I remember reading a book called "Presidents Are Unreliable" many years ago. The author of the book Linda took the "Watergate Incident" as an opportunity to deeply explore the principles and operational details of the United States' separation of powers. The title of the book is not to accuse the President of the United States, but to illustrate that the President, as a person, also has the possibility of making mistakes, and what is needed is a system of supervision and restriction. However, in American film and television works, the president basically appears on the screen and television in a brilliant image. Like the heroic images in "Independence Day" and "Air Force One", or the great images that turned the tide in the series "West Chamber of the White House", "Commander of the Armed Forces" and "24".
And everything is not the same. Recently, the hit American dramas have changed the style of praising the president in the past, and changed to the "president is unreliable" route, abruptly dragging down the superior president of the United States. Among them, the hit drama "Prison Break" The fifth seasons of "and "24" both pointed their heads at the President of the United States. The President of the United States instantly became the enemy of the people and the embodiment of a conspiracy. When the president of the United States turned into a negative image, it brought the show’s popularity. Although this is not the only reason, it is indeed a rather interesting phenomenon. Take "24" as an example. This series of episodes that have been aired for five seasons has actually begun to enter a bottleneck in the third and fourth seasons. However, the fifth season unexpectedly broke through the bottleneck and was highly praised. The three Emmy Awards are inseparable from the subversive plot design that set the President of the United States as the mastermind behind the scenes.
Why American audiences are so keen to accept the storyline of the American president as the villain seems to be contrary to the feelings of the entire nation. In fact, this is inseparable from the sense of crisis looming over the American people after 9/11. On the one hand, it lies in the people’s skepticism of the current US government’s policy implementation, but also the lack of trust in President Bush Jr., plus the Hollywood leftists on the other hand. People frequently attacked the Bush administration, and constantly exposed the conspiracy theories of George W. Bush, such as "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmed by Mike Moore, greatly damaged George W. Bush's personality. For a long time, no U.S. president has been so suspicious and untrusted. This also determines the audience soil for the subversion of the U.S. president to a certain extent.
But this does not mean that the American people can let the TV series slander their president. If you look carefully at these two series of Fox, you will find that the plot arrangement is quite skillful. In the fifth season of "Prison Break" and "24", the president who was the villain was promoted to president in an emergency because of the death of the former president. This is because the screenwriter fully considered the audience's acceptance. If a president who took office in the general election is the villain of the drama, this is undoubtedly a denial of the rationality of the US election system, and at the same time it is tantamount to despising the IQ of the American people, which is very undesirable. It can be seen that the screenwriters were deliberate before the subversion and avoided some potentially sensitive issues. At the same time, in both dramas, they designed an interest-manipulating group behind the villain president, which is also a political support for the president through the consortium. The family’s own ethical stance is to prove that the president’s actions may not be reliable.
The president is unreliable, so only the system is reliable. In the fifth season of "24", the agent Jack Bauer arbitrarily kidnapped the President of the United States in order to protect national interests and mechanisms, and forced evidence. Such an ending is actually to show that no one can override the system and the law, and the US president who is supreme in power is no exception. Since the president as an individual is sometimes unreliable, a reliable system must be used to control the unreliable president.
Text: Eyebrow Ruler
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