Comedian Patton Oswalt demonstrates that he can toss off this very entertaining and thought-provoking riff while doing a podcast about a sitcom.
While guesting on the podcast "Park and Recollection," about the TV show "Parks and Recreation" (talking about the episode in which Patton famously ad-libbed another epic, legendary riff when his character Garth Blundin filibustered at a city council meeting), Patton went off on how he thinks each president's personality "sets the tone for the pop culture" — specifically, movies — of his term's era.
I'd love to lay the whole theory out here in text, but it's more fun to let you watch him spin it out. His examples of how each era's movies reflect the personality of each president and the tone of his term are just perfect.
I'll just say that he starts with, "So, during Kennedy, it was all bright suits and James Bond, and we're going to space baby, and the rat pack, and Yeah!" and takes off from there.
This video cuts off at Obama, so I will quote Patton's take on the Trump era:
"And then there was a rejection of [Obama], with Donald Trump, which I think was a combination of a white reaction to having a black president, quite frankly. But it's also this thing if you notice, because Trump's whole thing is, like, Well, what is reality?
What is truth? And now everything is all about the mutliverse [e.g., the Marvel multiverse] and "Everything Everywhere All at Once," or "Russian Doll," where nothing's really real. There's no actual set truth anymore. And everything is amorphous."
