Donald Trump is like one of those monstrous creatures from the cheap science fiction and horror movies of the fifties, who emerge menacingly from who knows where and seem like they are going to take over the world or destroy it, and the more shots they get, the more attacks, more lethal chemical discharges, they become even stronger, grow faster, tower over the heroes and scientists who in trying to control them have done nothing but feed their power. The giant Godzilla that devastated Japanese cities made of obvious papier-mâché, knocked down the fighter planes launched against him with his hands as if they were flies, and also lacked the sentimental vulnerability of the poor gorilla in love, King Kong. King Kong belongs to a fantasy of colonial exoticism inherited from the imperialist adventure novels of the 19th century: lost and fugitive in 20th century New York, his danger was very little, and his survival was as difficult as that of other large condemned wild animals. to extinction.
In the first decades of cinema, the horror genre was still heir to the Gothic novel, from which all its monsters came, Count Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Wolf Man, the hairy and criminal Mr. Hyde who had his refuge in the laboratory of Victorian doctor Henry Jekyll. Godzilla and the various black and white monstrous beings of the 1950s were already radically modern, because they had been born from that new definitive form of terror that was the atomic bomb. Horror cinema gives visible forms to the nightmares of a rationality driven to madness by the monstrous nature of reality. The transformation of a normal human being into a giant fly, into a tiny homunculus, into a teeming, shapeless mass, comes no longer from a bite or from a chemical product mixed in a test tube, but from nuclear radiation, which is also the that has given birth to Godzilla, precisely in the same country in which hundreds of thousands of people were pulverized or turned forever into ghosts of incessant suffering by the explosion of the two atomic bombs, the most sophisticated products of scientific progress until then. The creatures born of destruction themselves become almost indestructible: almost, because cinema, being a commercial art, tends towards comforting endings, and behind the stories that seem of maximum technological and futuristic complexity, it always reiterates the scheme of the most ancient of all, which is the fight between the hero and a powerful and evil animal that is defeated in the end.
Reality, unlike fiction, does not obey the limits of verisimilitude. And commercial cinema, as it lacks prejudices and scruples, often succeeds in inventing misguided beings and impossible plots that end up being perfect metaphors for the time in which they became popular, and even disturbing premonitions of what is to come. There is no fictional dystopia in literature or cinema that is scarier right now than the first page of the newspaper or the first minutes of the news. When I see the mega-billionaires of today (Elon Musk with his rockets and satellites, Mark Zuckerberg with his bangs copied from Emperor Augustus, Jeff Bezos with his giant yacht that doesn't fit in any port, Bill Gates with his face like a decrepit child and his apostolate of plutocrat savior of the world), who I remember are the all-powerful and misanthropic evil men of Ian Fleming's novels, and the first James Bond films, still very faithful to that narrative origin. In comparison with their contemporary and real imitators, those criminals from the lineage of Doctor No and Goldfinger already become as endearing to us as Doctor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes novels. Apart from their technological obsolescence, they had the disadvantage of being fictional characters, and therefore subject to those rules of verisimilitude and coherence that literature always obeys.
No one could have invented Donald Trump. He looks somewhat like the Lex Luthor played by Gene Hackmann with a yellow toupee in that memorable superman directed by Richard Donner in 1978, and also to the wiseguys and mafia bosses from New Jersey and Queens, who in turn imitated the costumes and language of Coppola and Martin Scorsese's fictional mobsters. And like the monsters imagined by makeup and special effects specialists, Trump has the ability to be immune to the weapons and increasingly aggressive strategies that are launched against him, although from time to time he grants us the deceptive respite so frequent. in the cinema, that it seems that he has finally been defeated, that he has received more impacts than any living organism could withstand, that he lies annihilated in his grave, in the coffin that no vampire claw can pierce, or under the ice of the arctic, or at the bottom of the sea.
The respite was false, the oldest and most repeated trick that exists, although it never ceases to be effective. The calm of what seemed like the last cheerful and trivial scene of the film is broken with a shock that unleashes an exclamation of fear in the movie theater. The fallen body rises, staggering and even more ferocious. The radioactive dinosaur moves again under the ruins that seemed to have buried it forever. Trump loses the elections in 2020 and the defeat becomes a stolen victory for his faithful. Trump encourages nothing less than the assault on the Capitol and even his closest supporters fear that this time he has gone too far and lost the credit he had left, but the shameless support for that uprising makes him even more popular. Trump is tried for fraud, for electoral fraud, for sexual abuse, for tax crimes, and each of these episodes convinces millions of evangelical believers that he is a victim of persecution by the powerful and the wicked, and they compare him to Jesus Christ scourged and innocent in the court of Pontius Pilate.
Trump has spent his life flaunting his sexual promiscuity, his infidelities and divorces, his physical and verbal rudeness with women: for evangelical Christians he is like King David, who was an adulterer and yet served God and enlarged himself. the military glory of the kingdom of Israel; He is also like King Cyrus the Great, who was an idolater and a sinner, but, as told in the book of Isaiah, he allowed the Hebrew people to return to their land from the Babylonian captivity. One reason why it is difficult for a European to understand the United States is the impossibility of getting an idea of the weight exerted on many millions of people by the bloody religiosity of the Old Testament and the delusions of the book of Revelation, read and accepted in a certain sense. literal. For all those people, in a country so divided, the elections are not going to be a dispute between Democrats and Republicans, but between Good and Evil, with their terrifying capital letters. There is a video, very popular among evangelicals, in which a deep voice thunders over an image of planet Earth in space and repeats it with a cadence of biblical recitation. And God gave us Trump. Terror has never been so mixed with the grotesque. The nightmares of reality have made the worst fantasies of cinema irrelevant. In his new metamorphosis, in his unprecedented reincarnation, the threatening creature that returns turns out to be the Messiah.
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