INVISIBLE MEN

HOW HOLLYWOOD DEPICTS OUR PRESIDENTS--AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT US

In America, anybody can be elected president. That's the risk we run.

In 18 months, we'll have narrowed it down from anybody to somebody, but the risk will remain the same.

No one knows how we do it, really. What template of a president trembles inside our brains with wan electricity, waiting for a flesh-and-blood double to inspire us to vote? If there is no template, what do we judge candidates against? Historians, pollsters and journalists have failed to tell us. It is a mystery.

In a movie called "The Best Man" in 1964, an Adlai Stevenson-like candidate played by Henry Fonda says: "Men without faces tend to get elected president, and power or personality tend to fill in the features."

So what is presidentiality? Oddly enough, for all the neo-Walter Lippmans and goody-two-shoes reformers demanding we look at the record and the issues, presidentiality seems to require an ambiguity verging on invisibility, like George Bush as rendered by Garry Trudeau in "Doonesbury" -- just an asterisk in midair, accompanied by an evil twin named Skippy.

Hollywood understands this, maybe because in America anybody can become a movie star too. That's the risk we run every time we go to a Madonna movie.

What does it say about our instincts for the presidency that lately we've had a run of corrupt or bumbling or nebbish presidents in "The Pelican Brief," "Clear and Present Danger" and "No Way Out"? In "Point Break," bank robbers wear rubber masks of Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan, and call themselves "The Ex-Presidents."

In "Dave," Kevin Kline plays a nasty conservative president named Bill Mitchell. He also plays a presidential double named Dave, who is hired to deceive crowds into thinking they're seeing Mitchell. As Mitchell says to Dave: "You're a very handsome man -- just get rid of the grin, you look like a schmuck." Dave-the-double ends up a temporary president -- a kindly, sincere liberal president who rolls around with his dog on the lawn. Strange: This "double" theme in president movies goes back at least to the early '30s.

President movies are not the same as historical costume dramas like "Jefferson in Paris," with Nick Nolte gliding around in knee breeches. Nor are they all those floppy-forelock embarrassments about Jack Kennedy. Actors doing real presidents rarely generate enough excitement to keep your eyes off their wigs. Henry Fonda played Lincoln, but it was more like Lincoln playing Henry Fonda. Anthony Hopkins will play Nixon in a film by Oliver Stone due to start shooting here soon, but who could play Nixon better than Nixon? The problem with costume-drama presidents is that almost always, the actor can't keep star quality and presidentiality going at the same time.

All historical costume dramas have to be about real presidents, and all modern ones have to be about fictional presidents, generic presidents, ghostly figures who fulfill whatever popular notion of presidentiality lurks behind all that vagueness.

It's tempting to scrutinize the '60s and '90s and find patterns. Then as now, we lived in a time when things were falling apart in a world we never made and ignorant armies clashed by night, etc. Tough choices: old/young, stoned/straight, fear/love. It took a certain instinct to tell the cash from the trash.

Maybe the same things could be said of almost any decade in this or any other century. Nevertheless, in the '60s:

Old/young: In "Wild in the Streets" (1968), Christopher Jones, with his James Dean mouth and Charlie Sheen forehead, is a 24-year-old rock star who becomes president and puts everybody over 35 into concentration camps. At the end, some 10-year-olds start to plot against him because he's too old.

Stoned/straight: See above, and below.

Black/white: Robert Downey's "Putney Swope" (1969) not only makes a black man the most powerful adman in America, but makes a marijuana-smoking midget the president, adding to the shock by having President Mimeo and his midget wife thrash around on their bed in a necking scene that ends up a menage a trois. Later, in 1972, James Earl Jones starred in "The Man," about a black senator who becomes president.

Fear/love: Burt Lancaster is the Air Force general in "Seven Days in May" (1964) who stages a coup against Fredric March as the president whose polls are at all-time lows following a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union -- but the hidden strengths of wimpy liberalism overcome the conspicuous brawn of militaristic conservatism.

Self-respect/self-destruct: In "Fail-Safe" (1964), Henry Fonda plays the president who orders the destruction of New York to pay for a mistaken nuclear strike on Russia.

Sane/insane: In "The President's Analyst" (1967), James Coburn plays a baboon-grinning shrink who acquires vast knowledge about the president, whom we never see. His invisibility makes it possible to imagine madness and power beyond anything actable.

