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Tony Blair was a fan of Casablanca. Bill Clinton loved Grey’s Anatomy. Donald Trump’s favourite film? Problematic antebellum schmaltzer Gone with the Wind. Even UK PM Keir Starmer, who cagily refused to disclose his favourite novel or poem in a recent pre-election interview, has admitted a fondness for Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner. But can you judge a politician by their taste in the arts?
This week, as Kamala Harris steps in after Joe Biden’s long-anticipated withdrawal from the US presidential election race, many will be scrutinising her artistic predilections in search of what they might tell us about a future Harris presidency. For her campaign song, she has selected Beyoncé’s “Freedom”. It’s easy to see why Harris would have chosen this track, an uplifting and sincere anthem drawing on the history of civil rights activism – but it doesn’t end there.
Harris has spoken about her cultural tastes at various points down the years. In 2020, she listed her favourite books as the following: Native Son by Richard Wright, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. You’ve got classics, more contemporary picks, and something for the children. There’s a whiff of focus-grouping to the collection, sure, but it’s nonetheless a positive and diverse list – smart, human, and accessible. It ought to be essential for a politician to have a wide-ranging compassion for all parts of society; if you wanted to engender this type of empathy, you could do a lot worse than start with these books. Biden, in contrast, seems to have a slightly more intellectualist bent, and has over the years dropped allusions to his love of Ulysses. (It’s hard to imagine him making his way through James Joyce now, of course – hell, it’s hard to imagine him getting through a James Patterson.)
When it comes to cinema, Harris again seems to err on the side of accessibility – flaunting a particular penchant for Hollywood’s biggest McFranchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Appearing on a fundraising Zoom call with the cast of Avengers in 2020, Harris, who had previously championed the movie Black Panther, exhibited an authentic-seeming knowledge of the superhero films, speaking about specific scenes in real and enthusiastic detail and quoting lines from the franchise. (“I can do this all day!”) How we should interpret this passion – as conformity, or populism, or simply unpretentiousness – may be a matter of opinion.
In another interview, Harris described bingewatching the FX drama Yellowjackets, and has previously cited her favourite movie as being My Cousin Vinny, the exuberant 1992 comedy featuring Joe Pesci as a scrappy New York lawyer and Marisa Tomei as his foot-stomping paramour. There is a certain irony to be found in the fact that Harris – whose record of imprisoning non-violent offenders while serving as San Francisco’s district attorney remains a frequent point of criticism from the left – should gravitate towards a film that is about wrongful arrests, that has at its heart the shortcomings and frustrations of the American legal system.
Similarly, eyebrows ought to be raised by Harris’s unfettered embrace of Charli XCX’s recent album Brat. When the Essex-born singer declared on X/Twitter this week that, in the parlance of the summer, “Kamala is Brat”, Harris ran with it, changing her social media aesthetic to an on-brand “Brat green” in tribute. But of course, Brat is an album that has little to do with Harris’s world. It is unapologetically about, among other things, the trappings of celebrity, millennial womanhood, and, significantly, the carefree use of illegal stimulants. How this last point chimes with Harris’s own stance on drug legislation – which has, admittedly, become somewhat more liberal over the years – is anyone’s guess.
Ultimately, though, this is the folly of mistaking a person’s taste for their moral virtue. It’s a conflation that is made all too often within the kangaroo court of social media, but it really is as simple as the fact that sometimes people like predictable things, and sometimes people do not. When Rishi Sunak says that he’s a fan of Jilly Cooper, is this in any way significant? What does it mean that Osama Bin Laden’s hard drive contained films such as Antz, Cars, and Chicken Little? Even Trump is hard to pin down. As well as Gone with the Wind, he has also exalted Citizen Kane – a movie that is glaringly about the perils and moral emptiness of extreme wealth – and has been said to have a major soft spot for the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
When politicians profess to adore this or that cultural product, it should usually be taken with a pinch of salt. (There is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding the authorship and agenda of Barack Obama’s yearly cultural recommendations lists.) Name-dropping a popular band, movie or TV series is an easy, cost-free way of barnacling oneself onto the hull of something with greater cultural cachet. But, if done too nakedly, this can backfire – think of The Smiths refusing the affections of David Cameron.
The insights we get into the (often carefully curated) cultural tastes of politicians usually end up obfuscating more than they illuminate. They are most humanising in their contradictions, in the creeping realisation that liking or disliking Avengers: Endgame probably has little to no bearing whatsoever on any other part of your life or belief system. It’s true for Kamala Harris, and it’s true for me and you. It reminds me of the scene in HBO’s The Wire – a firm favourite of Obama, as it happens – when Dominic West’s detective Jimmy McNulty finally visits the apartment of heroin kingpin Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). Entering the property, he is shocked to find an upmarket home filled with books, sculptures, and high-end furnishings. “Who the f*** was I chasing?” he asks. Who indeed?
