figure within his party.

The critique of American politicians as vacuous and uncommitted is far from novel. Since the age of Ronald Reagan, every president has been analyzed through the lens of celebrity, more movie actors than political ones. Yet Biden’s disappearance from public view while occupying the highest political office in a hypermediated age, reversing this trend of cinematic commanders in chief, provided an uncanny negative image of national identity crisis; attempting to caricature his dissolution was like grasping at smoke.

Mulaney’s zeitgeist-capturing stand-up routine about the lived experience of the first Trump term analogized its sense of constant chaos to “a horse loose in a hospital.” The unintended subtext of this bit was that the whole country had for some time felt like an ICU, the stench of decay and death never far away. So who better than kindly old Joe—himself so tragically experienced in matters of personal loss with the 1972 deaths of his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi in a car crash, and the 2015 loss of son Beau to brain cancer—to tend to a democracy on life support? If Bill Clinton had professed to feel his voters’ pain (the only reassurance offered during the neoliberal turn of the Democrats), Biden promised to place his cold hand in theirs when the bell tolled. But history continued apace, and it was Biden himself who slipped away over the course of his term, with his most memorable public appearances (not least his campaign-ending June debate performance) all featuring the uncanny image of his back shuffling away from the camera, like the patriarch glimpsed in the opening credits of Succession (2018–23), or, in a final, surreal gesture, disappearing into the rainforest like the doomed parental units of Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt.”

“The Veldt” is a dark fairy tale about hallucinations that become increasingly corporeal; its original title, “The World the Children Made,” also marks it as a story about one generation devouring another. Sci-fi and horror have always lent themselves to such interpretation: from They Live’s Hoffman Lenses to Get Out’s Sunken Place, metaphors of vision—of seeing through something, or inside it, or beyond it—are central to the critical practice of reading mainstream American cinema, including and especially genre product, between the lines.

For some, the game of considering movies in the context of the specific political epochs in which they were first produced, distributed, and exhibited—and structuring those eras according to the specific durations of respective presidential administrations—is an old game and, perhaps, a parlor trick of sorts. The more magically a writer extracts meaning from a particular periodized zeitgeist, the greater the suspicion that they’re dealing from a stacked deck. In his 2003 book The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, J. Hoberman mined John Frankenheimer’s 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate—a movie ruled by playing card motifs, from practical jokers to fallen kings to red queens—for a deeper vein of subtext than even its carefully layered screenplay (by former playwright and Martin and Lewis gagman George Axelrod) would seem to have intended. The film’s delectably paranoid premise of Beltway Machiavellis conspiring to kill a sitting-duck president in order to install their own, more easily controlled figurehead (and the obvious resemblance of the perpetually soused and cartoonishly bellicose “Manchurian Candidate” to Joseph McCarthy) manifested a clear, if snidely noncommittal, satirical perspective; the additional and devastating resonance overlaid on the movie’s climax by the killing of John F. Kennedy transformed what was, at its core, a virtuoso stab at cinematizing Mad magazine for grown-ups into a potential and retrospective Rosetta stone for a decade defined by idealism in the crosshairs.

By placing The Manchurian Candidate and its foreign meddling, MKUltra-style conditioning, and stage-managed assassination at the center of an extended meditation on the give-and-take between Washington and Hollywood, Hoberman not only honored the tradition of his forebear Siegfried Kracauer—whose landmark 1947 study From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film pioneered the Svengali-to-authoritarian pipeline—but also located the perfect frame for his own critical practice. While The Dream Life’s suggestive phrase “the Secret Agent of History” technically referred to Laurence Harvey’s Raymond Shaw (a tragic marksman in whom the figures of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald had converged with eerie, precognitive providence), it also served as a seductive self-appellation for Hoberman as a kind of deep cover operative. His mission: to drop the scales from his own eyes, and from ours as well. Taken together with the other entries in the Found Illusions trilogy (2011’s An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, about the politics of the Hollywood blacklist, and 2019’s Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, a rise-to-power-narrative organized around the personage of its eponymous president), The Dream Life extended Kracauer’s basic thesis that conspicuously popular films both reflected and energized popular sentiment—what Madeline Whittle calls “an implicit, common-sense premise: that box office receipts are more or less directly analogous to a popular vote.”

