Way back in 2021, Politics Editor Lars Emerson and I launched Watching Mates, a podcast that discussed the films we thought best represented each post-war presidency. The final episode, about the then nascent Biden administration, dropped in February of 2022, and given how early into that term we recorded it and the pandemic related tidal waves still roiling the film industry, I think it’s safe to say that we were a little hesitant about the episode overall, drawing much more on the things that Biden had promised to do than what what actually ended up happening during the first year or so of his presidency.

But even mere days away from the end of Biden’s four years, I don’t know that his relationship to film and the entertainment industry at large is still all that well defined. Unlike his former boss Barack Obama and his predecessor and successor Donald Trump, Biden is not exactly a celebrity – he doesn’t hang out with Jay Z and Beyoncé, has never hosted a reality show, and his rallies never quite reached the level of cultural phenomenon that even Kamala Harris’ did. As such, Biden’s pop cultural legacy seems more likely to rate like those of Gerald Ford and the recently departed Jimmy Carter – overshadowed by the larger than life figures that bookended them (in Ford and Carter’s case, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) and plagued by memories of inflation, unrest in the Middle East, and a general sense of economic and cultural malaise. Politico went so far as to call the Biden presidency a “cultural black hole.” 

But just because Biden doesn’t cut the immediately recognizable figure of a Reagan, Trump, Obama or even John F. Kennedy doesn’t mean that his presidency didn’t have an impact on the world of entertainment, and that the feeling of the time didn’t reverberate across the film, television, and music that we all consumed throughout these last four years. So, in keeping with the Watching Mates tradition (which itself was inspired by Adam Nayman’s States of the Union series), I compiled a list of six films that I think best represent the mood and attitudes of the nation at large and the White House itself during the presidency of Joe Biden. Some of these films are good, some of them are bad, but all of them – I would contend – tell us something about the way that the country and the world thought about the way things were being run between 2021 and 2024, and will serve as helpful ways to describe this peculiar era of American politics for generations to come. 

Minari (2020)

In keeping with the rules of Watching Mates, I’ve included one film that was released during Biden’s campaign for the presidency as opposed to his term in office as a way to convey what I think the nation may have been hoping to get out of his presidency. Minari, director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film about a family of Korean immigrants living in rural Arkansas, was my pick for the Biden episode of the podcast, and I still stand by the points I made three years ago. Whether it was a goofy murder-mystery like Knives Out or a sweeping sci-fi series like For All Mankind, the stories of the first Trump administration were replete with plots of immigrants contending with both the bigotry of white Americans and the cold indifference of the immigration system, a reflection of how both border security and rank nativism took center stage between 2017 and 2021. But Minari is a different, more hopeful kind of immigration story – while the Yi family encounters plenty of microaggressions once they leave California for the Natural State, the primary conflict occurs within the family and against the nature of America’s heartland, as Jacob (Steven Yeun) tries to balance his dreams of becoming a Korean produce wholesaler with the financial and emotional well-being of his family. 

Had this movie been released three years earlier, it’s easy to imagine Paul (Will Patton), the evangelical Korean War veteran that Jacob hires to work on his farm, would be written as a closed-minded bigot. Instead, he and the Yis connect over their shared faith and desire to work the land – a microcosm of the film’s argument that such immigrant stories are just a greater extension of the American Dream. Rather than boasting the Obama era’s hopes of a post-racial America, Minari takes the same tact that the Biden campaign took during the 2020 election, which was punctuated by the George Floyd protests – acknowledging rather than ignoring that Americans come from a wide range of different backgrounds, but hoping to forge common ground via an appeal to wholesome patriotism and a main street-first approach to civics and the economy. 

Sound a bit too hopeful for you? Then consider the eerie presence of the final act – grandmother Soon-ja (Youn Yu-jung, in an Oscar-winning turn), determined to continue contributing to the family despite a debilitating stroke, accidentally burns down the Yis’ barn and vegetables while incinerating their trash. The hope and dreams of everyday Americans going up in smoke due to a senior “overheating” things – even Republicans could find something to appreciate about this otherwise progressive film. 

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

In my original review of Glass Onion, I described Rian Johnson’s sequel to his hit murder-mystery Knives Out (which features a literal debate among a WASP-y family about Trump) as the toothless, cinematic equivalent of “Make Donald Drumpf Again.” I stand by that assessment, but I would also argue that its heart-on-its-sleeve resist lib politics and preoccupation with the pandemic are exactly what makes it a perfect representation of the early Biden era. 

