The Dream That Was America

I love watching the Oscars. Partly it’s just because I love movies, but I also do it as a culture critic. The best picture nominees are filtered through the collective efforts of creatives, businesses, critics, and industry professionals who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ voters. That means watching them gives me a good picture of where the country is; even if you see Hollywood as representing only one half of the country—since it’s primarily populated by liberals—it’s often reacting against the other half.

The Oscars this year are a great example of how modern liberalism has changed, and where the new lines are being drawn in the American culture war. Hollywood’s vision of liberalism used to be about making our culture better by living up to our founding ideals, like Aaron Sorkin’s heroes always preached in The West Wing or The Newsroom. But now, it is largely about making our culture better by rejecting our founding ideals. 

Movies nominated for best picture have historically been pretty affirming of normative (if left-of-center) societal values in the cross section of Western and American culture. Winners like CODA, Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Oppenheimer either mostly focused on characters living the American dream in traditional families while focusing on personal growth (CODA, Everything Everywhere All at Once), the tragedy of society changing (Nomadland), or someone within the establishment trying to fight for its best ideals (Oppenheimer). There are exceptions to this, like The Shape of Water and The Power of the Dog, which were more blatantly deconstructive of America as an inherently racist and sexist place, but they weren’t the majority of winners. And even in the years they won, other nominees were more affirming or neutral toward societal values, like Darkest Hour or King Richard.

One of the best examples of the positive attitude toward these values at the Oscars is 2001 best picture winner Gladiator. This film portrayed Rome as founded on solid values, though society was failing to live up to them. Heroic figures then fought for the modern world to live up to its “true self.”

Marcus Aurelius: And what is Rome, Maximus?

Maximus: I’ve seen much of the rest of the world. It is brutal and cruel and dark, Rome is the light.

Marcus Aurelius: Yet you have never been there. You have not seen what it has become … Will I be the emperor who gave Rome back her true self? There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish … it was so fragile. And I fear that it will not survive the winter.

But this year’s best picture nominees almost entirely agree that society is fundamentally bad. It’s the core values of mainstream culture—not a failure to live up to them—that causes people within those societies to oppress those at the margins. Anora is about a sex worker who is rejected from marrying into a respectable family because of their prejudice against that profession. The Brutalist is about a Jewish immigrant architect who is mistreated in America because of its fundamental prejudice against Jews and for Christians and the wealthy. Wicked is about a girl mistreated because of society’s biases and who discovers all the positive virtues her land stands for are just propaganda to hide oppression. Emilia Pérez is about a transgender former mob boss and lawyer who are forced to live and work in secret because their society is fundamentally racist and transphobic. The Substance is about a society destroying a woman because it demands all women live up to impossible but deeply entrenched beauty standards.

Past films that Hollywood chose to elevate would often portray American values (like family) positively while leaving the impression that negative ones—like racism and sexism—do not represent our highest “dream of Rome” values. This would often mean that someone, often the protagonist, would try to work within the system to change it. 

But in these new films, heroes don’t come from the system or work within it to make it better. When Elphaba finds out the Wizard who runs Oz is evil, she has to escape society to not become party to his oppression; her friend Glinda is portrayed as morally compromised for not joining her. When Anora tries to find help from people outside her sex-worker community and within the legal system, she finds none. The heroine of The Substance is destroyed by society’s beauty standards. Dune: Part Two is a direct deconstruction of the idea of the internal reformer, with Paul’s rise to power leading to him becoming an oppressor rather than a liberator. In these movies, there is no redemption for the society at hand that draws on the culture’s own internal resources.

Conclave is somewhat of an exception; the Catholic reformers can work within the system to make things better while adhering to the faith’s “spiritual core” (not unlike the “true self” of Rome). But the only way they can do that is by disobeying Catholic dogma. 

