“Game Change” knew exactly what was coming

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AAnd we may ask ourselves (to quote Talking Heads – there's never a good time to quote Talking Heads): Well, how did we get here? How did we get ourselves to this place of howling danger? On the eve of the 2024 vice presidential debate, with so terribly much at stake, can we get a little context? And could it be presented in an entertaining way so that we don't get bored? Allow me to recommend a viewing or re-viewing Game change.

But first: let's go back. Back through the germ clouds and the sulfur swirls and the windows broken with the flagpoles, to a time when we were only half crazy. Maybe three quarters crazy. Let's go back to the summer of 2008.

Do you remember 2008? John McCain was the Republican presidential nominee. The Democratic nominee was Barack Obama. The major backlash had not yet been unleashed; The foaming tides of discontent awaited their final blow.

McCain versus Obama. Interesting pair of characters, interesting binary moment for the nation: cranky old McCain, the war hero, unpredictable, perhaps insecure, rumbling around the country on the Straight Talk Express (his bus) – and handsome young Obama, the anointed one, with the noble profile his arena-swelling cadences. “We are a people of the improbable Hope … with a Eye towards Future!” (Cue hysteria, flashing lights.) Did he have a bus? Surely he just floated weightlessly from rally to rally. And as the summer wore on and convention time approached, it became clear that Obama wanted to cream McCain. The polls swung and swung, voter sentiment swung back and forth, but McCain always fell short. Always lose. He had to do something. He had to shake it up. He had to do something… game changing.

Game change dramatizes the reckless hour when McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate (“That's a woman with a gun, John!” one of his advisers stammers: “I mean, come on! The base is going to be fine go Backflips“) and then had to deal with the consequences when it was revealed that she didn't know much about foreign countries or the Federal Reserve. Woody Harrelson plays McCain strategist/bouncer Steve Schmidt, all shoulders and shiny skull; Ed Harris plays a wild, foul-mouthed, wide-eyed McCain; and Julianne Moore, coming from a place of truly Strasbergian interiority, plays Palin.

At the time of its release – 2012 –Game change seemed to be a fairly serious and educational, if very well-made, piece of entertainment. Framed at the beginning and end of Schmidt's interview with Anderson Cooper (in which a sweating Schmidt is asked, “If you had it to do over again, would you have her on the ticket?”), the idea of ​​Palin's selection seemed pretty clear was a catastrophe, a Faustian bargain with the forces of American irrationality. McCain loses, of course, but right after his very dignified concession speech, the crowd begins to roar, “Sa-RAH! Sa-RAH!” Something happens. Palin glows, a radioactive glow. The soundtrack blares with foreboding; The McCain team looks around nervously. You can feel the lion's breath of history on your neck.

From the June 2011 issue: Joshua Green on the Sarah Palin tragedy

Looking at it now, it feels more complex. Because it's a movie, a good movie, with a commitment to the characters and the narrative arc and so on, Game changealmost despite himself, gives us a Palin who is plump, humane and likeable. Forced from her Alaskan habitat by the McCain campaign's unscrupulous jocks, small-town Sarah struggles in the jarring world of prime time. She maintains close ties to her family – her entourage even includes the young man who recently impregnated her illegitimate daughter. (“Thank you for inviting me, Ms. Palin.” “Thanks for touching your mullet, Levi. I really appreciate it.”) Her speech at the Republican National Convention is a slam dunk—she’s killing it! – and the people out. I love her on the street, but her political personality is fragile. No information is saved. It wasn't built for testing. She becomes prey for the liberal media, and in the big interviews you feel for her. You don't like Charlie Gibson and his schoolmasterly frown. Katie Couric circles with a predatory gleam: “When it came to establishing your worldview, I was curious: What newspapers and magazines did you read regularly before you were chosen for it?” (“Name a damn newspaper!” moans Schmidt. )

Verbally, the film has two registers that serve as two opposing discourses. One of them is the banal saying of the popular Sarah: “Hey, Bristol? They hold trig. I'll take Piper on the roller coaster.” The other is the ultra-secular, sub-Sorkin political language used by the hacks and flacks around McCain. “The data shows we need to do four things. We have to win back the independents, we have to excite the base, we have to distance ourselves from the Bush administration, and we have to close the gender gap.” If the “Deep State” exists, this is how it speaks.

So Game changebefore Trump, before the pandemic, before January 6th, clearly ignorant of all the craziness that was coming, they clearly saw the split in the American psyche from which the future – our present! – emerge would emerge. Somewhere on the runway on the campaign jet before the election is announced, the brutal Steve Schmidt is impressed by Palin's equanimity. (She looks blissfully out the window.) “You seem completely unfazed by that,” he says. She turns to him: “It's God's plan.” And despite the slight hint of fanaticism on Moore's face as she says it and the hint of panic on Harrelson's face, you're somehow with her. Schmidt, about to climb to 30,000 feet, doesn't know that he is in the hands of God. But Palin does!

McCain-Palin was a tragedy: a great statesman desperate for victory, succumbing to vanity and making a pact with darkness. That's one way to look at it. McCain-Palin was a comedy: a flailing candidate, frustrated by his own ego, made a ridiculous decision and everything went wrong. That's a different perspective. Game change somehow splits the difference: McCain-Palin was a movie, soapy but terribly consequential, and we still don't know how it will end.