Episode 7: First Ladies in Films

MaryAnne Borrelli gives insight on how first ladies are portrayed in movies about the presidency ranging from Independence Day to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

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TRANSCRIPT

Teri Finneman: Eleanor. Dolley. Mamie. Jackie. They were the nation’s original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile. All left their mark on the nation’s history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Teri Finneman, a journalism historian who studies media portrayals of first ladies with production editing by Bella Koscal. This is the First Ladies podcast.

(0:42): Movies about the presidency have ranged from the award-winning film The Butler to the alien-invading blockbuster Independence Day to even Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. But how are first ladies shown in these films and what broader understanding can this give us on perceptions and assumptions about these women?

In this episode, our guest, MaryAnne Borrelli, watched a few dozen movies released between 1993 and 2016 to understand how presidents’ wives are portrayed in films for her upcoming book chapter.

MaryAnne, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?

MaryAnne Borrelli (1:22): Well, I had done some work previously on women in the Cabinet and wrapped that up and thought what do I do next? And the thing that had been so very interesting about women in the Cabinet was when they appeared before the Senate for their confirmation hearings, and there was this extraordinary dialogue between the women secretaries -designate and the mostly men senators, and I thought, well, if this is happening in the legislature on behalf of the executive branch, what's happening within the executive branch? And there were not very many people doing work on first ladies, so it seemed a good topic and a topic that might be in need of some scholarships, so that was what started it.

Teri Finneman: So, we're talking about movies today. Why is it important to understand how first ladies are portrayed in movies?

MaryAnne Borrelli (2:06): Well, I think that movies are opportunities for entertainment, but they're also opportunities that invite people to think about new possibilities, right, to open their imagination to see what could be happening or what might be happening, and the moviemakers themselves understand themselves to be kind of starting from a platform of the recognizable and then springboarding into again those new possibilities. So, if we look at president movies, a lot has been done about the president and some has been done about the administration, but again, nothing had been done about first ladies. So, I wanted to see what the springboarding to the possibilities was for first ladies in president movies.

Teri Finneman (2:52): Why did you want to focus on movies that came out during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years in particular?

MaryAnne Borrelli: So, those were the three presidential administrations in which the first ladies not only stepped onto the public stage, that had been happening before, but these first ladies stepped out onto the public stage and then drew attention to it, usually forthrightly and unapologetically.

Sometimes there is a bit of masking that went on. We've seen masking in previous administration, but there was a stronger determination to be public about their contributions to the presidency, and that was across three administrations, right, you know, both Democratic and Republican, 24 years, and I thought this is a longer-term change, and we should expect to see this registered in president movies because president movies in the past had registered changes that were caused by the president and the presidential office. So, it seemed logical, and because it seemed logical, it therefore seemed not necessarily possible. So, it was a reason to do the research.

Teri Finneman (4:02): You examined 19 movies in which first lady characters have speaking roles. Some of them were Murder at 1600, Thirteen Days, The Butler, Independence Day, Air Force One, Lincoln, and First Daughter. What exactly were you looking for when you watched these movies?

MaryAnne Borrelli: So, I'm just going to take a step back, Teri, because you're absolutely right, 19 movies in which the first ladies were speaking, it was a sample of 31, right, and then kind of narrowing them down to different ways of assessing the participation of the first lady character in the narrative. So, that came to 19 that we're speaking, and the thing that I was really interested in looking at is a movie is both audio and visual. So, these were characters that were participating in the audio aspect of the movie, and I wanted to see how they were self-actualizing, what the character was doing when they were given a voice. So, the thing that is really striking about a movie is that it has both audio and visual components, and your eyes learn so much as you watch the movie and then the voices come and there's the musicality of the voices and there's the content of the voices.

(5:18): So, when I was studying first ladies’ speaking parts and when they spoke in the narrative, the intentionality, their contributions, I was really trying to understand how these characters were presenting to the audience through their voices and then how that presentation contributed to the narrative, because these were all movies that were president movies about presidential power.