The question of how such analysis might function in a moment when the industry metrics for measuring popularity have (much like mainstream movie exhibition itself) moved into a phase of technocratic ephemerality—and whether or not the results would seem more speculative or contingent than generations of Hobermoles burrowing through receipts at the multiplex ballot box—is worth considering. If subliminal programming is the through line from the ersatz Camelot of The Manchurian Candidate to the wicked twist on Obama-era racial solidarity of Get Out (with its cast of East Coast liberal Caligaris yearning to Be Black, Baby) what does it say about our early 21st century Dream Life that Netflix honcho Reed Hastings has joked that his company’s only competitor is sleep?

These days, everybody has a Netflix deal, including Barack and Michelle Obama, who formed their production company in 2018, halfway through Trump’s first term, and before COVID-19 accelerated the hermeticization of global spectatorship. That company’s name, Higher Ground Productions, split the difference between the aspirationalism that earned its creators two superficially prosperous and paradigm-shifting election cycles, and the nagging suspicion, surely felt within their inner circle and high-end enclaves of all sorts, that something, whether on the coastline or in the air, was five feet high and rising.

Hoberman’s choice of Reagan as his series’ protagonist-slash-antihero makes sense insofar as he was, as has been written about ad nauseam, the first “movie star president,” parlaying his familiarity as an entertainer into success on the political stage. By contrast, Obama was arguably the first (and surely not the last) president to see himself at least partially as a studio mogul, as well as a tastemaker. Where presidents (or their biographers) in the past kept detailed logs of the movies screened at the White House (let the record show that Trump seemed to have enjoyed 2017’s The Greatest Showman), Obama has recently simplified the process by releasing carefully—some might suggest too carefully—curated lists of the year’s best movies. These roundups seem designed to render the first president to fully harness the impact of the internet (like JFK and the television set before him) accessible to the online masses while keeping his feet firmly planted on higher ground. In the absence of any critical annotations, however, it’s hard to know what to think of his picks. Did Obama enjoy Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024) for its widescreen spectacle or as a cautionary tale about the ascent of a false prophet whose flaws are recapitulated as strengths by a constituency hoping to spice up a desultory, dynastic political narrative?

While Obama continues to court soft power through the media, and since leaving the presidency has drawn attention for his celebrity friendships and star-studded guest lists for birthday celebrations at Martha’s Vineyard, Biden has shown little interest in Hollywood glad-handing, preferring instead to speak of the close relationships he cultivated with Senate colleagues. His oft-touted ability, even eagerness, to work with “both sides of the aisle” made Biden an uneasy figurehead for his party in a polarized era. A go-between and a creature of Washington institutions, rather than their master, Biden finds his screen proxies not in messianic figures like Paul Atreides, or even in members of a superhero team like the Avengers—notwithstanding the odd physical similarity between himself and the aged-up Chris Evans in the coda of Endgame (2019), where Captain America reflects on a life well lived in service to the CIA—whose adventures in dominance at the box office provided colorful shorthand for a turbocharged international liberal order during America’s Pax Obama. Instead, the harbingers of the Biden presidency recur in films about men who lack a heroized sense of personal agency—or a destiny that eludes them until too late.

Frank Sheeran, the title character of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019), is a creature of two particularly American mythologies: the secret history of organized crime, with its web of involvements in labor union racketeering and potential role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and rags-to-riches stories of the Horatio Alger tradition that became, in the 20th century, the corporatized dream of upward mobility. Recruited by the Bufalino crime family in the postwar years, Sheeran (Robert De Niro) rises through the ranks under the cool mentorship and protection of Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), later working alongside and befriending legendary Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), whom he eventually murders on Bufalino’s orders. As depicted by Scorsese, Sheeran’s only reward is estrangement from his family, followed by a deferred prison sentence (for other crimes), and an early release into the nursing home where he awaits his death in lonely terror. De Niro’s performance as Sheeran—navigating the uncanny valley thanks to a new de-aging technology that allowed him to play the same character over six decades—earned mixed reactions. Viewers widely mocked the scene where the then-76-year-old actor, through a scrim of unconvincing VFX, haltingly beats and kicks at a grocer. But the scene where a stammering, dissembling Sheeran speaks to Hoffa’s widow on the phone, denying any knowledge of his dead friend’s whereabouts, still stands as one of De Niro’s finest moments in his late career.

