Running an energetic if rather improvisatory campaign, an aging U.S. senator unexpectedly becomes a popular phenomenon with his stinging attacks on corporate greed, inequality and the bipartisan failure of political ambition. Bernie Sanders in 2016? No, the fictional Jay Bulworth in 1998.
That focus undersells the film’s complexity, however, and its usefulness for analyzing American politics today. “Bulworth” shows how the ’90s, far from being a “holiday from history,” were the origin of populist rebellion against neoliberalism’s defining features of financialization, growing socioeconomic inequality and globalization.
To Americans adrift in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, angry critics of mainstream politics addressed clarion calls. They would wage an internal political war to restore America. These calls were sounded early by the quasi-isolationist 1992 presidential campaigns of billionaire independent H. Ross Perot and insurgent Republican Pat Buchanan.
But populist critiques also emerged in cultural productions on the left from people like Beatty, a Hollywood actor with decades of experience as an activist and Democratic Party adviser.
In the 1990s, Beatty seriously considered his own presidential run. It wasn’t just that Ronald Reagan had already proved an actor could move into the White House. Beatty was first and foremost a successful businessman. With his landmark 1967 production “Bonnie and Clyde,” he helped to usher in a “New Hollywood” that was as much an economic revolution against the Procrustean studio system as it was a cultural revolution in artistic taste and styles. The New Hollywood gave actors, directors and individual producers much greater power over the movie business.
Beatty, who flirted with the Reform Party (as did Donald Trump), ultimately decided not to launch a presidential campaign. But he instantiated his political message in “Bulworth.”
The film revolves around Sen. Jay Billington Bulworth (Beatty), who is a political child of the 1960s. His office is dedicated to that mythic decade’s radical promise: the famous photograph of Martin Luther King Jr., meeting Malcolm X; images from Sen. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. But the disillusioned Bulworth has become a Clinton-era centrist — most clearly shown when he endorses welfare reform in a taped campaign message. He is so disgusted with himself that he takes out a contract on his own life. This will leave his daughter a life insurance payout he has been gifted by lobbyists in exchange for killing a health-care bill in committee.
Knowledge of his impending demise liberates him, however. He publicly castigates how the corrupt “system,” of which he has become a part, has betrayed Black Americans. He acquires a coterie of Black female campaign volunteers — one of whom, Nina (played by a young and impossibly charismatic Halle Berry), catches the old roué’s eye. (“Later,” says Nina in one scene as she walks away from the senatorial limousine; “I was hoping for sooner,” shoots back Bulworth.)
Crucially, the film argues that the corruption of American politics arises from structural economic conditions. Nina, deflecting Bulworth’s squirm-inducing attempt to impress her by name-dropping Huey Newton, argues that there are “no more Black leaders” because of deindustrialization and globalization: “ … it’s because of the decimation of the manufacturing base in the urban centers … when you shift manufacturing to … the Third World, you destroy the blue collar core of the Black activist population.”
Bulworth ridicules the then-ubiquitous argument, repurposed occasionally by the contemporary right, that “culture” explains racial economic inequality. During a television interview, in which he raps and dresses in what the interviewer calls an “ethnic” style, Bulworth argues that drug-dealing is one of the few economic opportunities in urban areas suffering from underinvestment in public education and hollowed out by offshoring jobs — an argument he actually borrows from L.D., a South Central gangster played by Don Cheadle.
Beatty’s engagement was deeper than the film’s embarrassing rap scenes suggest. Beatty consulted with musical figures including Snoop Dogg and Public Enemy’s Chuck D. In a real-life scene one wishes was caught on film, Beatty met infamous record executive Suge Knight at a deli in the San Fernando Valley at 1 a.m. to discuss “the politics of hip-hop.” Civil rights activist Julian Bond also spoke with Beatty about the film’s major themes.
There are flaws in how “Bulworth” handles its material. For example, the scene in which both Bulworth and Nina, in different ways, lament that there are “no more Black leaders” since the 1960s ignores transformative Black politicians of recent decades. The film never mentions Jesse Jackson, for example, whose 1980s presidential campaigns developed a complex politics of economic uplift intertwined with social justice that helped shape the multiracial liberalism of the 21st-century Democratic Party.
Conversely, “Bulworth” ignores the important role of Black mayors such as Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young in Atlanta, both of whom pioneered entrepreneurialism and public-private partnership as political approaches to economic regeneration. Such Black leaders helped shape post-1970s liberalism and post-1970s U.S. political economy, even as they may have been constrained by macroeconomic conditions that “Bulworth” identifies. In the film, the category “Black leaders” is apparently conterminous with a specific memory of 1960s radicalism. This shortchanges a history of variety and complexity.
This suggests how, for all its sophistication in identifying post-Cold War structural economic transformations, “Bulworth” was prescient in anticipating not just the rise but the shortcomings of 21st-century populism. Contemporary populists, often informed by brilliant historians such as Lily Geismer, make an important structural critique of globalization and deindustrialization — precisely what was anticipated in “Bulworth.” However, the populist left sometimes overlooks that deep continuities between the mid-20th century and recent history in the use of government-business partnerships to build state capacity and deliver policy undercut their view that the ’90s represented a betrayal of an earlier, purer form of liberalism. Basking in the warm glow of New Deal and ’60s nostalgia (much like Jay Bulworth), populists also fail to fully grapple with the ways in which our post-1970s “neoliberal” economy has been made by local politicians and communities (“popular marketization,” as one historian puts it), not simply imposed from above by nefarious elites.
On its 25th anniversary, we would do well to revisit “Bulworth.” If politicians and political commentators wish to locate the origins of turbulent post-financial crisis, pandemic-era politics, with their multifaceted backlash against the failures of globalization, they need to turn to the decade after the end of the Cold War. And they could do worse than re-watch “Bulworth,” the film that foretold a surprisingly large amount of it all.
