Big picture politics

I WAS HERE, governor, for your State of the State speech. Your lips said “health coverage and roads and schools and prison reform,” but your heart was whispering “box office.”

This is about a pair of towns, Sacramento and Hollywood, that you’d think would be as un-twinly as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. But it isn’t so -- and it has nothing to do with the fact that two of California’s 38 governors have been actors.

Schwarzenegger’s two big speeches this week are about more than his big ideas for California and their big price tags. The State of the State speech is a romantic declaration, full of big hopes and big ideas. The next day’s budget speech is the sober, bottom-line calculation for making those wishes come true.

And here’s where moviemaking and speechmaking intersect. Politicians make explicit what the box-office zeitgeist implies about our yearnings and our terrors -- what do we want, and what are we afraid of?

Schwarzenegger loaded his Tuesday speech with warnings about letting old problems drift on, unresolved: “We are addressing needs that have been ignored for decades.” And what’s the nation’s No. 1 movie? “Night at the Museum,” about how the nasty, unresolved past will come back to bite us unless we have an ingenious way to fix it.

Schwarzenegger is duly alarmed about our future well-being, offering both a plan to heal our “sick old man” healthcare system and a proposal to cut the gasoline crud in the air by 10% in 13 years. “California,” he proclaimed, “has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial ... to action.”

And what’s playing big at the Roxy? “The Children of Men,” a really scary movie about what happens when there is no future, when children aren’t born on a planet that’s poisoned itself with its own neglect and excesses.

Schwarzenegger leveraged himself into politics with a ballot measure promoting after-school programs, and this week he spoke -- a little too sappily -- about investing in “that small child with sticky hands starting the first day of kindergarten.” “But,” he said, “it is not just how much money we spend, but it is how we spend it.” And up there on the marquee? “Freedom Writers,” about a different kind of teacher in Long Beach.

Just to check myself on this premise, I did a little back-reading. Pat Brown, the state’s Great Builder himself whose cement-pouring model Schwarzenegger hopes to follow, was reelected in 1962, just as California was about to become the nation’s most populous state. And the top movie of 1963? “Lilies of the Field,” starring Sidney Poitier, a movie literally about building and metaphorically about people of different colors and faiths getting along -- the emerging California challenge.

Ronald Reagan presided over the cultural churn of the 1960s -- when movies like “Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy” sold a lot of popcorn -- and the law-and-order blowback of the 1970s. The best picture of 1970 was “Patton.” Out with flower power, in with firepower. Movies like “A Clockwork Orange” made it official -- the counterculture was turning counterclockwise.

As for the films of the era of contrarian Jerry Brown, “Chinatown” couldn’t have done a better job of contrasting the creaky corruption of California’s old backroom power players. And “Star Wars”? It’s the techno-future, baby, and Jerry Brown would have fit right in at Skywalker Ranch.

George Deukmejian stepped into the governorship from the attorney’s general job. The movie of his moment? “Fatal Attraction.” He went for the throat of that other dangerous woman, Chief Justice Rose Bird, for blocking the door to California’s gas chamber.

Pete Wilson’s administration took huge economic hits as California’s aerospace job machine took down its “help wanted” sign. “Apollo 13” was a wistful reminder of those daring and dangerous days and of the hundreds of thousands of jobs that vanished into, well, thin air.

As for Gray Davis -- two films suggest themselves: “American Beauty” and “A Beautiful Mind,” in which things were shockingly not what they seemed. Davis was twice elected, but it turns out what we really wanted was change.

Which brings us back to Schwarzenegger. On crutches, trying to accommodate querulous Republicans and work with Democrats, he may be recalling the box-office hit of his first year in office -- “Spider-Man 2,” whose lesson is, if destiny makes you a hero, you’d better put on the suit and act the part.