This is a fundamental shift in how Hollywood portrays what it means to be a hero in our world. Hollywood is a liberal place, so heroes have typically been portrayed as standard-bearers of liberal values. But what a liberal is has changed. Filmmaker Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice, Don’t Look Up) summed up this shift in 2021 when he described Aaron Sorkin as the “right-wing version of me.” 

I would say Sorkin is slightly right of center. I think that’s fair. His interpretation of that trial [Trial of the Chicago 7, the film Sorkin made about the Vietnam War] was one of supporting the system. There’s a lot of dialogue in that movie about belief in our institutions.

For anyone watching The American President, A Few Good Men, or The West Wing in the ’90s, describing Sorkin, whose stories were pretty much all liberals fighting right-wing villains, as right-wing sounds absolutely insane. But it’s true that he also seems to believe in the fundamental goodness of the country, as exemplified by the lines “I think the institutions of our democracy are wonderful things, that right now are populated by some terrible people,”—from Trial of the Chicago 7—and “We aren’t the greatest country in the world, but we sure as hell used to be,”—from The Newsroom.

This shift in the Overton window for what is considered “right wing” also partly explains the “rightward cultural shift” that has taken hold and worried some and excited others. People point to the popular vote win by Donald Trump, the supposed “death of wokeness” in entertainment with companies like Disney removing gay and transgender-related storylines, and a seeming return of interest in faith among many intellectuals and Gen Z. In fact, it’s many of the exact societal values that the modern Oscar films are critiquing—like traditional sexual norms, Christian faith, beauty norms, and more conservative views on immigration—that parts of America are moving to embrace.

And yet, the data shows that the country is still further left on issues like sexuality, abortion, climate change, or gun rights than it was decades ago. Even where trends are reversing (such as support for LGBTQ issues), Americans’ positions are still further left than when West Wing was in its heyday; Many of the figures who are embracing “the right” are people who would have been called liberals not too long ago—including Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr. Many explicitly say “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me.” Even the modern rhetoric that is considered “right wing” on immigration today isn’t too far off from how Democrats spoke about the issue not long ago. Joe Rogan had a related laugh on his show in November, quoting liberals saying: “’We need our own Joe Rogan.’” To which he responded: “But they had me! I was on your side!”

Indeed, part of what makes the right more attractive is the perception that the left has ceded the very low bar of believing in Sorkin-style innate goodness of our fundamental values. When The New York Times claims in its 1619 Project that the “true founding” of America was when slaves arrived—thereby basing American origins not in freedom, but oppression—it makes Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again”—regardless of how faithful one thinks his agenda is to liberal democratic values in practice—a much closer rhetorical match to the values of the mainstream. A Jordan Peterson-esque figure can draw fans from the right and the left simply by celebrating Western values that Sorkin would also affirm, like family, free speech, and the goodness of religion’s moral principles (even if he’s not sure about the literal truths of those faiths). Indeed, Peterson’s documentaries, like The Foundations of The West, are deeply filled with the “dream that was Rome” vision of a great heritage that should be reclaimed. 

This should temper both the left and the right on conversations around the supposed “vibe shift” we’re going through. The culture does not seem to be “moving rightward” nearly as much as it’s not moving leftward as fast as Hollywood. Conservatives should not make the mistake of overinterpreting recent electoral or cultural victories, lest they a) overstep and engender their own backlash or b) become complacent that they’re “winning” and fail to remember that their definition of “conservative” itself is leftward of where it was decades ago.

Likewise, liberals in Hollywood should realize that by digging in their heels with anti-establishment content, they open themselves up to losing their monopoly on culture-shaping entertainment. Conservative media companies like the Daily Wire are chomping at the bit to create movies and TV that challenge Hollywood’s empire. The more people perceive Hollywood as out of step with their values, the more they will be open to alternatives. This might mean that conservatives will eventually have the eyeballs and cultural trust to engage in the kind of social shaping that has usually been the domain of Hollywood. 

The Oscars reflect the views of the people who tell our stories. But a reckoning is due when those stories are no longer broadly ours.