So, for example, does the first lady speak early, and then she's gone? That would be Thirteen Days. The one speaking scene with the first lady comes very early in the movie, and from then on, she's silenced or in montages. Or does the first lady speak across the narrative?

(6:07): So, for example, in the romantic comedy Dave, the first lady is speaking throughout the movie, and she's speaking about different topics and in different ways, sometimes confrontational, sometimes political, sometimes relational. So, by looking at the speaking parts and by the extent to which the speech extended across and was integrated into the narrative, and the purpose of the speech, I was trying, I was learning how first ladies were being portrayed to the public as actors within the presidency.

Teri Finneman: Let's break down these primary roles that you saw in the films. Unsurprisingly, you found that most scenes revolved around the first lady clearly carrying out the role of wife or hostess. Talk about what some of those scenes and movies were.

MaryAnne Borrelli (6:59): So, there were 20 movies in which the first lady was presented as the nation's hostess, which is really extraordinary, 20 out of the 31. And clearly, there's almost like a checklist, right? This has to be covered in a president movie, but what was striking to me was there were only three movies in which this was the only role that the first lady was portrayed as fulfilling. So that – it may be a threshold for many movies, it has to be included, but it's not a threshold for all the president movies, and it also is only the beginning of the portrayal. For me, watching the movies and seeing the portrayal, I found it very problematic. I think it's a return to a historical conception of the first lady as an accoutrement, if you will, of the president.

(7:51): She's a trophy. She's evidence that the president conforms to expectations of, you know, virility and sexual appeal. And there's of course, heteronormativity, so that attention to the first lady as a presidential trophy or in some ways as a nationalist symbol, right, first lady of the land, is really very much a part of the public life, nation’s hostess role, and you do see that being performed throughout the movies.

Teri Finneman (8:30): What are examples of scenes in films where the first lady is shown primarily in moral guide or mother roles?

MaryAnne Borrelli: So, the mothering role is really interesting, and it takes three forms. So, there's “the first lady is a Madonna,” really that kind of spiritual, uplifting, not changing the diapers, right? And you only see that in one movie and that's Thirteen Days, when Jacqueline Kennedy is portrayed in a couple of distinct montages that are very clearly associated with spirituality. One is even shot during Catholic Mass.

The second mothering role that we see a lot of is defending the children against the outside world. So, for example, the determination to protect the Lincoln children is seen both in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and then in Lincoln.

(9:27): Another one is Air Force One, the confrontations with the terrorist to protect the daughter. But this idea that there are threats that the first lady steps in front of and ends on behalf of her child. And then the third form of mothering is mediating tensions within the family. This often takes the form of the presidential ambitions and how the president's own ambitions are limiting the childhood or the opportunities of the children, often the young daughter, and that occurs, for example, very clearly in both of the teen comedies, Chasing Liberty and First Daughter.

Teri Finneman: What do you think this tells the public about what a first lady should be when most scenes are showing the first lady in the wife, and hostess, and mother roles? You talked about that a little bit but talk about it a little bit more.

MaryAnne Borrelli (10:17): So, the moral guide is something, is a rule that I've derived from social conservative thought, and in social conservative thought within the family, there are distinctive gender roles for the parents and the father, of course, is in the public sphere, the breadwinner, and really confronting all of the moral problematics that come in the public sphere. The mother, the wife, is in the private sphere of the home, and her task is to both provide moral guidance to the husband who's confronting all of these dilemmas and then to raise the children so that they carry that moral compass within them, the daughters on behalf of raising good, loyal sons, and the sons on behalf of entering the public sphere and really uplifting.