When he began his fourth run for president in 2019, Biden faced consistent criticism that he had missed his shot and was now too old to defeat Donald Trump. In a September 12 debate, underdog candidate Julián Castro pounced on a moment of hesitation and accused the former vice president of forgetting words he had spoken on the same stage minutes earlier. Within a few days, articles began appearing defending Biden’s perennial gaffes and increasingly slower speech patterns by attributing them to a childhood stutter. Anyone could see that, in contrast to the Biden who had served under Obama, this candidate was missing a step. Yet, the campaign and the media seemed to argue, the voters’ own memories deceived them: wasn’t this the same—old—Biden they’d always known? Even as a freshman senator, Biden had been prematurely aged by his commitment to the institution of the Senate and by the politics of reaction required to make the right friends, odious though they may have been. The veteran cast of The Irishman, marketed as an all-star matchup of Italian American screen icons—the first collaboration between Pacino and Scorsese, and the first time Pacino and Pesci had appeared on-screen together—served as a preview of 2020’s debate-stage showdowns, where the Democratic primary field narrowed to the septuagenarians Biden and Sanders, themselves competing for the opportunity to tackle the 74-year-old Trump, at that time the oldest individual ever inaugurated to a first term.

Like the film’s Sheeran (almost certainly a fiction, spun out of tall tales told to author Charles Brandt before the real Sheeran’s death in 2003), Biden was a company man, less a secret agent than a blinkered functionary of history, a career foot soldier for the Washington consensus due for the ultimate promotion. Having spent decades focused on his own political survival, either unconcerned with or simply having turned a blind eye to the larger ideological project he served, he was poised to earn his button, and Democratic voters would reward him in 2020 for achieving the sort of respectability—like “ugly buildings and whores,” in the words of Chinatown’s Noah Cross—that only accrues with time. But the echoes of that stammer would return to haunt the Democrats, as the devil’s bargain—exchange the exasperatingly omnipresent Trump for the absent-minded Biden—effectively traded away any forward vision for the party, defined at the top by paralysis, absence, and indifference. Scorsese was further criticized for the limited speaking time allotted to his female characters; Anna Paquin, playing Sheeran’s estranged daughter Peggy, speaks only once in the film. This criticism ignored the deliberate structure of Steven Zaillian’s screenplay, for Peggy’s contemptuous silence is the same hush that torments Sheeran’s final, sleepless hours: the song that closes the film is by the Five Satins, “In the Still of the Night.”

“This isn’t the last film Scorsese will make, or the last film anyone will make about the Mafia in its heyday, but it does arrive at a kind of resting place,” wrote A. O. Scott in his New York Times review of The Irishman. The temptation to prematurely eulogize our elder statesmen is real, as is the desire to see them as forever young, and so the mordant subtexts of The Irishman intersected with the prevailing—and galvanizing—image of Marty Scorsese as an old-timer projecting influence and enthusiasm into a brave new world. Scorsese’s early-21st-century transformation into the smiling, eminently Instagrammable face of mainstream American cinephilia was complicated—and ultimately strengthened—by his eloquent doubling down on an offhand remark he made during The Irishman’s press junket that Marvel movies were “not for [him]”; the bad-faith reading that Scorsese was somehow out of touch or elitist ignored the director’s willingness, above and beyond that of his generational cohort, to advocate for directors on the come up.

“[I]t was like they were mugging me,” said Scorsese of his Oscar-season meeting with the fraternal directing duo of Josh and Benny Safdie, whom he cheerfully likened to “two bandits.” The duo’s sixth and most accessible feature, Uncut Gems (2019)—released in the United States by bro-teur kingmakers A24 and internationally by Marty’s pals at Netflix—was very much a movie about getting away with something, a big-city picaresque charged, like its predecessor Good Time (2017), with the Scorsesean exhilaration of skulking through mean streets after hours. Where the earlier film worked by strategically uglifying its millennial matinee idol lead (Robert Pattinson, dyed pretty in peroxide), Gems offered up an undisguisedly paunchy and punch-drunk Adam Sandler, whose antic performance as embattled Manhattan jeweler Howie Ratner drew on and amplified the manic mix of potency and self-deprecation that the star had trademarked as the worst actor—and most consistently funny presence—of SNL’s early 1990s championship seasons.