This film was released in December of 2022 but was insistent on bringing viewers back to the dark days of 2020: the films takes place in the heart of lockdown, features plenty of mask jokes that we were already tired of hearing, holds up out of touch millionaires with access to an advanced vaccine as a prime source of the world’s problems, and seems to search for some kind of justification for the 2020 riots in the final act smashup of Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) private art collection. And while out of touch millionaires aren’t exactly helping the situation, the Democratic Party’s notion that the public still cared about the pandemic or thought well of the events of 2020 in mid-2022 after they had already had at least one dose of the vaccine and were now more focused on crime rates is something that, in my assessment, was as much a sag on Biden’s poll numbers as inflation or the Afghanistan withdrawal. 

But even though I don’t care for Glass Onion, I’ll give Rian Johnson this: he recognized that Elon Musk, represented by the barely concealed stand in of Bron, would play a major role in the nation’s politics over the next four years, as would manosphere livestreamers like Dave Bautista’s Duke Cody. If one of Julio or Joaquin Castro had ended up running for president, we could attach some significance to Janelle Monáe’s dual role as a pair of identical twin sisters as well, but, alas, they stayed out of the fray. 

Barbie (2023)

As someone who did a lot of reporting on conservative media and companies during the Biden administration, I often had to wrestle with the idea of “woke capital,” a term used derisively by both the right and the left to describe ad campaigns and initiatives adopted by corporations to communicate progressive values and, by extension, win the loyalty and patronage of a certain segment of consumers. In theory, a multibillion dollar toy company making a movie about how their thin, blonde doll that has been blamed for fostering unrealistic body standards is actually a feminist icon would seem like an easy target for skeptics of this very concept. But in the hands of Greta Gerwig, that film instead became a semi-skewering of “woke capital” itself, as well as a reflection of the confused and directionless state that the various progressive movements of the Trump era found themselves in during the Biden presidency. 

The 2020 election results may have been rosy, but Barbie is, at its core, about how early 2020s liberals struggled to make sure that the relatively fleeting victories of “representation” and even elections themselves manifested in real change, much in the same way that Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical” Barbie has to wrestle with the fact that the matriarchal utopia of Barbieland has little effect on the male-run real world. And much like in the real world, the Barbies’ quest for equality is met with a heavy backlash led by Beach Ken (brilliantly portrayed by Ryan Gosling), whose lack of purpose and search for feminine approval echoes concerns about the “male loneliness epidemic” now blamed for rightward shifts among young men. Here’s hoping that America’s current gender divide reaches the same amicable conclusion that Barbieworld’s civil war does – and that the fighting never gets much fiercer than the film’s beach brawl/dream ballet. 

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Even if you’ve only ever heard of The Zone of Interest, you know it’s a film that demands political interpretation. Jonathan Glazer’s chillingly matter-of-fact portrayal of the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who live their banal lives as the sounds of screams and gunshots echo just beyond their garden walls, has been most vigorously compared to the global response (or, depending on your persuasion, nonresponse) to the ongoing war in Gaza, a comparison that Glazer invited while accepting his Oscar for Best International Film in early 2024. Among the left, Gaza became a non-negotiable albatross around Biden’s neck, but one could easily apply The Zone of Interest to any number of situations that the government and Americans at large chose to divert their gaze from when it was convenient. 

Where progressives might see parallels with the administration’s handling of the Middle East or immigration, conservatives might see parallels to their insistence that the American economy was healthy as inflation raged, that fears of rising crime were exaggerated, that the anti-immigrant backlash was being overstated, or that things were going as planned in Afghanistan. But, taking a step back, one could view the reality TV style cinematography of The Zone of Interest as an indictment on America and the comfortable Western world at large: while people in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and any number of other war torn nations underwent a daily life or death struggle, we were content to focus on the petty political drama in front of us instead and let the rest of the world burn so long as we remained safe and sound.

The Beekeeper (2024)

It’s one thing to look at critically acclaimed Oscar winners like Minari or The Zone of Interest to try and gauge the political zeitgeist of an era, but there’s probably an even more compelling argument to be made that, if you really want to capture the mood of the nation, you should focus on the trash it makes as well. 

Enter The Beekeeper, a Jason Statham-starring action film that, at first blush, doesn’t seem like it would have a whole lot to say about politics, culture, or really anything at all. But even a few minutes into its runtime, David Ayer’s revenge thriller reveals itself to be a particularly brutal conduit of populist rage. Staham plays Adam Clay, both a literal apiarist and a former member of a group of secretive black ops assassins who has retired to a quiet farm in Massachusetts owned by the kindly Eloise (Phylicia Rashad). But when Eloise commits suicide after falling prey to a phishing scam, Clay dusts off his hitman skills and goes on a bloody rampage through the scamming network that triggered her death. His chilling discovery? It’s all controlled by Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), the drug addicted-son of… the president of the United States (Jemma Redgrave), who has assigned the former head of the CIA (Jeremy Irons) to keep an eye on him. 

