Will Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay was asked to name a conservative equivalent of himself due to the unapologetically left-wing political slant of his recent artistic output.
McKay responded by saying “the right-wing version of me — maybe this isn’t the best example — is an Aaron Sorkin.” While the claim took some readers by surprise, a quick comparison of the duo’s artistic output proves that McKay’s comment on The West Wing creator makes sense.
McKay elaborated on the comment when an interview mentioned Sorkin’s seemingly left-sympathetic The Trial of the Chicago 7. The director argued in response, “I would say Sorkin is slightly right of center… His interpretation of that trial was one of ing the system. There’s a lot of dialogue in that movie about belief in our institutions.” As evidenced by comparing the pair’s output, McKay’s movies trend toward a worldview that holds institutions as the issue causing the world’s ills, whereas Sorkin's movies in comparison tends to blame individual actors and the maintenance of existing systems. This reticence toward large-scale structural change and belief in the essential value of existing institutions, which is found in Sorkin’s work and not in McKay’s, is likely the “right-wing” or conservative worldview that the Anchorman director is referring to in his comments.
McKay’s next movie, Don’t Look Up, is a political satire from the director that tackles climate change denial. His last movie, 2018’s The Wolf of Wall Street and The Laundromat, lays the blame for the era-defining disaster squarely at the feet of hedge funds and big banks themselves, rather than specific individual villains. McKay’s cop comedy The Other Guys depicted banks and corporations, rather than drug dealers or mob bosses, as the villain of its story, and even the anarchic Anchorman 2 found time to depict the creation of the corporate-funded news networks as a damaging influence on the media landscape. The prevailing outlook of McKay's movies is that systems themselves need to change, something Sorkin’s output denies. One episode of The West Wing saw a character condemn anti-war protesters as “idealistic,” claiming that war was inevitable (with the series subsequently proving the claim correct and the character wise, rather than a House of Cards-style cynic).
Sorkin’s later series The Newsroom caused controversy by positing that a site anonymously naming rapists would be a bad thing, as it could cost a hypothetical student a medical school scholarship, an idea brutally deconstructed in Promising Young Woman. As noted by a Sorkin’s writing. Where Sorkin’s work depicts the existing status quo as something worth preserving and protecting from criticism, McKay’s work depicts existing institutions as the cause of the world’s problems. As a result, Adam McKay calling Aaron Sorkin “right-wing” in comparison to him makes sense considering the outlook of both writer/director’s oeuvres.
