The cartoonist who made presidents tremble

For as clichéd a piece of music as it is, Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a perfectly appropriate score for a film about the life and work of political cartoonist Pat Oliphant. Grieg’s famous composition — written for Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play “Peer Gynt,” and popping up in everything from the “Inspector Gadget” theme song to “Real Housewives” season trailers — is instantly recognizable for its swift sprint toward its electrifying, tense climax. In the context of Ibsen’s play itself, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is played during a face-off against the titular Norwegian hero and a band of bloodthirsty trolls, led by their ruler, who forces the protagonist to ponder ego and morality. Remove the veil of folklore, and the plot isn’t too different from Oliphant’s career as an unrestrained cartoonist, whose satirical illustrations drew the ire of power-hungry politicians and like-minded megalomaniacs all over the world. Like Peer Gynt in search of a greater truth, Oliphant willingly pitted himself against larger-than-life beasts and lived to tell the tale.

Fitting, then, that “In the Hall of the Mountain King” opens Bill Banowsky’s new documentary, “A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant.” The composition’s frantic strings and minor chords cleverly emphasize the brilliance of Oliphant’s cartoons depicting the circus of the politically obscene. In a career spanning 61 years, over 10,000 cartoons, 24 illustrated collections and one Pulitzer, Oliphant established himself as one of the world’s preeminent political cartoonists. No person, be they an American president or a civilian critic, could make Oliphant put down his pen — though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Death threats and backlash from those in power were regular responses to Oliphant’s work, reactions he welcomed as proof of a job well done.

But being a political lightning rod in an increasingly fascistic world is a dangerous game, one that many in Oliphant’s industry are losing. Banowsky’s documentary arrives at a pivotal moment in the fight to preserve honest journalism. Political cartooning is a dying art, usurped by illustrations that trade intelligent ribbing for low-brow button pushing — or, equally as startling, memes that require minimal effort to make. And it’s not just cartoonists who are losing their jobs; legacy print media has become a dinosaur in the digital age, when news is presented in a constant stream, not a cycle. Battered by this constant deluge of information, audiences have lost their ability to appreciate not only the art of satire, but its efficacy. Banowsky’s film is a love letter to the process of provocation, the kind of thoughtful, challenging art that demands time and handmade effort. The laborious method of cartooning is what carries enough sway to move the needle. And though Oliphant’s medium is increasingly at odds with the automation of our contemporary world, “A Savage Art” is a welcome reminder of the status quo’s impermanence, stressing that nothing is ever quite set in stone, no matter how dire things may look.

Granted, things do look quite a bit different than they did during Oliphant’s heyday. In the decade since his retirement in 2015, America has endured enough material for a lifetime’s worth of political cartooning. Though even if Oliphant were still drawing today, there’s no telling how often or easily his work would be seen. Newspaper circulation is dwindling, and papers are folding left and right. Gone are the days of flavoring your morning coffee with a bit of ink, accidentally dipping the corner of the newsprint into a mug while thumbing through the pages. Too many of us wake up and consume blue light before sunlight, fumbling in the dark for a smartphone or a tablet to see what fresh Hell the push notifications have in store for us today.

In the digital landscape, the political cartoon, once a staple of the American newspaper, has fallen by the wayside, crushed under a mountain of current events and covert biases. It used to be that the average reader could look to the newspaper cartoon as a distillation of the world’s chaos, an illustration to convey both humor and critical political thought, a combination that is sorely missing from the modern news cycle. Unlike daily comic strips, political cartoons were intended to stay with the reader long after they’d turned the page, becoming a source of conversation and introspection that could take place throughout the day.