Sandler’s loud-and-proud Jewishness has always been a key weapon in his comic arsenal (cf. “The Hanukkah Song,” which threaded the needle from the Three Stooges to Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock) and, from its circumcision-centric title on down, Uncut Gems vibrates on a very particular frequency of ethnicized pride, defiance, and self-hatred (not necessarily in that order). The contradiction of a survivor who’s also his own worst enemy accesses a modern scriptural tradition of Dangling Men and Human Stains; the heart-in-throat experience of watching Sandler’s gambling-addict character trying (and succeeding, and failing, and then trying again) to play for his life with house money, meanwhile, captured something queasy about the post-bailout era. “The film dramatizes the old struggle to reconcile Jewishness, capitalism, and assimilation that was revived after the economic collapse,” wrote Jacob Siegel in Tablet. “It’s also a preview of how those anxieties will play out as they intensify in a political arena where Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Donald Trump all play to different Jewish archetypes and fears.”

The shitposting mindset to collapse the distance between Howard Ratner and Bernie Sanders as Jewish archetypes (or caricatures) was strong during 2020’s primary season, not least of all because Sanders’s (some might say self-fulfilling) prophecy as the Democratic Party’s proudly obstinate, once-and-future vote splitter was a myth predicated largely on the promise of Pyrrhic victory. “Bernie would have won” was a uniquely rueful catchphrase. “This is how I win,” Howie assures a client in a strident tone that suggests he’s also trying to convince himself. While surely not a democratic socialist (and, in a different version of a circa-2013 plotline that didn’t end with his brains splattered all over the walls of his store by his brother-in-law, a likely future Trump voter), Howie is, finally, a victim of his own principles, such as they are. His refusal to quit while he’s ahead is tied to his recognition (and resentment) of the country’s real front-runners, making Howie an avid emblem of a small-entrepreneurial class increasingly resigned to living their lives (and running their businesses) on tilt. The film’s euphoric fatalism, meanwhile, approximated the accelerationist view (or was it acquiescence?) on Trump’s first 1,000 days in office, a position that seemed to come terribly true with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The critics likening Uncut Gems to a cinematic panic attack anticipated its utility as a catchall allegory for all kinds of stir-craziness; the universal implications of the Safdies’ wonderfully granular greed-is-good tale found their purest expression in a mock-Kubrickian finale that shrank and expanded the story’s metaphysics to cosmic dimensions.

Like Uncut Gems, David Prior’s The Empty Man begins with the excavation of a precious artifact from a far-flung cave—an object freighted with ill portent and magic powers. The latter movie bowed theatrically on October 23, 2020, grossing a little over $1.3 million on its opening weekend; by not screening Prior’s film for critics, the film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox (by then operating under the umbrella of their new parent corporation, Disney) guaranteed that a project that had already been languishing in postproduction limbo even before COVID-19 delayed its opening would get no traction. In theory, that week’s most politically resonant new American release was the Borat sequel, shaped and delivered by Sacha Baron Cohen and his gang of Juvenalian delinquents as an act of election-season intervention transforming Mar-a-Lago honchos like Rudy Giuliani into unwitting satirical accomplices. What had worked like gangbusters in the Bush years felt tired and insufficient the second time around; the only real upshot of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was a surprise (and deserved) Oscar nomination for Cohen’s on-screen progeny Maria Bakalova, who turned her authentic hotel-room seduction of Giuliani into an audition to play Ivana Trump. How odd that Prior’s Lovecraft-inflected story of an apocalyptic death cult manifesting their own guru-of-convenience out of bad vibes turned out to be the true October surprise—and, in its way, the first keynote movie of the Biden era.