(11:12): So, the difference between a moral guide as I coded it in the movies and a presidential adviser, is that the moral guide is having political conversations or conversations about policy and politics in private, whereas the presidential adviser is doing so in public before an audience of other advisers, before an audience in any way. And so, I thought it was really interesting that so many more movies would have the first lady really speaking about politics and policy as moral guides in a private setting, rather than as presidential advisers and doing so forthrightly in a public setting. And I thought it was interesting for two reasons. First, I think it's a more traditional conception of the woman's politics as extending from the family, right, and secondly, because it also feeds into fears that the president's bedmate or sexual partner will exercise undue influence.

(12:13): And I think that those kinds of affirmed traditions and feared traditions are interwoven through the movies in some very complex and important ways, so I wanted to bring that forward and look at the private sphere rules of the first lady both together and apart because only three films had the first lady both as mother and as wife in the private sphere, which to me was quite an extraordinary statement about how these films understood the family and the family dynamics.

In terms of what that means for the audience, I think it's really important that the audiences and president movies be encouraged to recognize that a presidency and a presidential administration, it's complex, it's very complex, and it's a really intricate organization that has both the personal dynamic and the political dynamic, and the institutional dynamic.

(13:14): So, the more that the first lady can be portrayed as both engaged in a personal relationship with the president, and engaged in a political and professional relationship, and as part of an institution, to me, the entertainment is then stretching the imaginations of the audience further and the entertainment becomes this gentle, intriguing education, and to the extent that it retreats in tradition, I think it undercuts opportunities, and when it retreats to traditions that are no longer being practiced because these are movies that are coming out during administrations in which Hillary Rodham Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama are all out on the public stage, welcoming public recognition of their work, then the movies are not merely endorsing tradition but seeking to reverse current practices.

Teri Finneman (14:12): To a lesser extent, the movies that you watched showed first ladies in political roles. What movies tended to do this the most?

MaryAnne Borrelli: First off, I would say the political roles were not common. So, you have five movies with a political adviser. You have only two movies with the presidential surrogate, and you have six movies with policy entrepreneurs, and of those six movies, four had positive portrayals. So, the first thing that I would begin by acknowledging is that these are not these rules, the public sphere rules, we're not seeing across a wide swath of 31 sample movies.

That said, when I started this project, I thought it's a time of change, and so, what is likely to happen is to see some movies and some presentations that are really harkening to well established status quo of the first lady as perceived as the president's wife and any political work as an extension of her being the first political wife.

(15:23): And then some movies I thought might really venture into the more activist, more politically engaged, political leadership roles that we were seeing in the three administrations, and then some movies would be hybrids. And that was what I found. The number of movies that presented an activist first lady were considerably smaller than the number of movies that presented the more traditionalist first lady. And that to me was explained by the fact that traditional first ladies still more easily win public approval and very likely seeing the effect of the for-profit drive of the movie industry, right? But that said, looking at the movies that had first ladies in political roles, I think it's really interesting that many of them were more imaginative movies.

(16:21): So, for example, action movies. So you see a very much an activist first lady in Air Force One. The first lady in Independence Day very seldom on-scene, but very definitely activist. Dave, romantic comedy, again, a greater willingness to suspend the imagination when looking at a happy outcome comedy, right? Life is kind of dreary for many people, and so a venture into happily ever after, excellent. And that's also what you see with romantic comedies like First Daughter and Chasing Liberty. So, the movies that were willing to stretch the imagination further were also movies in which the first lady tended to be portrayed as more activist. That said, the activist portrayals were not necessarily uniformly positive and not necessarily creating first ladies that were admirable.

(17:17): Some of the first ladies, for example, First Daughter, the first lady is very strong and very clear and very positioned in support of her husband's political ambition. “This is his time,” she says to the daughter, and the daughter has to sacrifice. “Your time will come,” and that kind of tough love makes for a very interesting screen character, but it's not somebody that you just sit there and you're comfortable with.

So, I would say that the movies in which there are first ladies that are portrayed in more activist terms are offering the audience diverse narratives, action, romantic comedy, Lincoln, historical drama, offering diverse narratives and very diverse characters, and as a whole, though few in number, inviting a more thoughtful approach to understanding what it means to be a president's wife.