Much like how Bush-era audiences wanted to root for heroes cutting down foreign terrorists and Obama-era audiences had an axe to grind with the Wall Street, it’s clear the Biden-era audiences wanted to see someone take down the “deep state” and were all too happy to cheer as Jason Statham set his sites on an obvious Hunter Biden analogue and his enabling presidential parent, all in the name of breaking up an annoying phone scam. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the Trump-era Republicans’ anti-elite mindset, and also an indicator that – despite their overtures to the working class – the Biden-era Democrats may not have stood a chance no matter who was at the top of the ticket in 2024. 

Megalopolis (2024)

Up until a few weeks ago, I was ready to stake my claim that The Beekeeper – which frames personal tragedy as the work of an avaricious government conspiracy – as the definitive film of the Biden era. But while that movie may capture the mood of the public during the last four years, I would argue that Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the film that best captures the Biden presidency itself. 

Much like Biden’s designs on the highest office in the land, Coppola had been conceiving of Megalopolis since at least the 1980s, but neither man had the ability to realistically make their dreams a reality until 2019, when Coppola officially returned to the project and Biden announced his 2020 campaign. And much like Biden’s presidency, Megalopolis is a film devoted to an ultimately optimistic vision of societal progress – architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), despondent at the decaying state of “New Rome,” envisions the construction of a new, constantly evolving city that would benefit all citizens, much to the consternation of a jealous and decadent class of patricians personified by Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf), a vengeful, hedonistic rich kid who tries to rise to power by firing up mobs of protestors dressed like January 6th rioters to whom he bestows personally-signed hundred dollar bills. Cesar is also plagued by a fickle media (personified by Aubrey Plaza’s gonzo performance as bleach blonde TV anchor Wow Platinum), a deep-faked sex tape, and selective prosecution from New Rome mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) – all things that, in one form or another, the most ardent Biden supporters would argue plagued the 46th president as well (well, ok, there wasn’t a fake sex tape, but there were all of the scandalous Hunter photos and the “cheap fake” panic). 

By the end of Megalopolis, Cesar is ultimately triumphant, able to convince the public and the powers that be that his vision will benefit all New Romans and leave the world a better place for their children. It’s probably the kind of thing that Biden hoped his Build Back Better agenda would achieve – deliver material benefits to everyday Americans, and in the process transcend all manner of political divides to create a kind of new New Deal coalition. Unfortunately, things didn’t end as well for him as they did for Cesar – if anything, Biden’s legacy is more likely to parallel the film’s itself: ambitious and mostly derided, albeit celebrated by a dedicated few.

Honorable Mentions

The following are films (and television series) that I think reflected some aspect of the Biden era, but perhaps not the extent of the six I’ve already discussed:

Succession (2018-2023): This hit series about the ultrarich behaving badly might remind most people of the Trumps and the Murdochs, but, in hindsight, it’s difficult not to see a group of power-hungry aspirants latching onto social positions across the political spectrum in a bid to replace their aging patriarch as an accidental metaphor for the 2024 election.

Mrs. America (2020): A miniseries chronicling the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that hastens to point out that women sometimes organize for reactionary causes as well (hello, Moms for Liberty), and that figures like Phyllis Schlafly helped lay the foundation for Trumpism.

Don’t Worry Darling (2022): A purely aestheticized version of social progressivism that’s as shallow as many conservative critics think real life progressive movements actually are. 

American Fiction (2023): The story of a Black author who grows frustrated with the way that modern social justice rhetoric paints him and his community into a corner artistically. His solution? Lean into it by creating an ex-con alter ego to exploit the white guilt of the publishing industry and Hollywood.

The Curse (2023-24): The sharpest social satire of the last four years, in which the daughter of slum lords leverages pro-Native American, environmentalist, and urban renewal rhetoric to get her own HGTV show, ignoring a local community’s concerns about crime and affordability along the way. (Read The Postrider’s review).

Twisters (2024): A Gen Z-targeted celebration of rural America in which a group of scrappy YouTubers do the real work of tornado recovery, while a fancy, well-funded corporation tries to profit off of the devastation instead. 

Civil War (2024): We never find out what exactly started the war in question, and the people fighting it don’t seem to care either. All we know is that the media is having a field day with it, and that the main character made her name by photographing the “antifa massacre.” (Read The Postrider’s review).

Anora (2024): In which a sex worker who works all night and devises a way to marry a millionaire is told by an older man that “kids don’t want to work anymore.” 

Conclave (2024): Remember back in August when a bunch of high powered politicians scrambled to find a replacement for an elderly Catholic leader at a time where the very institution he led felt under siege by both internal and external threats? If you’d like to relive all of that, then this thriller about a particularly fraught papal conclave is the film for you.