Greg Stillson – “The Dead Zone” (1983)
Martin Sheen’s Greg Stillson in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “The Dead Zone” is a slightly different figure from the others on this list. He never actually takes power, for one, and in the film’s timeline doesn’t get to wreak the kind of havoc that he might have otherwise. But for all that (and hopefully because of that), he might be closer to Trump than even the names above. Both King’s novel and Cronenberg’s film (one of the director’s most mainstream outings, but arguably one of his most entertaining) focus principally on schoolteacher Johnny (Christopher Walken), who wakes from a five-year coma to discover he can discover the past, present and future secrets of anyone he touches. Stillson, appearing late in the movie (he’s a joint main character in the book), is a senatorial candidate who, Johnny’s touch reveals, will go on to become President, and more specifically a ranting, raving president who will start a nuclear war (“The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, hallelujah”). Comparing it to the chance to stop Hitler before World War Two, Johnny goes on to attempt to assassinate Stillson: he fails and dies, but Stillson grabs a baby as a human shield and is exposed as a coward. While much of the character’s back story is dumped for the movie (kicking a dog to death, blackmail, threats of murder), Sheen gets across the perfect amount of wide-eyed mania and ego in the short screen time he gets, giving a performance that’s decidedly Trump-esque in retrospect, even if it’s surely a coincidence.
With the exception of Idi Amin (and that story is based on a fictionalized novel), none of our picks are based on historical figures —though obviously, Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” comes pretty close. However, two real-life card-carrying dictators have been portrayed recently, with rather hilarious results: Kim Jong-Il in “Team America: World Police” and Kim Jong-Un in “The Interview.” Similarly, Saddam Hussein cropped up in “South Park” and “The Devil’s Double,” Napoleon in 1926’s “Napoleon,” and Genghis Khan was portrayed by Tadanobu Asano in the pretty decent “Mongol” and by John Wayne in the dire “The Conqueror.” “Quo Vadis” portrays Nero as a despot, and “Julius Caesar” is very much about the threat of despotism, and of course, there’s the brilliantly definitive embodiment of Hitler by Bruno Ganz in the excellent, essential “Downfall,” along with myriad, mostly lesser portrayals, while Issey Ogata as Emperor Hirohito of Japan in Sokurov‘s “The Sun” is one of the most impressive and undersung performances of the century so far.
On the fictional dictator level, there are films that just missed the cut: obviously Sasha Baron-Cohen‘s “The Dictator” qualifies, but his finest moment was throwing ash over Ryan Seacrest at the Oscars so we scratched him out. We already had “The Manchurian Candidate,” so we dropped Frankenheimer’s “Seven Days in May“; there are a couple of potentials in the widely panned “Land of the Blind,” but that film is pretty poor, and Jodie Foster‘s turn in “Elysium” is horrifying for other reasons, and we didn’t want to muddy the waters. Finally, there’s Groucho Marx’s Rufus T. Firefly, leader of Freedonia in “Duck Soup,” but while he is a dreadful, dreadful leader, he is altogether too lovable for us to lump him in with the subject of this feature.
Over to you, then —what cautionary tales do you have on (tiny) hand to illuminate these dark days further? Or are you disgusted (because you can hardly be surprised) by our unapologetically anti-Trump bias? Let it all out in the comments.
WHERE IS IDIOCRACY
Greg Stillson is far more like Ted Cruz than Trump, making Cruz far scarier (though no less a threat to the nation).
Seems rhetoric & identity politics still reign supreme in USA. That Americans are more concerned about a loudmouth pseudo-candidate who has actually done no real harm to the world than a woman who has obliterated entire countries and threatened to nuke others shows the vacuity of your political discourse (not to mention your shocking amorality).
I rewatched NETWORK recently, and its portrait of a mentally unbalanced figure gleefully turned into a media star by corporate conglomerates because he raises network revenues, and given a national pulpit from which to spew nonsensical populist rants, felt like a documentary about Trump.