Hillary Clinton needs Hollywood:

Hillary Clinton needs Hollywood: Modern Family proves it

Drama, like satire, can shape politics and alter society. From 24 to Borgen, TV does more than reflect life: it changes it

Jonathan Freedland

Hillary Clinton should steer well clear of Nicole Kidman. The latter's performance in a new movie of the life of Princess Grace, formerly Grace Kelly, has come in for some acid criticism. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw declared Grace "so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk".

Twisting the knife, he likened it to the dire Diana movie, a film whose arteries were similarly clogged with saccharine. Admittedly, Helen Mirren did a wonderful PR job for the Queen, but often even the most hagiographic screen treatments can end up diminishing rather than dignifying their subjects.

What's this got to do with the former secretary of state and could-be presidential candidate for 2016? No producer is likely to begin shooting Hillary: the Movie anytime soon – not now, when the final reel of the story is still undecided. And yet, Ms Clinton needs Hollywood's help.

Specifically, if the grand dame of the Democratic party is to seek the White House she needs a fictional depiction – not of her life but of a woman in the Oval Office. For while life has a knack of imitating art, art also has a pretty good track record of shaping life, especially when it comes to politics. Think of it as President Palmer syndrome.

In 2002-3, the second series of the thriller 24 aired in the US. One aspect of its political influence was visible right away: agent Jack Bauer's whatever-it-takes attitude to the bad guys both reflected and feda post-9/11 climate in which torture came to be seen as acceptable. The forward propulsion of the programme was such that viewers could hardly help themselves: their adrenaline pumping, they found themselves urging Bauer to waterboard suspected terrorists, if that's what was needed to stop the ticking bomb. In the propaganda wars of the first half of the noughties, 24 was one of the Bush administration's most potent weapons.

Yet the series also contained the seeds of what would come next. For Bauer served David Palmer, a principled and wise president who just so happened to be African-American. In 2008, as Barack Obama made his first run, I interviewed a series of political operatives who agreed that the on-screen President Palmer had, five years earlier, subtly prepared the US public for the notion of a black man in the White House. What was once deemed a political impossibility, a fantasy, was suddenly there on the TV screen. And once you've seen it on TV, it becomes normal. Of course, there were a thousand other factors at work, but in this respect at least, Hillary lacked Obama's luck. Not that Hollywood hadn't tried: Geena Davis took the title role in Commander in Chief, but the show flopped. To this day, Americans have not had regular, sympathetic exposure to an imagined woman president.

Palmer syndrome is quite rare. Fiction's impact is usually felt on the broader political culture rather than manifested in the election of specific individuals. The most vivid example is reaching its peak this week, as Cam and Mitchell – the gay couple at the heart of TV sitcom Modern Family – celebrate their wedding. The speed with which attitudes to equal marriage in Britain and the US have shifted is remarkable. Less than two decades ago it was seen as an outrage; Bill Clinton signed into law a measure to block it. Now it is part of the American landscape.

Credit for that transformation has many fathers and mothers, but Cam and Mitchell deserve a footnote. Since 2009, America's living rooms have seen two gay men act as parents, as flawed and loving as any others. By the time Obama announced in 2012 that his earlier opposition to equal marriage had "evolved", so had (almost) everyone else's.

Eric Stonestreet, who plays Cam, says he's fully aware of the "social impact, cultural impact. We hear it from kids, we hear that from parents, so we know it's real." Real enough that when Mitt Romney crashed to defeat in 2012, one Republican strategist diagnosed the problem precisely: they were "a Mad Men party in a Modern Family America".

Fiction's ability to bring change is not confined to the US. Perhaps it's too much to suggest that Denmark anointed its first female prime minister in October 2011 because Borgen had shown a woman come to power exactly a year earlier. Even so, Copenhagen politicos speak of a definite Borgen effect, reckoning Denmark's parliamentarians and their aides started behaving the way they had seen characters conduct themselves on screen. More concretely, when the Danish MP Mai Henriksen advocated a bill of rights for prostitutes, the Danish political class accused her of lifting the idea straight from the third series of the TV show.

Examples in Britain are a tad less noble but suggest art's power over public life is no less real. A senior BBC executive once told me that Smashy and Nicey, the geriatric Radio 1 DJs created by Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield, were decisive in the eviction of the Dave Lee Travis generation. One had only to glimpse the satire to know the real-life version was no longer tenable.

One expects the recent BBC series on the BBC, W1A, to have a similar effect. Surely executives will hesitate to begin each sentence with bizarre jargon or a name-dropped reference to "Tony", now that they've cringed when Simon Harwood, Director of Strategic Governance, does it. I worked at the BBC when it launched the idea of rooms that were part workshop, part office – calling each one a "woffice" – so I can testify that W1A hardly exaggerates.

Of course, there are limits to satire's effectiveness. You'd have thought The Thick of It would have given politics' backroom boys a degree of self-awareness. But there was Patrick O'Flynn, aide to Nigel Farage,physically bundling the Ukip leader out of an awkward interview with LBC yesterday, apparently undeterred by the fact that he was acting out a scene that might have been penned by Armando Iannucci.

At the very least, fiction can change the way we see politics and politicians. Robert Harris wrote his novel The Ghost before Tony Blair left office, yet his depiction of a perma-tanned, transatlantic former PM living in a twilight world of private jets and plutocrat hospitality has proved eerily prescient. We cannot look at Blair now without seeing Harris's Adam Lang. Similarly, Steve Bell's grey man wearing his underpants on the outside altered the way Britons saw John Major forever.

So fiction can change both reality and the way we see it. It's necessary. Hillary Clinton needs it now but there are other situations equally crying out for help. An imagined depiction of a Britain without Scotland might be more persuasive than a thousand speeches for the No campaign. And what might shift opinion more ahead of 2017's putative in/out referendum than a drama showing a desolate, friendless Britain (or its opposite) outside Europe?

The point is, once we've seen it on the page or screen, we can believe it. It becomes real – even if, as Kidman proves, there are exceptions.

Twitter: @Freedland

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/16/hillary-clinton-needs-hollywood-modern-family-politics-tv