Critic at Large: Palin’s story conjures movie analogies

Even if you’re a liberal Democrat who would like to kick George and Dick into Kingdom Come, you’ve got to love it.

For a little while anyway. I mean, get real. If you had to choose between Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin as a hunting partner, you know where your vote is headed.

Ooops. Almost forgot that the lever switch in November is mostly about who is going to stem the economy’s downward spiral, fix the wounded health care system and bring some kind of honorable closure to the mess in Iraq.

Still, even if you are a Democrat cringing at the possibility of a McCain-Palin triumph, you’ve got to savor the taste of the bittersweet Palin pie, especially if you love or write about movies.

Because, though we are still in Act 1, the Sarah Palin story seems to be coming to us right out of a lot in Hollywood.

“If you created a character who was an evangelical Christian and hunted caribou with a machine gun, people would say it’s too broad for even satire,” writer-director Gary Ross told Rachel Abramowitz of the L.A. Times. Ross wrote the 1993 presidential comedy “Dave.”

Got to take notice

Hello! I don’t care where you stand politically; this Sarah Palin thing is either a lovely screwball comedy in progress, a vicious satire on the gullibility of American audiences, or a sinister drama in the tradition of “The Manchurian Candidate.”

And because Palin is perceived as hot — right now a picture is circulating with Palin in a bikini — you could have a Hollywood hottie portray her.

Veteran TV writer Larry Gelbart suggested Demi Moore because of what he called Palin’s “mixture of sensuality and dominatrix.”

Hey, there’s a turn-on: “A whip-wielding mistress,” writes a blogger in Salon. Suddenly, he says, “Republicans have become the party of sex, women and fun.”

“This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor,” writes Camille Paglia, my favorite feminist and an Obama supporter.

Paglia cannot stop herself from gushing at this “explosion of muscular American feminism dominatrix persona of high glamour” in the tradition of Marlene Dietrich.

Modern Annie Oakley

Something about Palin resonates, transcends political affiliations. She is, says Paglia, the embodiment of “Annie Oakley and our pioneer past.”

“Her story could be a Capra film or a chick flick,” another observer opines.

That was my initial read on the issue, even if I summarily rejected the notion of Palin as Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith, who exposes graft in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

That cynically disingenuous convention speech about the media and the liberal press eliminated her from coming off as Miss Innocent, but who knows what could happen if Palin ever went to Washington and got to write her own speeches.

Summoning more analogies from movies and pop culture, Cintra Wilson goes apoplectic, comparing Palin with “a cutthroat cheerleader stage mom,” a kind of Stepford wife.

“It is a kind of eerie coincidence,” she fumes, “that Sarah Palin is being sprung on the public at the same time as the bimbo/frat-boy . . . comedy ‘House Bunny,’ which features a poster of a beautiful young lady with Playmate-style bunny ears, big, stupid eyes and her mouth hanging open like someone just punched her.”

Wilson then goes on to call Palin “The Carmella Soprano of the GOP.” It’s an appraisal that strikes me as mean.

Everyone, it seems, is trying for a movie or TV analogy to explain the Palin phenomenon. Maureen Dowd suggests we are witnessing a malevolent variation of Eliza Doolittle from “My Fair Lady.”

Abramowitz reminds us about Tracy Flick, the scheming high school senior played by Reese Witherspoon in “Election.”

“Dear Lord Jesus,” prays Tracy, “I do not often speak with you and ask for things, but now, I really must insist that you help me win the election tomorrow because I deserve it and [my opponent] doesn’t, as you well know. . . . Now I’m asking that you go that one last mile and make sure to put me in office where I belong so that I may carry out your will on Earth as it is in heaven. Amen.”

Too mean-spirited? In a recorded speech, Gov. Palin did say, “God’s will has to be done to get that gas line built.”

Having it both ways

Those wishing to underscore Republican conservative hypocrisy point to “Juno,” last year’s surprise hit about a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant and decides to have her baby.

“It’s Juno in Juneau,” writes Leon Wiesteler in The New Republic. He is not the only observer who notes that the very same people who castigated “Juno” as immoral are now showing empathy for Palin’s pregnant daughter Bristol. Those fundamentalist Christian Republicans who chastised the Spears family for not keeping watch on their daughter Jamie Lynn are now saying what most of us knew already: That “it” can happen in the best of families.

Finally, a note of compassionate conservatism from the mouths of alleged Christians who want to have it both ways. It’s a potential trap that turns this Palin scenario into a more serious drama.

Now we are back to the chick flick story of a tomboy-beauty queen-girl next door who shows them that a hockey mom-huntress can bake apple pie, don leather in the bedroom and whip the Taliban into submission when they arouse her ire.

And then, as she holds her newborn in her arms, snuggle up to her adoring husband. It is powerful, mythic stuff that may have little to do with her qualifications to govern a nation. And even less with the real Sarah Palin.

But it sticks.

‘American Idol’ syndrome

There’s another cultural touchstone, perhaps the most telling in a drama about to begin Act 2. This whole Palin story underscores the influence of manufactured reality shows like “American Idol.” As Gelbart says, “the proliferation of this form of entertainment has whetted the American public’s taste for amateurs.”

One thing for sure: Some Democrats are going out of their way to demonize her, while some Republicans are intent on rationalizing Palin’s weaknesses into strengths that are not yet apparent.

It’s movies, myth and politics in a cauldron of what may turn out to be a blockbuster brew.