Oliphant enjoyed courting the contemplation. Hailing from small-town Australia, he became bored with censoring his work for family papers and cartooning about the weather, seeking something bigger to fit his burgeoning punk sensibilities. When he scored a coveted spot as a cartoonist for The Denver Post, Oliphant gained a taste for the anti-establishment, and soon after, his cartoons were syndicated internationally, gaining him renown the world over. No topic was off-limits, and no president was beyond lampoon. Less than three years after joining the “Post,” Oliphant received the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for an illustration of Ho Chi Minh carrying the body of a dead Vietnamese man. In “A Savage Art,” Oliphant claims that he saw it as the worst cartoon of the pack he submitted, and was upset with his editor for altering the drawing’s caption (“They won’t get us to the conference table . . . will they?”) prior to its publication, which he believed baited the reader and removed some of the cartoon’s subtlety. For Oliphant, every part of the cartoon — subject, style and structure — is important, and it’s that reverence for attentive construction that’s been so rapidly phased out.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The process of political cartooning, absorbingly detailed in Banowsky’s film, is a multi-faceted procedure that requires the artist to be not only present — sorry, Marina Abramović! — but multiple steps ahead. A cartoonist worth their salt is thinking about how the news cycle can change, and how to communicate a message cleverly enough to maintain a cartoon’s relevance and humor, no matter when the reader sees it. What’s more, they’re intimately knowledgeable of history, able to yank references from the past and stress their pertinence to our present. After a bit of analysis comes the humor, which should be sharp but cunning, never the obvious punchline that you might see online or hear tossed out in the office kitchen. Then, they’ve got to draw. Before his retirement, Oliphant was producing around three cartoons a week, a magic number that would likely divide a room of people if you were to ask whether they thought that was a lot of work. In this age of mass production and computer-generated “art,” some might say three cartoons is nothing. Others, understanding how tricky it is to be truly smart in a world full of phony intellectuals and career posers, would be appropriately impressed. “A Savage Art” seeks to shrink that divide, highlighting just how difficult it can be to make art look easy.

(Magnolia Pictures) A political cartoon by Pat Oliphant

For his part, Oliphant was a student of his subjects. He studied their individual tics and mannerisms to find the things that people across the world might only note subconsciously, and wove them into his caricatures. Jimmy Carter’s appearance became more diminutive during his incumbency, but his teeth became bigger; Ronald Reagan’s face went from smiling to hollowed and ghostly. As the world’s events would change, so would Oliphant’s editorial depictions. It’s these kinds of details that can only be observed with the naked eye and the human mind, the kinds of tells that are so specific that an AI program can’t pick them up. If you head to the replies of a news outlet, politician, or commentator on X, you’ll likely notice that a swath of accounts are ready and waiting to post AI-generated “cartoons” in response, and these unholy bastardizations of the medium quickly convey their own meritlessness. A result prompted by some keywords fed into an image generation algorithm will never be as funny or observant as a political cartoon, simply because the creators do not possess the same wit to match someone at Oliphant’s level. These days, everyone thinks they’re a political savant, a sharp-tongued thinker who can see the world for what it is. But rarely is that actually the case, and that’s why the creeping demise of the editorial cartoon has left such a hole in our news consumption. Being a cartoonist requires a healthy sense of irony. Humor is derived from individual perception, and it’s hard to see much of the world stuck in the blinding blue light of a digital silo.

(Magnolia Pictures) Pat Oliphant in “A Savage Art”

More than his technique or ruthless scrutiny, it’s Oliphant’s humor that feels the most absent from our world right now. The American political divide has grown into a bottomless chasm; fall too deeply inside, and it’s likely you may never come out. But the humor of an editorial cartoon is what kept people peering over the edge, instead of diving in. Oliphant’s work demands that you stop and examine his perspective. What does this cartoonist believe so strongly that he took the hours of effort it requires to make this piece of art by hand? When these cartoons were staples of the media, it was much easier to maintain a healthy sense of speculation about a politician’s intentions. Oliphant’s work was non-partisan, stressing that corruption was present on both sides. And as profit-making corporations proliferated with high-powered investors and political lobbyists bought, sold and dismantled the media, it was in their best interest to get rid of cartoonists, some of the last remaining people who held their new owners’ feet to the fire.

And it’s not just newspapers being gutted; your favorite late-night talk show is on the chopping block, too. This is one of the most critical moments in our country’s history for a documentary like “A Savage Art” to be released. Oliphant understood that his job was to make people look at the truth, and he used humor and ingenuity to do it. “What Pat did in terms of challenging the status quo was quintessentially American,” Oliphant’s son, Grant, says in the film. “He got a lot of blowback from people who had the love-it-or-leave-it mentality. We’re seeing it again now, this notion that if you’re challenging the way things are, you must not love America.” As Grant puts it, decency was Oliphant’s metric, and he wasn’t afraid to call out immorality where it lived. It’s painfully ironic that Oliphant could look at the world so hard, for so long, and be repaid with the slow loss of his eyesight, as Banowsky finds toward the end of the film. But even grappling with macular degeneration, Oliphant refuses to look away. Though it may be easier to turn from the darkest realities of our times, the danger remains whether we’re willing to see it or not. We may as well know what we’re up against.