In praise of Bob Roberts – the polit­i­cal satire that got it spot on

Any­one wak­ing up from a year-long coma might be for­giv­en for not entire­ly believ­ing the world that now exists before them. ​‘Yes,’ you might gen­tly insist, ​‘Don­ald Trump real­ly is Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. He’s actu­al­ly wants to build a wall between Amer­i­ca and Mex­i­co and he’s try­ing to ban Mus­lims from enter­ing the coun­try. Oh, and Brex­it hap­pened. But Leonar­do DiCaprio did final­ly win an Oscar.’

Switch­ing on the news in 2017 is like watch­ing an absurd mock­u­men­tary – like a 21^st cen­tu­ry remake of Bob Roberts, the 1992 satire direct­ed by and star­ring Tim Rob­bins, which fol­lows a right-wing busi­ness­man run­ning for Unit­ed States Sen­ate who promis­es to clean up Amer­i­ca with his return to ​‘whole­some’ fam­i­ly values.

Set in Philadel­phia in 1990, the film employs var­i­ous doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing tech­niques (hand­held and shaky cam­eras, the absence of a nar­ra­tor and plen­ty of under­cov­er eaves­drop­ping) in order to tell the sto­ry of the fic­ti­tious Bob Roberts’ cam­paign for pow­er. British doc­u­men­tary mak­er Ter­ry Man­ches­ter (Bri­an Mur­ray) takes the audi­ence with him as he joins Roberts on his mis­sion to Make Amer­i­ca Great Again – or, in Roberts’ words, to, ​“a‑Change Back Time”.

With plen­ty of mon­ey to pump into his cam­paign and armed with a gui­tar and a win­ning smile, the folk-singer / busi­ness­man turns his atten­tions to what he sees as the most seri­ous issues plagu­ing Amer­i­ca: drugs and lazi­ness. The cam­paign trail footage shows Roberts using pop­u­lar folk music (and provoca­tive music videos fea­tur­ing leg­gy female dancers) to reach out to poten­tial vot­ers and con­vince them of his con­ser­v­a­tive lean­ings while his dodgy cam­paign man­ag­er (Alan Rick­man) will do any­thing to win votes over Roberts’ rival, the world-weary Brick­ley Paste (played by Gore Vidal).

It’s hard not to notice the sim­i­lar­i­ties between scenes of Trump lam­bast­ing Hillary Clin­ton post-email scan­dal with Roberts’ accu­sa­tions of his rival’s predilec­tion for teenage girls. A pho­to­graph is released of Paste with a young girl. It tran­spires that she’s just one of his daughter’s friends (his daugh­ter has been cropped out of the image), but the dam­age is already done.

Like Don­ald, Bob is first and fore­most a busi­ness­man. His cam­paign bus isn’t used sole­ly for cam­paign­ing, he’s also hap­py to host bro­kers that trade night and day whilst on the move. His approach to pol­i­tics is much the same as his approach to busi­ness. Embody­ing the cor­po­rate greed of 1980s Amer­i­ca where any­thing goes if you’re the win­ner, Roberts not only pre-empts Trump, he’s a sign that times indeed are a‑changin’ back to the way they were. Back we go to Reagan’s Amer­i­ca, an era in which Num­ber 1 is the only num­ber that mat­ters, where might is right and where polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is ush­ered out and replaced with good old-fash­ioned ​‘fam­i­ly’ values.

Play­ing the pop­ulist card is a game both Trump and Roberts have mas­tered. Where Trump can unleash his unsavoury one-lin­ers to mil­lions on twit­ter, Roberts appeals to ​‘ordi­nary’ Amer­i­cans with his catchy folk num­bers. In one scene he croons:

“Some peo­ple have, some peo­ple have not and they com­plain and com­plain and com­plain. Some peo­ple will work, some peo­ple will not but they’ll com­plain and com­plain and com­plain. It’s society’s fault, I don’t have a job, It’s society’s fault I’m a slob. You are liv­ing in the land of the free, no-one going to hand you, opportunity.”

Just like Trump, Roberts isn’t for sol­i­dar­i­ty among ​‘ordi­nary’, work­ing-class Amer­i­cans. Instead, the would-be leader encour­ages divi­sion and a with-me-or-against-me atti­tude. He makes ene­mies out of the weak­est mem­bers of soci­ety and harangues them with his catchy, up-beat music. When Roberts appears on a prime-time TV show to sing one of his most well-known tunes, only to switch it to a cam­paign song once live on air, the pow­er is cut halfway through his per­for­mance. The show’s work­ers are vis­i­bly incensed. There are clear par­al­lels to be drawn between this and Trump’s own, wide­ly pub­li­cised ten­sions with the media.

In anoth­er mem­o­rable scene, an out­raged African-Amer­i­can talk show host accus­es Roberts of being uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, stat­ing that, ​“What Bob Roberts wants to see in Amer­i­ca is a com­pli­ant and silent pub­lic which respects the wish­es and actions of its pres­i­dents no mat­ter how immoral or ille­gal.” Sound familiar?

Despite the unearthing of var­i­ous scan­dals and a mount­ing fury over Roberts’ cam­paign through­out the film, he claims vic­to­ry at the film’s cli­max. ​“For­get human rights, for­get women’s rights, and for­get help­ing the home­less,” reports a crit­ic, ​“Bob Roberts is not for the peo­ple, he’s for him­self.” You need only look at Trump’s posi­tion on immi­gra­tion, Oba­macare, women’s rights and cli­mate change to appre­ci­ate that what we have to deal with could be so much worse.