Film in the age of Obama

It's hard to think of the present as a period with a set of themes, mostly because themes are best assigned from a safe distance. "Mad Men" can mine the '60s with elegance and impunity because the book has been closed; society has been made into a narrative; hippies are chapter eight. We don't yet have a coherent idea of the Bush era, which we left behind just a year ago. Where cinema is concerned, we have fragments: some Iraq here, some terrorism there; the media-soaked, porn-obsessed clusterfuck called "Southland Tales."

But even if we can't get a handle on the Bush years, I can't help wondering: What will be the cinema of Obama, and how will it be different?

Mumblecore — a term coined in a bar and minted on the web — is considered Generation Y's first genre. It applies to ultra-low-budget indies made on MacBooks, describing the apartment-style ennui of post-graduate twentysomething MacBook owners. It seems logical to assume that the cinema of Obama will be mumblecore 2.0 — more of what's already been started.

But maybe not. Mumblecore is about disillusionment; Obama is about optimism. Mumblecore, like Lars von Trier's "The Five Obstructions," is about the severe limitations of its own format, but at this point, home video is nothing to be so self-conscious about. We're not the same twentysomethings as before.

Last Sunday, in an unadorned theater space a few blocks from Times Square, CAS senior Matt Hooper premiered a short film called "Life is Cause." To call it Obamafied would be an understatement. In the film, Hooper wins an essay contest and becomes the president's press secretary for a week, at which point he bungles the job. The story is narrated by bloggers and the 24-hour news cycle, with the occasional interruption for a music video.

The premiere event was called "Infotainment Politics in the Millennial Generation," a title I still can't digest. We were told to turn off our cell phones, though Twitter was encouraged. Hooper's film was followed by a small panel of new media proponents (such as The Onion's Baratunde Thurston, and Michael Skolnik, Russell Simmons' political director) who had a theme of their own to express: the Internet as a democratizing force. It's so democratic, Obama uses it as biodiesel.

The audience wasn't entirely onboard: Hooper's grandfather got up and asked, with stately charisma, how "the Facebooks and the YouTubes" will make money. Society's response — ad revenue!

We can't yet define the cinema of Obama, but it will probably be marked by such contradictions: the drive to celebrate our all-consuming social media cloud while still pointing out the airiness; the drive to plunge face-first, like our president, into the ass-backward realm of representations. Perhaps it'll be concerned with portraiture — face value, or the lack thereof. At the very least, it'll have to deal with Twitter.

"I think we're going to see a diversion between hope and irony," Hooper told me, and that seems apt. It was definitely apparent in the picture he'd put up next to the screen: a reconfiguration of the iconic Obama painting, done by the actual artist, with the president's face changed to Hooper's and "HOPE" changed to "HOOP." That was something new.

To watch "Life is Cause," visit gocause.org.

Matt Margini is Pretentiousaurus.