The American biopic offers us linearity, a simplified relationship to time and history.
The biopic is a staple of contemporary American cinema. In 2024 alone, moviegoers have been treated to biopics of Bob Marley, Ronald Reagan, Amy Winehouse, and the entire original cast of Saturday Night Live. LEGO even got in on the action with an animated biopic of the singer and songwriter Pharrell Williams. The American biopic offers us linearity, a simplified relationship to time and history. These are the origin stories of our political, musical, historical, and comedic heroes—Hollywood explanations of how these cultural giants came to pass through our lives in a fixed moment in time and history.
But Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s newest film, The Apprentice, which follows the relationship between Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) through the greed-is-good mentality of New York City in the 1970s and 80s, pushes the biopic into new territory. Rather than adhering to biopic conventions, Abbasi refuses neat Hollywood linearity and its propulsive commitments to causality. By dislodging referents in time and space, Abbasi shows how America’s cultural myth-making machine—the biopic being one among many of its arms—has enabled Donald Trump’s exceptionalism, eroded American democracy, and cast a darker pall on the motivations of U.S. politicians. Through his filmic technique, Abbasi presses his audience to think about how American democracy is under siege because of a set of rules Cohn taught Trump 50 years ago—and about the links between truth’s mutability and the politics of deniability so entrenched in our political ecosystem today.
While Donald Trump (of course) took the very film’s existence as a personal attack, characterizing it as a “hatchet job” made by “human scum,” this film is not about Trump per se, but rather about what Trump shows us about American democracy and myth-making. Abbasi’s use of filmic technique underscores photography’s ability to slide across what Siegfried Kracauer in “Photography” calls the “spatial and temporal continuum.” By eschewing the traditional chronology typical to the U.S. biopic, often framed as “origin stories” of politicians and celebrities, and instead dislodging referents from time and place, Abbasi shows us the American myth-making machine at work: we watch as history, with all its discontinuities, is smoothed and sutured into a coherent cultural story. By revealing this process—choosing to slide narrative across a spatial and temporal continuum through the mobilization of iconography associated with both America and Trump—Abbasi calls us to see the crucial role that processes of storytelling play in propping up American democracy.
Photography, at least according to Kracauer, has always been amenable to such processes of myth. Kracauer comments on the inability of film to capture the essence of an object: it fails in terms of memory, and is easily manipulated into meaning. But Abbasi uses this affordance of film and photography strategically: this continuum allows the film to move in and out of history as Abbasi hangs myth, fact, fiction, hearsay, gossip, and self-referential images like ornaments around the cultural myth of Donald Trump. For Kracauer, film and photography can strip context from the objects they depict, a process further diluted by their reproducibility on a mass scale. Abbasi harnesses the possibility of film and photography to dislodge from its referents, both spatially and temporally, and engage in an active process of meaning-making through new referents, materiality, and personal or collective memory. He thus rejects the temporal and spatial constraints of the traditional biopic in favor of leaning into a photographic fluidity that embodies how culture never stops shaping or being shaped by our collective memory, our political process, and our economic relations.
Throughout The Apprentice, Abbasi uses deliberate choices in film stock, camera lens, color palette, set design, and framing to evoke the look and feel of the 1970s and ‘80s for many scenes, but in other scenes, he evokes a more contemporary feel. These material aspects of Abbasi’s technique create a clear temporal juxtaposition that situates the film within two time periods: the late twentieth century and the 2024 presidential election cycle.
Through strategic references to McCarthyism and Trump/Cohn’s win-at-all-costs strategy, The Apprentice constantly reminds the audience of the American myth-making machine and its oversimplified reproductions of history and culture that helped to create Trump’s exceptionalism and is entirely characteristic of American democracy’s hero worship, which has always dominated our political theater. These ideas are at work throughout the film, as Abbasi uses his technique to dislodge referents and unsettle the overly simplistic, hyper-linear storytelling that currently dominates the U.S. biopic.
