Real Life Loses Out to Reel Life

So hungry are pundits for something fresh to say about the Washington Impeachathon that even D-Day has been swallowed into the media maw.

One measure of that exegetical exhaustion comes from Nexis, the computer news database. A recent search for Clinton-related references to the 1993 Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day,” about a man reliving the same experience over and over again, yielded 59 “hits” in the last year. In other words, that cinematic cliche rained down on readers and viewers like the hackneyed cats and dogs.

To be sure, reel life and real life are colliding. Bill Clinton, the mama’s boy from Hot Springs, became “The Man from Hope” in his 1992 campaign film. And just on Monday, he upped it again, calling himself “the walking apostle of hope.” Wonder what DreamWorks will do with that. Another film, “The Truman Show,” about a man whose life is surrounded by TV cameras, struck a pop culture chord when it was released last year; the cliche-starved punditocracy gang-tackled that trope, too. The same Nexis database, which is expansive but by no means exhaustive, yielded 25 Clinton-”Truman” comparisons.

In his new book, “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” author Neal Gabler argues that real life has become reel life: “The biggest, most entertaining, most realistic movie of all, one that played 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and featured a cast of billions.”

One can get carried away with such postmodern musings, neglecting the fact that even movie stars eventually must leave the studio. O.J. Simpson may be, as Gabler suggests, a familiar character in our lives, but he is still a real person, and Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are really dead.

Still, at a time when Clinton’s own sexual sideshow has derailed what was once straight-facedly called the “serious work” of Washington, popular culture has become a proxy for political debate. Conservatives praise the beatitudes of “Touched by an Angel” and berate the bawdiness of “Friends,” and media liberals, meanwhile, condemn enemy right-wingers; Camryn “The Practice” Manheim offered to share her Golden Globe award with those senators who voted to dismiss the case against Clinton.

So even events that might not seem to have much political content are nonetheless colored by politics. On Jan. 4, Variety, the Hollywood trade blat, reported that Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” was not a cinch for the best picture Oscar it was once thought to be.

And it didn’t take long for Frank Rich, the Clintonophilic columnist for the New York Times, to put a political spin on such intra-industry jockeying. The talk in Tinseltown, he wrote last Saturday, is that “Ryan,” which he dismissed with faint praise as “the patriotic shoo-in of the summer,” might lose to “Shakespeare in Love,” which he enthusiastically described as “drenched in sex (and lies about sex), whose lovable hero shamelessly cheats on the wife and kids he’s left at home.”

The problem with “Ryan,” Rich continued, is that World War II has been co-opted by Henry Hyde and his regiment of Republicans, who have several times cited the sacrifice at Normandy as inspiration for their impeachification efforts. Now it’s one thing to say the GOP is overreaching, conflating Clinton with, say, Hitler. But it’s another thing to turn against “Ryan”--to write, as Rich did, that “Omaha Beach has become another tainted pawn in the capital’s odious political discourse.”

As Lincoln said of a different battle, Gettysburg, those who come to hallowed ground can do nothing to detract from the blood-consecration of brave men. And so nothing that anyone writes today will diminish the D-Day heroism that Spielberg dramatized.

But it is possible that Hollywood, ever striving to be taken seriously by New York and Washington, will yield to perceived pressure not to throw a bone to WWII veteran Hyde at the expense of that swinging veteran of the sexual revolution, America’s 42nd president.

The irony of this yearlong spectacle is that even those who behave better in their private life feel compelled to defend Clinton’s debauched public life. So there’s something new for pundits to chew on: In the old days, people adored celebrities for being better than themselves. Today, they admire them for being worse.