Obamna-core Semiotics
Spotify Playlist to Accompany this Article:
What I listened to while editing.
Every so often I have an experience that makes me wish we could have had Obama for a third term.
Last week, I took a break mid-WFH to stop at Whole Foods. My secular Jewish partner drove us over in his EV, and we split a tray of Prime-discounted salmon nigiri and a Yerba Mate. He's a PhD Candidate in a humanities field and I do public service work. I was talking to him about potentially relocating to Tokyo. We're becoming passport collectors for the geopolitical leverage. I realized I'm living the Obama-era professional managerial class dream.
I'm thinking about becoming a regular donor to NPR and investing in Patagonia closet staples. I proudly have the way of life Obama killed Bin Laden to protect.
I've been in a real "Global Optimist" mood lately. My fuel has been binge watching some good old post Recession-era media: Jiro Dream of Sushi, Babies, Life in a Day, First Position, etc.
You might already get the vibes, but I can define it for clarity. When I use the buzzword jumble "Post Recession-era Obama-core Global Optimism" I'm trying to find a short hand for a hyperspecific attitude in media from approximately 2009 to 2015.
This article from Vulture covers this idea in a broader sense. It will give you a good general idea of what I'm referring to, but focuses more on sweeping coverage rather than litigating specific details. I actually wrote this full article first before I found it. I want to extrapolate and concentrate a bit more on concrete semiotics.
Rather than an actual organizing genre, it's a temporally situated cultural aesthetic. Defining themes include: cosmopolitan sentimentality, global humanism, sanitized multiculturalism, aestheticized self-improvement, habitual but ethical consumption, spiritualized productivity, and broader neoliberal idealism. It's the "Yes We Can" mantra actualized into a consumable product. I have a lot of genuine affection for this "vibe".
There's something very soothing about it. Its overly self-important, yet asipirational Philip Glass/Steve Reich derivative scoring. The ascetic shot composition with its Apple Store-style functional minimalism. It's an identifiable schema that triggers incredible nostalgia.
The semiotics of this construct a belief that the world was progressing, growingly interconnected, and capable of conflict-resolution through technological development, multiculturalism, neoliberal values, and global cooperation.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012) is the premiere example of this. It's a documentary about an elderly man, Jiro, who runs a fancy-schmancy sushi restaurant somewhere in Ginza (Tokyo). It was hailed as an aspirational portrait of professionalist excellence.
Being harsh but honest here: Jiro is a neglectful parent. The movie demonstrates this, but tacitly greenlights this behavior by interpreting it as a reasonable sacrifice for his craft. He has a monastic dedication to the craft of sushi-making, and the overbearing use of Philip Glass and Max Richter turns the movie into a secular religious text for the professional-managerial class.
These sorts of movies have a clear audience. 25-45 years old; college-educated; urban/suburban; fluent in English, maybe with existing or budding bilingualism; leisure travel, and likely occupation in NGOs, academia, tech, policy, or some creative-adjacent field. The types of people shop at Whole Foods, name drop their minimalist but meaningful consumption habits (Muji, Reformation, Hobonichi, Kinfolk subscription), and enrich themselves with trustworthy institutional news from The Atlantic, NPR, or The New Yorker. They're global citizens, not nationalists, and their aesthetic interests reflect that. Jiro is their patron-saint: discipline, worldliness, and meaning-making via consumer habit. Professionalism is a path to nobility.
The self-erasing labor in Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a moral good for its audience: his perfectionism is spiritual purpose. Its relational and emotional cost are merely quirks. It's meritocracy propaganda framed as an Academy Award-bait food journalism piece.
It might sound contradictory to my tone so far, but I love this movie. I also view it as a propaganda piece for values that are no longer viable. It's soothingly optimistic, but deranged when internalized. What was inspirational in 2012 is bleak in 2025. I don't think this documentary and its specific framing would do as well today.
Babies (2010) is another exemplar of this schema.
It's a French documentary about cute babies living cute baby lives. As an invitation to universalize the experience of infant-rearing, I really like it. The narration-free structure lends itself to more to being an open-ended ethnography than a prescriptive media piece.
Its globalized visuals are depoliticized, making the Namibian, Japanese, Mongolian, and American families all equally legible. It's the neoliberal global harmony fantasy. No politics, no economics, no borders, no poverty, no war: just vibes. "Deep down, we're all the same."