Teri Finneman (18:18): An interesting finding that you had related to first ladies who died in movies, such as in Independence Day. Talk about the trends you found in those portrayals.

MaryAnne Borrelli: So, I'm going to be very forthright and say that this was my most annoying finding, and then I had to kind of get used to it enough to write it in a more even tone, because I was incensed when I saw the pattern. So, what happens in three movies is that the first lady dies, and the three movies are very different.

So, there's the satire, Mars Attacks, there's the action film, Independence Day, and then there's the other action film, Olympus Has Fallen, and in each instance, the first lady dies. And sometimes, that death goes unacknowledged later. For example, Independence Day, when it's shown on TV and they have to edit for time, they consistently edit out the death scene. So, not only is she dying and being erased from the narrative, but you don't even know what happens to her. She just kind of vanishes from the narrative halfway through and the audience is left to wonder.

(19:27): So, it's really quite annoying, frankly, that a character that has such an important role, I mean, first lady character is the only character seen in more president films than the president is the first lady. So, this is a character that's deemed essential to the plot line by some standards, is simply being erased. You can tell I'm still venting, okay. Turning to the death itself, all right, there's the effect of the death and the narrative is that the president is devastated and becomes even more of the leader, even more determined to protect the nation and safeguard it. And so, the death of the wife, the death of the first lady identifies him with all the suffering that's going on in the society. So, in Mars Attacks, the first lady is killed in an attack on the White House, okay?

(20:25): Independence Day, she's killed when her helicopter is shot down by the aliens, two sets of aliens. Olympus Has Fallen, she's killed on her way to a political fundraiser. There's a terrible car accident, the Secret Service can only rescue one, and they rescue the president. So, there's the first message, is that this death furthers the plot line and deepens and strengthens the presidential character, and that's where I think a lot of views and viewers might stop consciously, but the subconscious, or subtext to these deaths, is even more fraught.

So, in each instance, the first lady could have prevented her own death, and she doesn't. So, the death is her own fault, which now you're in a different world. She chose to act poorly or wrongly or ill-advisedly, and it led to her death. If the first lady in Independence Day had come straight back to Washington when the president asked her to, then she wouldn't have been in the helicopter during the alien invasion.

(21:36): But why was she in the helicopter during the alien invasion? Because the president's office had scheduled her for a series of media interviews to reassure the public of the president's leadership. So she was doing her job, and for that, she dies, right? The first lady in Olympus Has Fallen, why is she in the car? She's going to a fundraiser for the president in terrible weather. Why didn't she protest? Because it was important to the president. She's doing her job. Mars Attacks is a satire on the Reagan administration. That first lady is killed when a chandelier falls in the White House during an alien attack. She should never have been redecorating the White House. It would have been fine if she hadn't decided to change the electrical fixtures. Seriously?

(22:28): It's – first ladies have contributed to the White House as a historic site, have established it as one of the leading museums in the country, and this is a reason to kill them. It's like, what are you thinking, moviemaker? But this is what it is. It’s this double-sided element, that the death is reflective of the woman's foolishness, and yet, it inspires the man's strength. So, I think that the death scenes are incredibly important and also incredibly problematic.

Teri Finneman: So, of all the movies that you watched, which one did you feel most accurately portrayed the role of the first lady?

MaryAnne Borrelli (23:09): So, I have to tell you that I didn't, I thought all of them had their moments. They really did, like for example, and I have to say, Teri, that when I saw the list, it was like, oh, seriously, I have to watch some of these? Because for example, I am not a big vampire person. I mean, vampires and zombies are like for somebody else's imagination. So, these were not all movies that I would have chosen to watch. I'm not a satire person. I am a comedy person, so those went down pretty easily. So, when I was watching them, sometimes it's easier to be critical than others. So, you watch several times in order to really kind of develop a sense that respects the movie for what it is, and all of them had their moments when you looked at them and you thought, “I can see that happening.”