I want to point to two scenes that capture the photographic fluidity at work in Abbasi’s technique—and how his strategic harnessing of photographic fluidity demonstrates the myth-making machine at work in American political, cultural, and economic reproduction. The first occurs midway through the film, after Trump has risen to considerable wealth and fame. He’s dealing with his older brother’s tragic death, which occurred in 1981 due to complications with substance abuse, and to which the film suggests Trump shares some blame for ignoring his brother’s pleas for help in an earlier scene. The scene in question opens with Trump, dressed in a dark silk robe, entering his bathroom and washing his hands with a germaphobic intensity. As the camera zooms in on Trump scrubbing furiously, Abbasi gives the audience a moment to consider the rather thin metaphor of a guilt-ridden man attempting to wash clean the sins of his past. Once Trump stops, the camera pans to the mirror where Trump, clearly sucking on a piece of hard candy, catches his breath and considers his reflection. Moments later, a pregnant Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova) walks into the room and tells Trump, “You don’t need to be fine.” Trump then walks out of the bathroom, passing another mirror along the way, and climbs into bed.
The considerably darker color palette in the bedroom counters the sterile, white palette of the bathroom and shifts the mood into a darker place. A woman on a small television set says: “Look at me. Do you like what you see?” Trump considers the TV set, continuing to suck on the hard candy as Ivana attempts to soothe his nerves with physical affection, only for him to grow angry and rebuff her. Then, in a brief moment where Trump’s humanity breaks through his carefully curated persona, he begins to sob, arms folded, body tensed, face screwed so tight he’s barely recognizable. But Abbasi doesn’t linger here for long. Instead, the scene pivots away from this humanization of Trump and the sympathy or empathy it might generate in a viewer to focus on the film’s auditory effects: the sound of Trump sucking on hard candy like a baby on a pacifier. The hard candy’s rattle is so apparent that it pushes the audience to focus not on Trump’s tears, but instead on his childlike affinity for candy and other foods we might associate with childhood. Rather than dwelling with real human guilt and grief, the audience is invited to reflect on Trump’s legendary appetite for McDonald’s and milkshakes.
One does not have to have seen Abbasi’s film, or even to have followed Donald Trump’s life very closely, to see the convergence of time and space enabled by the photographic fluidity in this scene. Trump is famous for his flashy, silk clothing, his germaphobic behavior, and his unquenchable sweet tooth. These are reference points that drop in and out of history, allowing the film to slide across this spatial and temporal continuum. The audience knows the scene is referring to a supposedly difficult time in Trump’s personal life, but there is no common knowledge that a scene like this ever actually occurred in history, no collective memory. Instead, Abbasi chooses to adorn both the visual landscape and the soundscape of the scene with cultural myths about Donald Trump, setting those myths in motion and reminding the audience of the idiosyncratic personality traits we all have come to know about him, but can’t quite place in time or space.
This photographic fluidity calls into question the audience’s collective memory and emphasizes film’s ability to operate free of temporal and spatial constraints typically associated with film as a medium. Even as this scene remains grounded in linear time in its own diegesis, it uses extratextual referents to infuse the Trump myth into a historical moment that probably never happened, but has been made possible in this film through the Trump cultural myth-making that all of us have participated in. Through this extratextual infusion, Abbasi asks us what we make of Trump, the movie character, the real estate developer, the reality television star, Mr. President. The employment of extratextual referents enables us to experience the film’s Trump as all of these at once. And as a result, the tension between the fluidity of the photographic continuum and the discontinuous fragments of the Trump myth points to Trump, not as an exceptional arbiter of populism, but as the most effective product of America’s myth-making machine, wielding his exceptionalism through the political arena.
No scene in The Apprentice represents the dynamics of this time and space convergence better than when Roger Stone (Mark Rendall) meets with Trump in his office in the late 1980s to convince him to run for president. The scene opens with a wide-angle shot of Trump sitting behind his desk at the top of Trump Tower while Roger Stone talks animatedly about the possibility of a Trump presidential run. Abbasi frames the actors by two large windows overlooking New York City, and litters the set with democratic paraphernalia—a football, a tiny American flag. These props immediately converge with Trump paraphernalia—a miniature model of Trump’s casino in Atlantic City and his “diet pills,” which Trump pops gleefully while speaking to Stone. The entire scene is reflected through a gold ceiling, which casts the actors and the set in a watery yellow light and projects their movements from above.