Invisibility is important. Remember those old horror movies where the scientists traveled to Washington to speak to the president? And wasn't the president always filmed from the back? This minimized the problems of both presidentiality and star quality. (These were the sort of movies that showed transmission towers sending emergency signals you could see, like lightning.) The effect was that of a Chinese emperor in the epoch when a commoner could be put to death for merely seeing him: untellable power and awe, in the manner of the Wizard of Oz himself.

In "Filial Love" (1915) a little boy decides that only the president can save his father, who is unjustly accused of murder. He hops a freight train to Washington and wanders around looking for the president: Union Station, Capitol Hill, Lafayette Square and the White House. It's a strange movie. The city has the gloomy, abandoned stolidity of landscapes in recurring dreams. The boy shouts through the White House fence, then approaches a door. A man waves him away. No one speaks to the great Oz. The boy goes to a park where he sees the real murderer and gets him arrested. His father is freed. The mojo of the invisible president seems to deserve credit.

Visible or Invisible

In the teens and '20s, president movies were set in either Latin America or the Balkans, but never in America. Plots tended to turn on political upheaval and the occasional mining contract. Problems were solved by the can-do energy of an American visitor who serves as a missionary for democracy, replacing General Mendoza or the King of Ruthenia with a president. They had names like "Soldier of Fortune," "Soldier of Chance," "His Pajama Girl" and "Yankee Doodle, Jr." They also had the allure of justifying our imperialism in Latin America and our disdain for European decadence.

The president movie as we know it surfaced briefly in the early '30s, as the legitimacy of the American idea came into question with the Depression. Then Hollywood moved away from it -- more movies were made about roller-skating and pigeons, though fictional presidents held their own against bubonic plague and dry cleaning, according to one film guide.

In 1932, "The Phantom President" arrived with the themes of invisibility and doubleness spelled out as carefully as they would be 60 years later in "Dave" and "Doonesbury." It opens with portraits of the Mount Rushmore quartet (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt) coming to life and singing "The Country Needs a Man." Theodore K. Blair, played by George M. Cohan, is the man, but he lacks "ginger and pizzazz." Politicians find a look-alike -- a low-rent entertainer named Varney, also played by Cohan. Varney wins the nomination for Blair, who's in hiding. After many twists, Varney runs for president under his own name, and wins.

Ten years later, Jimmy Cagney would play Cohan in "Yankee Doodle Dandy." It opens with Cagney/Cohan in a Broadway musical called "I'd Rather Be Right." In this show-within-the-movie, Cagney/Cohan plays Franklin Roosevelt -- a leaping, tap-dancing Roosevelt, believe it or not. Freed from his wheelchair with an insouciance that would be attacked as tasteless and politically incorrect now, he struts back and forth along the footlights, bent over like a man simultaneously treading water and leaning out a window. The movie is an orgy of propaganda proving that Roosevelt is an ordinary guy, and all ordinary guys should want to fight the Germans and the Japanese.

"I can't forget how Lafayette helped give us our first chance," Cagney/Cohan/Roosevelt sings.

Now, he says, it's time to return the favor by rescuing France.

"We'll take it back from Hitler, and put ants in his Japants!"

Beyond the doubling, there's the invisibility of the actual president. After opening night, a critic in the movie says: "My publisher resents Cohan impersonating the president -- says our young readers dream of growing up to be president."

A telegram summons Cohan to Washington. On a rainy night he arrives at the White House, which has the conspicuous emptiness it tends to have in president movies -- a shrine to an unnamed idol, a recurring dream feeling. Cagney ascends to FDR's office. We see Roosevelt from behind, with a cigarette in a trademark cigarette holder.

"How's my double?" Roosevelt asks.

Later in the movie, in a flashback to World War I, Cohan stands in front of a recruiting station tentatively whistling the first notes of his interventionist anthem "Over There." Behind him a man in the crowd turns, lifts a cigarette holder and gives the viewer a strobe-moment look-alike profile of Roosevelt.

Cohan is already linked in the public's mind to both the presidency and the double theme, from his performance in "The Phantom President" -- and now Roosevelt becomes Cohan becomes Cagney becomes the ordinary guy becomes a supporter of Roosevelt's determination to get us into the war.

In other words, he's all things to all men, one president invisible or visible -- whether near to us or far, it's no matter, Franklin, what you are, we vote for you.

