Having taken a few days away from the internet and social media, I returned to be greeted by rumours speculating that I’d died in a pub. I’d actually met up with an old friend for some hill walking and then going to the pub, but I’m probably more healthy for it. Still, I was reminded of a great piece of dialogue in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven between English Bob (Richard Harris) and Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman).
English Bob: Hello, Bill, I thought you were dead. Well, I’d heard you’d fallen off your horse drunk, of course, and that you’d broke your bloody neck.
Little Bill: I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead, till I found it was just that I was in Nebraska.
There could very well be an equivalent exchange in Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Homer, but the one I’m familiar with and can reference without any research is the one from Unforgiven.
Returning from my break and still being very much alive, I tuned into Donald Trump’s super-extravaganza mega-show at Madison Square Garden to witness Hulk Hogan bounding around on stage to his theme tune, I’m a Real American — a great dollop of maple syrup-covered patriotic cheese in ‘80s soft-rock guise. Never having been a fan of American wrestling, I associate Hulk Hogan with Rocky III. Then it dawned on me that Madison Square Garden is also the venue for Rocky’s explosive bout with Clubba Lang, which forms the epic finale to the whole film.
During the “show”, one of Trump’s sons gave a speech recounting the lore so far. Donald Trump was wealthy, popular, and famous. He had the great and good of New York and the liberal American establishment on speed dial, and he could simply sit back and enjoy life. Alas, the corruption, injustice, and nut-ball libtard agenda was just too much to stomach, and so he entered the arena of politics, first to mockery and then to the horror of the system.
In Act II, the Empire Struck Back and struck back hard. The swamp creature was more extensive and more powerful than anyone could have possibly imagined. You don’t drain the swamp; the swamp drains you. Betrayal, treachery, and cheating saw Trump defeated and cast out into the wilderness of Truth Social, with the most ardent of the MAGA faithful keeping him company in the digital and political wasteland. Joe Biden was installed as a grotesque mockery of presidential prestige, America’s reputation around the world plummeted, and the cackling hag Kamala gleefully set about the ruination of Trump’s legacy. Trump himself, like a grand orange Gulliver, was bound and tied down with lawsuit after lawsuit, one legal procedure after another for his alleged coup attempt, casting him in the role of a despised renegade and all-round mad bastard.
War returned to geopolitics while America’s cities became overwhelmed with immigrants and drug addicts, tottering about waiting to die from despair.
The MAGA flame dimmed as the lipstick of four-star transexual generals burned bright.
Elsewhere in the gloomy zeitgeist, Elon Musk scored a win by poaching Twitter from under the noses of the Regime. The revelations came thick and fast and confirmed what everyone knew: Conspiracy; it was a deep-state plot to censor, rob, and depose Trump all along.
One can only speculate on Trump’s conversations in exile during these days of despair.
Trump: I have to run again. They need me.
Melania: Just retire. You’ve given these people everything.
Trump: Not everything, not yet…
And thus, in Act III, we have The Return of Trump.
People become understandably irritated and exhausted by the incessant pop cultural references that are a hallmark of our hyperreal, postmodern era. It is a sign that we’ve all been programmed by Hollywood, television, or trashy and low art forms. As I noted in another essay:
It occurred to me that I was in a hyperreal land like Skyrim or the Lord of the Rings films. I remembered a favourite scene in Deer Hunter in which Robert De Niro stalks a stag across mountains as an orthodox choir soundtrack added to the sheer majesty of the cinematography.
Why the hell was I thinking of films and an old video game in this place? Once more, authenticity wriggled through my fingers like a little eel as I became conscious of the million media images embedded in my mind that denoted “awesome natural landscape”.
The problem with the Donald Trump saga is that it seems to be consciously and deliberately crafted to not only follow a standard three-act journey complete with cliché but directly to invoke the feelings, characters, and format of the ‘80s and ‘90s films that form its core. It is simply not possible to watch Hulk Hogan at Madison Square Garden, celebrating the triumphant comeback of Trump, without remembering that you’re pretty much watching Rocky III in a politicized form.