While the props, the wide-angle lens, and the gold ceiling certainly help establish the film’s photographic fluidity, serving as reference points for Donald Trump’s conflation of presidential powers with the all-encompassing egotism of his corporate persona, it is the dialogue that sends this fluidity into overdrive. Stone presents Trump with the campaign slogan meant to encourage him into the race: “Let’s Make America Great Again.” The slogan prompts Trump to launch into a tirade reminiscent of his contemporary rally speeches. He claims America is getting ripped off by undeserving minorities, lauds the Soviets for being tough, tells Stone he’s not going to read the policy brief in front of him, and proclaims his love for America and the democratic ideals it represents. This is one of the scenes where, late in the film, Stan begins to embody the physicality of the contemporary Trump. Earlier, Stan plays Trump as hesitant, unsure of himself, almost meek, but as his character finds his footing in the depths of immorality that characterizes Roy Cohn’s estimation of New York City politics and money, Stan transforms his performance into a blustery, breathless, egomaniacal portrayal reminiscent of the Trump we know in 2024. Throughout the scene with Stone, Trump slams his fist onto the desk, swivels in his chair, slugs a Coke, waves his hands, and points at Stone repeatedly, while proclaiming that “Government is for losers,” but he’d “love a blowjob on Air Force One.”
The representations of American democracy incorporated into the set merge with Stan’s physical embodiment of the contemporary Donald Trump, operating as spatial and temporal convergence mechanisms. Abbasi uses these convergence mechanisms to break free of the film’s temporal and spatial fixity, and move the audience into the contemporary moment, where Trump, now president-elect, will attempt to reshape American democracy. What’s more, Stan carries with him his role from another American myth-making machine: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We recall his role as Bucky Barnes—an avatar first of the dangers of propaganda and brainwashing, and then of American patriotism in the guise of militarized ubermensch. It’s not just that the audience hears the recognizable Trump of contemporary political theater, but that the film itself slips out of 1988 and into 2024. This slippage disavows the myth that Trump somehow tapped into a vein of populism in American politics and underscores how the cultural myth of Trump has been in production for decades. Abbasi slides along Kracauer’s spatial and temporal continuum to demonstrate how the biopic can shed itself of memory and remake meaning through cultural, social, and economic signifiers. It’s appropriate, then, that all of this is reflected in a gold ceiling.
Later in the film, when Roy Cohn is dying of AIDS and Trump invites him to Mar-a-Lago to throw him a birthday party, I found myself tearing up at the image of Cohn, sick, shrunken, and defeated, accepting fake jewelry from Trump before being presented with a cake painted like an American flag. To feel any empathy for these figures is more a testament to Stan’s and Strong’s performances, but it made me feel gross in the moment. I left the theater with this sentiment, this unchecked empathy for two loathsome characters, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this essay: to take a closer look at how Abbasi’s technique invited me to feel for these characters, and how I struggled to reconcile those feelings with my personal convictions regarding president-elect Donald Trump. This is at the heart of the film’s photographic fluidity—its ability to remind its audience of their relationship with American democracy, as a story we tell ourselves and a story that has taken up the figure of Donald Trump as one of its protagonists.
As we descend into a second Trump presidency, films like The Apprentice remind us how filmic techniques can force a confrontation between the audience and the myths we buy into, those myths of great American giants that still pull at our heartstrings despite our best efforts to resist them. In this way, The Apprentice pushes what the biopic can achieve by utilizing convergence mechanisms to take the film out of its diegetic timeline and place it right in front of its audience, in our current political climate, where questions of truth, greed, and power form the basis of our evolving conception of American democracy—inspired by Cohn, but built by Trump. These convergence mechanisms underscore the American cultural myth-making machine that has produced Trump and allowed him to rise to America’s most powerful seat for a second time, not because of some special talent for cultural and political theater, but because he is the most resonant example of this theater, one of the machine’s most effective and dangerous products.
John M. Fredericks is a PhD student at Arizona State University in the Educational Policy and Evaluation program. He’s become entrenched in Wicked fan culture since seeing the movie twice.