NOTES ON THE APPRENTICE (2024)
Meditations on the meaning of Trump's bildungsroman biopic, and what it may portend for contemporary culture.
When I watched The Apprentice, last year’s controversial Trump bildungsroman film, my mind couldn’t help but wander beyond its story to wonder about the story-behind-its-story, because as interesting as its story is, and as strong its performances are, they’re not as compelling (to me, anyway) as the timeline under which its development took place. The film, titled after its subject’s former reality TV show, was first announced in 2018, but production was slow.1 Funding was reportedly difficult to secure, as executives feared the movie would humanize, even lionize, Trump.2 Journalist Gabriel Sherman was attached as writer, though Sebastian Stan wasn’t cast as “Donnie” until early 2022, and Ali Abbasi didn’t join as director until late 2023. In that same span of time, the country endured a pandemic, exited one war, entered two others, removed Trump from power, prosecuted him in court, and then seemed poised to restore him – all enormous cultural events, and all undoubtedly affecting the film’s portrayal of the former and future president.
It’s therefore curious to contemplate how the film’s tenor might have shifted over the course of its creation. Biopics, even bildungsromans, are usually made, if not after death, after some denouement, after the threads in their tales have largely closed and are able to be reflected on with minimal ramifications for contemporary cultural life. When considering the ones about recent presidents, their releases have occurred after their subjects’ peak relevances as arbiters of American discourse. W, Oliver Stone’s less-than-flattering portrayal of patrician-cum-Texan failson George W. Bush’s wayward youth, came out as he was leaving office; the same was the case for Barry, Vikram Gandhi’s hagiography of ‘sensitive young man’ Barack Obama’s existential early years. That’s not so with The Apprentice. Although Donald Trump, maligned by the public and then mugshotted by police, was at his nadir during the timing of most of production, he remained a, if not the, dominant figure in American politics. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that Trump wanted the film dead – because he wasn’t, personally or politically.3
But one might speculate if the filmmakers, when crafting the movie, believed differently. Sebastian Stan’s Trump, far from the fears of his subject, and far from the Trump so commonly and cartoonishly constructed this past decade, is acted (at first) as a kinder, gentler man, a striver nepo-baby, sure, and a willing, if desperate, disciple of Jeremy Strong’s demonic Roy Cohn, yes, but a man in possession of an earnest demeanor (again, at first) and authentic dreams of making New York City Great Again. Audience members, even liberal ones, wouldn’t be blamed for sympathizing with his portrayal of him. I’m sure many mouths would shut seeing the beleaguered slumlord scion sadly shuffle door-to-door for his father to collect rent from schizos and various other down-and-outs, or watching him receive wisdom from his ill-fated alcoholic airline pilot older brother. No, Stan’s Trump comes across as likable, even if detachedly elitist and out-of-touch, and despite his descent into darkness during the film’s second half, that initial conception is stubborn to change. Even after his (disputedly depicted) on-screen rape of Ivana4, his monstrousness remains muted, subdued, and not bludgeoned over the head of the viewer. The only time it’s ever really made outlandish is in one of the film’s played-for-laughs closing scenes, where reminiscent of Darth Vader donning his helmet for the first time, Trump goes under the knife for liposuction and a hair transplant, thereby, perhaps, telegraphing his internal transformation in his external modifications. But mostly, however, his actions are given room for interpretation, intelligent judgement; there’s no angel (or devil, I guess) on our shoulder yelling at us that “YES, DONALD TRUMP IS A BAD PERSON!” We, the audience, are able to breathe – we are shown, not told, what to think.5 What is shown becomes more and more grotesque, but unlike most other Trump characterizations, there is a generosity extended to us — we aren’t assumed to be morons needing guidance lest we otherwise accidentally destroy ‘democracy.’
But would such a nuanced portrayal be able to exist absent the idea that Trump was ‘dead’? And would the filmmakers themselves have crafted such a portrayal if they thought he wasn’t? It’s easy to imagine an alternative film where from the get-go Trump is flattened into a sneering, boorish bully, and made devoid of any redeemable or respectable qualities. It would’ve been trite, but it probably would’ve raked in money, especially considering the high hysterics of the #Resistance times. But after Trump’s 2020 defeat, liberals and the left, triumphant over their ‘orange’ terror, began to relax, and the psychotic state of American politics (relatively) abated. The limitations on cultural conversation loosened, willingly or not, wittingly or unwittingly. No longer was the country in ‘crisis mode,’ or at least, no longer as acutely in ‘danger,’ and the arts, though still affected by political pressures and made more sensitive, ‘woke’ to social considerations, regained some greater sense of autonomy. As such, with its spectre-subject banished, a straight-played film like The Apprentice could manifest. Liberals, especially ‘elite’ liberals, were often in the Biden era beset (at least initially) by the delusion that Trump was gone, defeated and discredited, and if not destined to die in prison, doomed to live as a pariah at the margins of American society. That any attention, however large, paid to him was but a sideshow, a sad trip to a closing-down carnival of fascists and freaks. Mar-a-Lago was to be his St. Helena, January 6th his Waterloo. Instead, as it turned out, it was his Elbe, and then he actually wound up winning his war against Wellington.6 Might that victory have caught The Apprentice’s filmmakers by surprise? And if so, has Trump’s victory unintentionally altered any intended lessons, moral takeaways, from the film or its filmmakers?
The Apprentice, more than anything else, is a morality play, another entry in the timeless genre of men tainted by ambition and corrupted by its realization. The film is abundant with biblical imagery showcasing Trump’s fall from, if not grace, geniality; early in the film, the teetotaler Trump, echoing Eve, is tempted by the promise of greater power by the serpent Roy Cohn, and transgresses his intolerance of drinking in its pursuit. A little later, a shellshocked, discomforted Trump bumbles around a viscerally and visually surreal socialite-laden Roy Cohn rager, color-edited red as if to be made reminiscent of hell, and witnesses his ‘master’ spread-assed and being buttfucked on his bed. Donald’s not in Queens anymore, and to advance in Manhattan, has to (all too willingly) make his deal with the devil and adopt Cohn’s three rules:
1. Attack, attack, attack.
2. Admit nothing; deny everything.
3. Never concede defeat.
As we know, he did, and with ‘yuge’ success. Donald Trump employed these maxims and catapulted to prominence, and eventually, power. And when jettisoned from that prominence and power, as he has from time-to-time, he has always, without fail, used them to claw his way back again. But that he has once more appears out of alignment with several of the film’s plot elements, and I believe, aberrant from the film’s intended teachings. Nixon’s famous “I am not a crook” speech opens the film, serving as both timesetter and comparative harbinger for Trump’s presumed disgrace, and Roy Cohn, rather than reveling in his protégé’s success, is betrayed by him, beaten sick by AIDs, then dies in isolation — perhaps an intentional parallel for Trump’s once-projected, once-fantasized fate.
But such wasn’t, isn’t, Trump’s destiny. And that it wasn’t makes, perhaps, a new message for the film: that the Cohn laws work. That might makes right and game wins fame, so become the Nietzschean hustler. That in a time of diminishing living standards, when rents are high and getting higher, and jobs don’t roll out and are being algorithmically gatekept, and even the best and brightest struggle for sustenance, fuck the rules, fuck the laws, fuck everyone else, just hustle and get ahead, and never, ever, apologize for it.
It worked for the President, after all.
And say, wasn’t everyone else trying that anyway?