Rarely has Aaron Sorkin looked so out of step with reality. Speaking last month, the poet laureate of idealised political discourse outlined how he would write election night 2020: “Trump does what we all assume he will do, which is not concede defeat, claiming the election’s rigged and the Democrats cheated. For the first time, his Republican enablers march to the White House and say: ‘Donald, it’s time to go.’ I would write the ending where everyone does the right thing.”
As many were quick to point out, sadly we are not living in an episode of The West Wing or The American President, both of which Sorkin had a hand in. US politics is not conducted as an articulate, rapid-fire exchange of ideas conducted between well-intentioned people walking quickly down corridors. The recent presidential debates gave us the real, undoctored version, and it’s more like a Caps Lock Reddit thread live-read. Sorkin’s romanticised vision of American democratic norms was rejected as fancifully naive, and some went a lot further, arguing that while liberals wallowed wishfully in Sorkin’s fantasies, the hard-nosed Republicans had occupied the reality.
Those critics are not going to like Sorkin’s latest movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, based on the infamous 1969 show trial of a handful of anti-Vietnam war protesters. The parallels with the modern day are there to be drawn: mass street protests, clashes with police, blatant racism, the authoritarian right out to quash dissent. It is entertaining courtroom drama, but Sorkin can’t help but massage history into something a little more uplifting. He gives the chief prosecutor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a liberal conscience he didn’t actually have, and contrives an ending so grandstandingly Hollywood it verges on parody.
Perhaps we are being unfair. After all, when Sorkin takes off the rose-tinted spectacles he can be exhilarating. Just look at The Social Network, in which he used his trademark wit to skewer Mark Zuckerberg’s assholery. (Now, there’s a movie crying out for a sequel.) What’s more, part of The West Wing’s appeal in the early 2000s was the glaring contrast between Martin Sheen’s idealised president and the warmongering, barely literate George W Bush (the naivety was on us for assuming he was the bottom of the barrel). If Sorkin’s prose frames political issues more clearly and artfully than real life, is that a crime?
Imagine if Sorkin had written Barack Obama as a West Wing character: he’d have been dismissed as a liberal fantasy. Intriguingly, after Sorkin had left, The West Wing did introduce a candidate from an ethnic minority (played by Jimmy Smits), who was based on Obama. Even more intriguingly, Sorkin and the West Wing cast reunite this week for a fundraiser, with an appearance by … Michelle Obama. Art imitates life; life imitates art. Maybe idealism has more value than we think.
