Before Bob Roberts and long before Veep, Robert Altman’s Tanner ‘88 was the definitive satire of modern Washington politicking and the soul-sickening, ever-lengthening presidential campaign seasons. Yet Altman’s 11-episode, 6-hour series, co-created and co-written by Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau, plays its cards closer to the vest than either Tim Robbins’ film or Armando Iannucci’s TV show. Shedding nearly all signs of cartoonish buffoonery and taking a more definitively arch tone, Tanner ‘88 presents the fictional campaign of Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy) through the lens of realism—or “neorealism” as the pretentious cameraman Deke (Matt Malloy) is fond of saying—effectively blurring the lines between the real and the fictional by being shot on the campaign trail during the actual 1988 presidential runs and including cameos from everyone from Bob Dole and Pat Robertson to Gary Hart and Kitty Dukakis, most of whom were not in on the joke and blindly believed that Tanner, like his campaign slogan, was “for real.”
But temporarily fooling actual candidates that Tanner was legit is merely a fortuitous side effect of Altman and Trudeau’s approach to the material—a sign of how deeply entrenched they were in the absurdist, image- and sound-bite-driven reality show contest for the grand prize of the White House. Because it’s so deeply connected to the political world of the time, Tanner ‘88 is undoubtedly dated and firmly situated in the years before the internet and the 24-hour news cycle. This, however, isn’t to suggest that it has nothing to say about politics in the 21st century as it was in fact a clarion call, warning of the very nightmare we find ourselves in now, with politics having fully transformed into a national sport and manufactured and malleable data and images being shaped into narratives and taglines to engage with or infuriate a particular fanbase.
While the technology involved in the campaigning is certainly arcane, the intricate process of creating and maintaining a public image and the notion of the campaign as something of a living, evolving organism that requires constant heel-turns and concessions (both moral and strategic) is, at its heart, very much the same some 35 years later. And it’s in its meticulous detailing of the various processes and competing interests at play that Tanner ‘88 marks itself as one of the most fascinating, perhaps even prescient, interrogations of how the world’s most powerful man goes about taking his throne.
It is Altman and Trudeau’s detail and process-oriented approach, which is as exacting in its portrayal of campaign staff, beat reporters, and family members of politicians as it is of Tanner himself, that served as inspiration for Aaron Sorkin when he made The West Wing. But one need only watch the pilot episode of Tanner ‘88 to see that its sense of grounded reality is free of the smugness and preachiness that’s typically found alongside Sorkin’s fingerprints. Unlike Sorkin, Altman and Trudeau are not interested in falsely restoring anyone’s faith in the system they represent. There is no sense that Tanner is any better or worse than any of the other candidates, only that his decision to run for president inevitably thrusts him into a form of political machinery that bends and twists both him and his opinions in ways he dislikes, and often completely disagrees with. He instead becomes helpless clay in the hands of those deemed professionally qualified to mold his image, his political stances and his words.
In one of the series most indelible sequences, Deke surreptitiously films Tanner through a glass coffee table as he goes on an impassioned tirade about the value of American democracy. Although it never moves beyond platitudes, it is one of the few moments that Tanner’s true thoughts and feelings are seen. Yet when his campaign manager uses the footage as the catalyst for a new campaign slogan—the aforementioned “For real”—Tanner feels betrayed, completely lacking in agency in what he initially believed to be his campaign. And it’s that dawning revelation that Tanner is not even central to his own campaign’s importance, but rather the calm, immovable eye at the center of a political hurricane sustained by a seemingly endless supply of horse shit that stands as one of Tanner ‘88’s most crucial running themes.
Tanner ‘88 also exposes the fair-weathered loyalties of virtually everyone to the candidate they work for, and campaign managers and spin doctors are driven far less by any moral fortitude or strongly held political beliefs than by the rising thrills as the campaign season goes along. If much of this seems like old hat by the 2020s, Altman and Trudeau’s sly, cutting sense of humor goes a long way to make the ideas at its core more compelling and entertaining, while also pointing decisively to an era where the point of no return had not yet been reached. If nothing else, the film provides an exciting window into the inner workings of the countless mechanisms at play in crafting the image of an American president, and reminds us that while the tools and mediums may have changed, the game has infuriatingly remained exactly the same.
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