5 - Cinematic Populism and the Political Superhero Blockbuster

Summary

On the eve of the US presidential elections on November 3, 2020, Stephen Colbert's Election Night special on the Showtime television network opened with an animated segment that appropriated the iconography of Batman movies to cast President Donald Trump as a cartoonish supervillain and his challenger Joe Biden as an aloof, but heroic defender of the democratic process. Titled “Election Knight Rises,” the segment derived much of its humor from the fact that it depicted the events of the day as a dramatic confrontation between a Batman-like Biden and a Joker-like Trump. In doing so, the segment mapped key categories of the superhero genre onto the 2020 election and portrayed the latter as pivotal moment in an epic battle between exceptional people whose outcome would decide the fate of the American nation. Simultaneously, the segment used this construction as basis for a series of highly intertextual jokes about both candidates. The election day special's opening was neither the first nor the only example of this kind of joke on late night television. In fact, it followed similar segments on Stephen Colbert's Late Show (CBS, since 2015) which, earlier that year, had used mash-ups of television news footage and scenes from Avengers: Endgame (2019) to depict prominent Democrats and Republicans as superheroes or super-villains (“America: Endgame,” “America: Endgame [RNC Edition]”). The resonance of these send-ups was heightened by the fact that the election campaigns of both parties occasionally used similar references to the genre to advance their causes. In December 2019, for example, one of the Twitter accounts operated by the Trump campaign posted a short video with a doctored scene from Endgame that superimposed Trump's face onto the head of the super-villain Thanos. In the clip, Trump/Thanos uses the magical Infinity Gauntlet to turn Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff into dust –a depiction that soon not only prompted outrage on Twitter and other social media, but also inspired mockery by users who noticed that the footage implicitly depicted Trump as a genocidal madman whose plans were bound to fail (@TrumpWarRoom; see also Einwächter, Ossa, Sina, and Stollfuss 148–49). But Republican campaigners were not the only ones inspired by superhero narratives.