Working smartly in the gleaming, procedural style of his sometime collaborator David Fincher, Prior used his generic setup of an ex-cop investigating a trail of corpses to riff on the true pop cultural growth sector of the early 2020s: that of messianic Reddit-thread theorizing, with extremely online explainers proffering grand unified theories of decline and fall from the right as well as the left. (In the film, the Jordan Peterson manqué is played by Stephen Root, whose monologue is a manifesto against the ravages of postmodernism itself.) Wearing his sociological critique on his hand-me-down B-movie sleeve, Prior imagined his eponymous bogeyman—introduced first as a silhouette in a Tibetan snowstorm and later visualized as a faceless ghoul—as a kind of tulpa of horror-movie tropes; no less than Huey Lewis or Patrick Bateman, the Empty Man, who has spent centuries moving from host to host (and East to West, to the United States), is less a fully rounded movie monster than an idea whose time has come.

The joke—and it was a good one in a movie whose wryly torqued sense of dread deserved to be taken more seriously than the critics who shrugged it off could bother—is that the backlog of tragedies defining James Badge Dale’s nominal protagonist James Lasombra (dead wife and kid; car crash on an icy road; he was off cheating with a neighbor) are revealed as the conditions of a patsy’s sinisterly stage-managed existence. Instead of sincerely thematizing “trauma,” Prior underlines its maddening expedience as both a screenwriting tool and a catchall tactic for millennial genre specialists. James’s pain is a cover story for malevolence; the only thing he’s truly investigating is his own gaping lack of interiority. He’s a placeholder inviting pity (and maybe derision) even as the climax confirms that the same cipher-like qualities suspending true autonomy (or morality) are the conditions of his worship; the closing image of a cabal of followers bowing down to the Empty Man (who doesn’t seem to know what to do next) is harrowing but also darkly funny.

Prior’s images of anonymous crowds moving in a swarm, paralleled with the insects scuttling about in his prologue’s Bhutan crypt, were emblems of all-purpose dread, ready-made for the viewer’s own anxieties (provided they could find the movie streaming online). One such primal fear arrived shortly after the Biden-Harris campaign’s victory in the November election, when another mob, in search of their absent leader, stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The insurrection exploded and fizzled out quickly, with panicked back-channeling from Republican leaders persuading the sulking Trump, who was watching the spectacle on television from the White House, to disperse his followers with a Tweet. The acolytes had arrived on time, yet their guru had neither the strategy, the vision, nor the will to see the coup through; if American fascism was the old idea reborn, it had an imperfect vessel in Trump 1.0 and his crew of kleptocrats. Fed up with the chaos of the Trump years, the GOP establishment were all too pleased to let the crazies burn out, leaving the MAGA movement—for the moment—running on empty.

With a decisive popular vote margin of seven million in the November 2020 general election—clinching victory with an electoral vote win in the new swing state of Georgia—President Biden had his mandate: to enact the American Rescue Plan, distribute the new vaccines, and restore normalcy to a pent-up, traumatized populace. He would execute this platform in a compromise with the party’s progressive wing, whose Warrenite policy wonks would play key roles in staffing his administration, with Sanders blessing the project in an effort to mollify his own cult. Might the careerist Joe prove to be the right sort of empty vessel—not only a familiar presence but also a willing receptacle for new ideas to fit the times? As expounded upon in Root’s monologue, Biden’s political manner was in many ways a compendium of clichés, repeated so often that they’d lost their meaning. It was easy to forget who he really was.

As many 2020 releases were either off-loaded into doomed theatrical runs à la The Empty Man or prematurely rushed to streaming per WarnerMedia’s Project Popcorn initiative, the quarantine year offered a preview of things to come: a popular cinema fully decoupled from the traditional yardstick of box office success. The moviegoing public—the dwindling percentage of Americans who go to a cinema more than once per year—was, too, now a cult in search of an object. The odd spectacle of the April 2021 Oscars, held at Los Angeles’ Union Station (another anachronism), honored the birth of cinema with its homage to the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896), although the train itself—and the recipient of the night’s final prize, Anthony Hopkins for Best Actor—never actually arrived. Change had come to the federal government on its predetermined schedule; the Hollywood zeitgeist, meanwhile and per usual, was running late.