Paid Post: "G20" and the Elusive Dream of a Black Woman President
The action thriller, now streaming on Amazon, indulges our desire to see a Black woman as US President even as it also reminds us of the yawning gap between imagination and reality.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
Like a lot of other people, I went into November of last year fairly confident that Kamala Harris was going to win a notch over Donald Trump. Yes, there were reasons to be wary–inflation was high, people were still angry, and Trump has shown time and again that he is quite capable of surviving and thriving when anyone else would flame out into well-earned disgrace–but still, Harris was just so damn charismatic. Surely, I thought, the American people would come through this time. Then November happened and that whole dream went up in smoke, revealed for the fiction that it always does. When it comes down to it, a distressing number of Americans are quite unwilling to vote for a woman, let alone a Black woman, even when said woman’s opponent is a man who literally tried to overthrow the government the last time that he lost an election.
A glance at recent popular culture suggests that, in Hollywood at least, there was a similar sense that 2024 would mark the moment when America was finally willing to put aside its historical prejudices and give a Black woman her due. Thus it is that we have a number of films and TV series that imagine what it would be like if the US had a president who wasn’t a straight White man. The Residence, for example, has a gay president, and the very mixed bag that was the Netflix thriller series Zero Day co-stars Angela Bassett as a Black woman president who has a no-nonsense and kickass attitude about her office and her responsibility to the people of the United States. In the latter case, one didn’t have to squint to see the obvious allusions to a potential Kamala Harris administration, particularly since Robert De Niro’s George Mullen, her predecessor, bears a striking resemblance to our own dear Joe Biden.
Even more explicit, in its own way, is G20, the action thriller film from Amazon. In this case, a Black woman is not just President of the United States but also an action badass and, for all that it is a bit predictable, I loved the way the film allows us as viewers to imagine ourselves in a world very different from the one in which we currently find ourselves. For all that the action film is usually seen as a conservative genre, G20 demonstrates the extent to which its conventions can be put to other uses.