Presidential Doubling

In "Suddenly" (1954) Frank Sinatra is a hired assassin trying to take out the president with a sniper rifle in a town out West. He is neither patriot nor traitor, but the essence of a postwar existential psychopath and narcissist, the sort of creep that literary existentialists like Norman Mailer glamorized as an apostle of freedom and authenticity. (Then Mailer sprung one from jail, and the guy stabbed a waiter to death.)

"I never killed a president before," Sinatra says.

"Don't you have any feelings?" asks a mother he has taken hostage.

"No, I don't, lady. They were taken out of me by experts. Feelings are for suckers. If I had any, they'd be for me. . . . I got no feeling against the president. Don't give me that jazz."

He finds the job ridiculous. "Half a million clams for nothing. Five p.m. I kill the president, a second later there's a new president."

Sinatra gets killed by his hostages. The president never appears, except in the form of Secret Service men and cops who have taken over the little town. He is doubled by the vice president, also unseen, who would replace him before the bullet was cool. If his death means nothing, his life means nothing. Invisible.

In "Advise and Consent" (1962) Franchot Tone proves Sinatra right. The plot hangs on a tied Senate vote on the nomination of a secretary of state. The president dies during the vote. The vice president, as president of the Senate, could break the tie but decides he wants to name his own secretary of state. He walks out of the Senate chamber looking suddenly presidential. (Vice presidents are never shown looking presidential.)

In "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick satirized not only paranoid militaristic screwballs who want to start a nuclear war, but also the feckless inability of anyone to stop them. Peter Sellers plays three roles. As Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, he is a Britisher who tries with ruling-class ironies to talk Gen. Jack D. Ripper into recalling bombers he has ordered into Russia. As the insane Dr. Strangelove, he shouts "Mein Fuhrer!" from his wheelchair when he talks to President Merkin Muffley, played by Sellers as a bald, bland, whining exemplar of the burgeoning cult of personal feelings.

President Muffley calls the Russian premier to give him the bad news.

"Well, how do you think I feel about it, Dmitri? I feel terrible about it. I'm sorry. All right, you're sorrier than I am, but don't say I'm not sorry."

Then, in 1979's "Being There," Sellers went even farther with the idea of the invisible and doubled president. He plays a half-wit gardener named Chance who has spent his whole life in a rich man's house in Washington. The old man dies. Sellers reacts with all the emotion of Sinatra in "Suddenly." He sits on the dead man's bed and turns on the television.

The housekeeper says: "It doesn't make any difference to you."

He sees the president on TV. He mimics his hand gestures. He has learned everything he knows by mirroring television.

He leaves the house. A limousine hits him. It belongs to a political kingmaker, who takes him in and is fascinated by his conversation, a sort of mirroring in which he says simply, "Yes, I understand." The kingmaker introduces him to the president as Chauncey Gardener. Asked for his opinion of the economy, Chauncey says: "As long as the roots have not suffered, all is well in the garden." The president quotes him in a speech, and he becomes famous.

At the kingmaker's funeral, two powerful pallbearers confer on the political situation. "I believe we should hang on to the presidency -- our one and only chance is Chauncey Gardener," says one.

Once upon a time, before America started gnawing on its own psyche as if it were a canker sore, the invisibility trick gave movie audiences a president vastly grander than even Henry Fonda. Nothing new about this trick: The seclusion of rulers has been a custom everywhere from ancient Egypt to the private bathroom in the CEO's office.

Doubling is an ancient dramatic trick too: Romulus and Remus founding Rome, Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper," and the twin girls in the "Sweet Valley High" teen novel series. Plus all the dichotomies of the yin and the yang, right brain and left brain, male and female and binary computer languages. Why not our idea of the president? Doubling gives us a chance to reconcile contradictions and excuse hypocrisy. We can have a president who's a cold manipulator and one who's a compassionate visionary.

We usually do, in fact.

Movie presidents have to seem vulnerable. They're very different from other movie heads of state. There isn't much doubled or invisible about Yul Brynner as Pharaoh or the King of Siam, for instance. Or Robert Shaw as Henry VIII, or Marlon Brando as the Godfather.

Best not to make too much of a muchness with these things. What does it mean that not one but two pig movies, "Gordy" and "Babe," are coming out this year? And why did people in the 1930s make movies about dry cleaning and pigeons? For that matter, why are the boy in "Suddenly" and the girl in "Advise and Consent" both named Pidge?

And what does it mean when we elect an actor to the White House -- was Ronald Reagan doubling himself? And does it ever seem that somehow, Bill Clinton has become invisible? Or just transparent? In America, anybody can become president.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.