An article in The New York Times Magazine reminds me of my typology of stories involving fictional US presidents. Fictional presidents appear in three kinds of stories- satires, nightmares, and fairy tales. In satires, they show that the rot goes all the way to the top. In nightmares, they show that even the highest authorities are powerless to help. In fairy tales, they stand in for the king and say the magic words or make the grand gestures that solves everyone’s problems. The most memorable stories tend to mix these three genres. So Fail-Safe, Superman II, and Independence Day mixed nightmare and fairy tale, Dr Strangelove and Mars Attacks mixed nightmare and satire, and Dave mixed satire and fairy tale. But pure forms can be effective too. Among examples mentioned in the article, Veep is pure satire, Seven Days in May is pure nightmare, and The West Wing and The American President are pure fairy tale, but they are all quite memorable.

The article mentions the apparently happy ending of Seven Days in May as a relic of a more optimistic time, but in fact it just heightens the nightmare. Sure, the president foils the coup and removes the villainous General Scott and the other plotters from the top echelons of the military, and the press corps applauds him on live television. But the president is still despised by the electorate, Scott is still hugely popular, and the president admits to Scott that he can never expose his crimes. He won’t even reveal what he knows about Scott’s extra-marital affair and complicate his public image. The Constitution will survive until the next scheduled election, but there is little doubt how that election will turn out, or what Scott will do once he has been voted into the office he was so narrowly prevented from seizing.

The novel makes this even clearer. Written in 1962, it supposes that John Kennedy lived to serve two full terms as president, at the end of which the country was mired in a war between Communists and non-Communists in a country on the other side of the world (in the novel, Iran,) crime in the streets was spiraling, college and university campuses were hotbeds of unrest, African American neighborhoods were scenes of large-scale rioting, and the economy suffered from high rates of inflation. This imaginary 1968 saw the election of a Republican president who failed to address any of those problems in a way the public could accept, and so President Lyman defeated him for reelection in 1972. Lyman ends the war in Iran with a treaty that at first seems to ensure a division of Iran like that of Korea after 1953, and that treaty is popular enough that he can persuade the Senate to ratify a nuclear disarmament treaty he has negotiated with the Soviet Union. But the Iranian Communists don’t respect their treaty, and they take over the rest of the country. Alarmed by the thought of what might happen if the Soviets don’t honor their part of the disarmament treaty, the US electorate votes for a Republican Senate in 1974, but Lyman insists on going ahead with dismantling the USA’s nuclear warheads. The coup attempt takes place in May 1975, and after foiling it Lyman moderates his stance on disarmament. The other problems are still in place, and American democracy looks like a dead duck.

The movie Seven Days in May was directed by John Frankenheimer, who not long before had directed the film version of another political nightmare, The Manchurian Candidate. That one doesn’t have a president character, just a couple of senators and some presidential candidates. But it is an unusually pure example of a cinematic nightmare. That’s clear if you try to explain the plot. How does any event in it follow from any other, how could the villains have imagined their plans would work, what are the scope and limits of their power of mind control, and why does Frank Sinatra’s character have the authority to do any of the things he does? None of these questions has an answer that even begins to make sense by the logic we use in the daylight hours, but by the associative logic of dreams it all flows with a terrible inevitability.