(23:56): I mean, I have seen it recorded in presidential documents, in the records that I read in presidential archives, in the films that I watch, and it's very telling to have that moment of gracious, like, parallelism to real life. It's part of what the movie is about, right, is to make part of the narrative so believable that you are willing to stretch your imagination to the fantastical, right?

So, all of them had their moments, and all of them brought those moments of grace forward in ways that I think an audience could enjoy them. So, sometimes that moment of, like, enjoyment played to the traditional, but we know that mothering and caring for children in the White House is a very powerful and high priority for first ladies.

(24:49): Michelle Obama's title of mom in chief, self-bestowed. Sometimes they played to the stronger activist side. Ellen Mitchell, right, Sigourney Weaver confronting the look-alike president, played by Kevin Kline, right. You know, you did a beautiful job on that, you made their funding go away, right, when she's defending the need for more funding for unhoused persons in shelters, right? I've read these things, and I know that they've been – the parallel statements have been made and confrontations have been issued because first ladies, to quote Richard Neustadt, right, they asked the “wait-a-minute" question.

So, all of them had their believable moments, and I'm just going to mention the believable moment that I think is really kind of intriguing because it's in one of the most fantastical films, which would be Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

(25:50): So, obviously this is a vampire movie. It's considered a drama or a thriller, depending upon the official listing that you look at, and it really obviously does not have very much to do with politics as we know they are practiced. I sincerely hope there are no vampires. So, that said, it was really interesting to me because at one point late in the film, the first lady says, “Who will take this information to the front lines?” and the president's response is, “I can't trust anyone to do it,” and she takes over. And so, she drives the ammunition to the frontline, and she instructs the soldiers on how to kill the vampires. And then, she takes on the “No. 2” vampire, if you will.

(26:41): And all I could think of was, you know, about the third time watching the movie, I must admit, vampires and me, not mixing, but the thing that I could think of is the number of times that first ladies have said, who can you trust with this, and the presidents have said, there really isn't anyone. So think, for example, here's a stretch for the audience to consider, but so, Lyndon Johnson signs a series of civil rights bills, and now he has to campaign for reelection. He's the first Southern president, he's determined not to lose the South in this reelection campaign. What is he going to do? And he turns to the first lady and has her take a whistle-stop campaign through the rural Southeast. So, they leave from Virginia, Arlington, and they circle all the way down through the Carolinas, through Georgia, Florida, across the Gulf, over to Louisiana and New Orleans.

(27:38): And that was an extremely difficult three-day whistle-stop. There were, I think, 36 speeches, maybe more. She had to confront serious protests, outbreaks of violence, all while trying to deliver a message that this is a president who sees, as she put it, a new South. She never talks, she never uses the term civil rights, but she's really coding this message for white conservative Southerners, because you don't have that realignment to the Republican Party in the South yet.

And I know, I know that somebody is sitting in the audience thinking, “Seriously?” She has gone from Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter to a whistle-stop campaign by Lady Bird Johnson in the 1960s, and I'm like yes, because what's connecting them is this sense that the first lady steps in when political ambition and self-interest runs counter to other administrative officials doing so, other administration officials doing so, and I think that's that thematic quality, not the first lady is self-sacrificing, but the first lady is a political actor with the acumen to do difficult things. That's fascinating.

Teri Finneman (28:57): And then tying into that, our final question of the show is why do you think studying first ladies matters?

MaryAnne Borrelli: I think that if you care about transparency and responsiveness and accountability and effectiveness in the presidency, then you need to recognize and respect and delve into the work of every member in the presidential administration, and I think that first ladies have been far too often overlooked, marginalized, ignored, and as a result, we have failed to realize the full potential of those same democratic virtues in our research.

Teri Finneman: All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.  

MaryAnne Borrelli: Thank you.

Teri Finneman: We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Teri Finneman, and this is the First Ladies podcast.

Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.