Mediators of Public Resonance: Cinematic Reflections on the Role of Iconic Figures of the ‘Everybody’ in Populist Political Processes

This article analyses how the medium of film stages and reflects on populist political practices and on the main figures and ways of appearing, acting and relating they involve to create public resonance. In analysing two sample films – one (Meet John Doe, Frank Capra 1941) released in the United States in the early 1940s and the other (Chez Nous,Lucas Belvaux 2016) made in Europe in the 2010s – it shows in detail how populist leaders embody the role of a central iconic figure, the ‘everybody’, in addressing the audience as ‘people’ in opposition to an ‘elite’. The central characteristics of such a figure and its functions in political discourses as well as the effects of its public performances and the stages it uses are disclosed. In addition, the article gives an insight into the genealogy and iconology of this figure. In this respect, it shows that for contemporary populism, the link of everybodies to the political myth of ‘the people’ re-emerging with the popular revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is most important.

In comparing the two sample films, the article discusses various concepts that are used in political theory to grasp the phenomenon of populism. By relating these concepts to the lived practices of populism depicted in the films, the key stylistic and performative features of populism are highlighted and the patterns of collective myths associated with it are revealed. At the same time, however, the change in populist political mobilisation from modernity to late modernity is also discussed. In this reading, popular film appears as a medium that does not represent an escape from social and political life but that leads us towards it and is able to vividly reflect upon how processes of political mediation work.