Two years ago, I argued thatDonald Trumpas president had ushered in a period of contention, and that periods of contention make for good cinema. They do, and by 2019 we were already seeing a new energy, a spirit of protest and a general elevation in movie product.

Yet two years later it can also be said that four more years of a Trump presidency would have been a disaster for American movies.

Protest art gets its power from two sources. In a totalitarian state, without free speech, its mere existence is heartening. But we don’t live in a totalitarian state, so the power of protest art in America derives from its audience’s faith that it might actually accomplish something. Like-minded audiences see it and think, “OK, this will have an impact.”

But when it continues to fail to have an impact, such art starts to seem, not only futile, but counterproductive. For example,Alec Baldwin’s Trump imitations on “Saturday Night Live” seemed really transgressive for the first few years. But somewhere during the 2020 election season it began to seem like a means by which the powerless comforted each other. And inevitably, as Trump got less funny, so did Baldwin.

Americans are impatient. We want results, even from our protest art, or we start to despair. With four more years of Trump, that despair would have manifested in yet more sci-fi dystopia and in the coarsest comedies imaginable. It would have also accentuated and perpetuated a concomitant trend that we already see across the arts: the domination of polemical activist or leftist art.

Unfortunately, politics is the first resort of the untalented artist. It’s a way for mediocre artists to assume importance by attaching important issues to themselves. This is why political art is usually bad art.

这个问题只是加剧了当你有一个leader like Trump, who can make bad artists of good artists, simply by making it impossible for anyone to think of anything but him and what he’s doing.

“Queen & Slim”(2019) is an example of bad Trump-era art — long, poorly plotted, too on-the-nose, but about a pressing social issue — the story of two African Americans on a blind date who are stopped and terrorized by a white racist cop.

If Trump had won, in addition to the dystopian science fiction, we would have had more movies like that: movies that proclaim, strictly for audiences that already know and agree, that racism, sexism, thugism and neo-Nazism are evil. These are worthy sentiments — beyond worthy — but so obvious that filmmakers need to offer something more than a statement.

Of course, to go deeper requires reflection, but here’s the catch: How do we find hours and days for reflection when we’re all stressed out? After all, half of us have been checking Twitter the way a nervous flier keeps looking out the window, as if the act of watching keeps the wings from falling off the plane. We carry within us a sense that if we turn away for just a minute, something horrible will happen, and indeed somethingdid.Just in the time since I began writing this column,insurgents stormed the Capitolin one of the most horrifying moments in recent memory.

So this is what I’m hoping for from incoming President-electJoe Biden:not thinking about Joe Biden. I want a president wedon’thave to think about.

If we get that, I believe that screenwriters and directors — not to mention playwrights, musicians and visual artists — can return from the culture war barricades and start looking inside again. They can start responding to life and emotion and not just to some guy in the White House. They can once again commune with the divine and universal within themselves and not be sidetracked or seduced by the daily spike in blood pressure produced by every Twitter alert.

Needless to say, the habit of stress will be hard to shake, as with all traumas, and a lot will depend on how fast we can get the virus under control and the economy booming. But there is a passionate desire out there for a return to normal life; a whole population ready to embrace all the things we took for granted as suddenly wonderful and extraordinary.

With a little luck, this should translate not into stodgy polemics, but into enthusiasm and innovation. It won’t happen all at once, and the coronavirus will slow things down, but I expect that we’ll see fewer sci-fi movies in which our cities are destroyed.

We’ve all had our fill of dystopia. We found out it doesn’t work.