It can be tiresome in the post-truth internet age to see comments splattered everywhere on how everything is “theatre” or “all following a plan”. Still, in the case of Trump’s grander arc, it genuinely does give one the impression of a storyline playing out.
Of course, political realism is also being deployed. It remains a fact that, as I noted recently, the madness of the Democrats has alienated erstwhile allies who now flock to Trump out of necessity, whether that be elements of the Zionist Lobby or titans of digital technology fearful of impending tax policies.
However, I would argue that what the Trump mythos actually embodies is a form of hauntology in which decades-old cultural forms, thought dead, exist as afterthoughts within the cultural psyche, waiting to be plucked from the ether and electro-shocked back into life. Everybody deep down in 2020 felt that the Trump storyline felt unresolved and that a satisfying conclusion was needed; whether that was a tragedy or triumphantly holding up the heavyweight belt, it needed to end correctly. Yet this is real-world politics, not a movie.
Perhaps we have all become lost in a miasma of tropes and symbols of pop culture to such a degree that earnestness and authenticity have to be expressed through its language. At Madison Square Garden, Trump described the most vicious and hideous crimes perpetrated by immigrant gangs on American people. I believe him when he tells us it will end when he becomes president again. I think he is genuinely appalled by it. Yet the “meta” is Trump as the avenging angel, Trump as the sheriff returning to town, Trump as Dirty Harry, Trump the consummate showman and entertainer. It isn’t so much that we, as the viewing public, are saturated with the imagery of media and Hollywood, but that the politicians are too, perhaps even more than us.
Kamala Harris actually has more celebrity endorsements than Trump does, but her endorsements represent the facile nothingness and misery of the here and now. Yas Queen Managerialism with a side dish of Leo’s yacht chic, swanning about with gays and HR feminists is no match for Rocky punching meat in an abattoir and running through the trash-strewn streets of Philadelphia before hurtling up the steps of the city’s Museum of Art.
MAGA at Madison Square Garden seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut. Yet, I was also aware that this would be the last time the play of deploying Rocky III as an ideological framing device would be possible before the inferior sequels began. The nostalgic afterglow will cool, and the references fade again into hauntology’s limbo.
I think I might push back my Monthly Review podcast so I can give some takes on the culmnation of the election in the US.
Excellent framing, and yes for anyone old enough to remember those movies or young enough to have watched them growing up on video or dvd’s there is a definite hero story all laid out to hitch this to. I despise the nostalgia for the 80’s and 90’s, it was a perfect time at least for us, our children were little and life was incredibly good. But time’s arrow flies in one direction only, and they aren’t coming back. Population is one problem, almost all developed nations are now struggling with a much larger and in many ways less functional population than in those years. Trump isn’t Reagan, maybe Reagan wasn’t even Reagan, and there is no huge groundswell of prosperity waiting to be released.
What is real and even surpasses the old movies is the evil of the other side. Trump isn’t Shane, or John Wayne, or even Rocky, but Kamala is Darth Vader with a lobotomy. A woman with no convictions, no shame, no intelligence, but the overweening ambition we have been at the mercy of for years. He isn’t a good man by any standards, but he is a better man than the horror show on the blue team. They have managed to defend every disgusting and unnatural and ultimately because divisive racist cause out there. They have alienated all decent people by clinging to the idea that there are no limits, no limits to the degradation, to the predation of our young, to the homeless encampment under the bridges, to the fentanyl and violent gangs coming across the border, to the persecution of the poor in cities and towns with inadequate policing.
I am from Philadelphia and in the years around the release of Rocky Philadelphia was a very safe city. Frank Rizzo as mayor had increased policing. As a teenaged girl I felt safe on south street after dark because I passed a police officer every block. When I watched the film of Kensington (Philadelphia) on Academic Agent’s recent podcast I recognized it immediately and it made me sick. It was never a “nice” area but this was another dimension.
When I hear the line “I thought you were dead” I think of John Wayne in Big Jake. He had been lying low since separating from his wife (Maureen O’Hara reprising the Irish trope beautifully) and everyone he meets greets him with “I thought you were dead”.