Like Jiro, in 2010 this was transcendant. In 2025, it's myopic at best. The Namibian and Mongolian babies do not have the same structural leverage as the Japanese and American babies. This positional advantage is ignored, and difference is portrayed moreso via the contrast of understructured versus overstructured rearing.
Ponijao and Bayar spend their days naked and rolling around in dirt. Hattie in San Francisco and Mari in Tokyo are helicoptered. Mari starts her baby pedagogy at age 0 in a 500sqft apartment, while Hattie is guided through Mama-Baby yoga classes.
This is wordlessly framed as cultural difference, not privilege and access. The follow up interviews tell all: Ponijao did not continue her elementary education, due to its conflict with her obligations to tribal tradition. Mari lives in Paris with her family, and is bilingual in French. Hattie's mom took a position in educational design at Stanford.
It's Obama-era catharsis: globalization without guilt, and diversity without discomfort.
Life in a Day (2010) uses this catharsis as its thesis. It's a Youtube-based globalist experiment. An exercise in crowd-funded sincerity, the twinkling acension of its arepeggiated scoring unifies its otherwise incoherent low-res footage montage. Montage here is ideology: disparate experience is cleaved together to imply unity where there is none. The Glassian uplift and dripping pretension makes it feel like a UNICEF advert edited by an MFA student.
"If we all record ourselves on the same day, we'll see we're not so different after all."
It's utopian dream theatre. Really the entire movie exists because of post Recession-era tech sector bravado. Technology is treated as a democritizing agent and a panacea to difference. The delusional optimism is as heavy as syrup, and its saccharine sentimentality provokes a nostalgic toothache.
It's essentially voyeuristic propaganda, and I mean this in the most gentle way I can. Of 4,500 hours of obtained footage, the most palatable clips are threaded to extract as much emotion as possible. Like this 2011 NPR review described:
"...Produced in partnership with YouTube and distributed by National Geographic Films, the documentary Life in a Day is offspring with the worst genetic traits of both: narcissism on a global scale, speckled with pretty pictures. In a world without books or magazines, this is the movie people would watch in the waiting room at the dentist's office."
It's techno-bro Koyaanisqatsi. Despite this, I don't hate Life in A Day. In our current state of over-documented perpetual conflict, the delusion of global togetherness is a needed analgesic.
First Position (2011) is a straight forward competition doc, following multiple YAGP competitors on their journey to ballet prestige. Ballet is brutal yet redemptive. Like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the self-sacrificial, near-monastic dedication these children have to their craft is portrayed as virtue. Who needs a childhood when you can have niche professional prestige?
First Position holds up better than the rest because there is more explicit commentary on the economic leverages between competitors. However, ballet —much like sushi or being a baby— is portrayed as a spiritual object that transcends circumstance. The Obama-core meritocratic dream claims that talent and tenacity can overcome background. Though in a limited way, the film quietly admits that this isn't always true.
Diversity is strength in this film: Dancers from Israel, Colombia, Japan, America, and Sierra Leone are all connected by shared dream. Despite disparate circumstance, they meet on the same stage. Success is framed as entry into prestige, and acquired in spite of a lack of meaningful structural change within the profession.
In all this media criticism, it's worth giving credit to how talented the dancers are. Michaela DePrince is a featured student, who posesses insane physical strength, stamina, and facility. Each rewatch has me in awe of her ability to suspend her extensions for so long. She was an impressive student, who went on to have an impressive career until her recent, untimely death.
She is framed as the near-perfect Obama-era meritocrat. She is prodigious through hardship, stoic in her suffering, and fanatical in her discipline. The extreme violence of her childhood in Sierra Leone is aggressively contrasted with the adoptive safety of her life on the Philadelphia Main Line. Anyone with normal empathetic impulse would feel a strong emotional charge listening to her story.
Yet at the same time, there is something fetishistic in how her real world trauma is rendered cinematic.
It flatters the audience: we gain cultural capital by being patrons of her and the broader cast's excellence. With Michaela in particular, there's an insidious undercurrent that suggests that if you are exceptional enough, the prestige system will find a way for you.
The movie is resoundingly a cultural artifact of post Recession class aspirations. Children sacrifice and perform resilience and the audience codes it at hope.
These films weren't bad —that's not what I'm arguing. These films were persuasive because they were good at cultivating this aspirational schema. They gave the viewers ritualized fantasy: if you care, appreciate cultural difference, and work hard, you will earn your deserved "better world".
I love these movies a lot. They are a comfort in a current world where things are chaotic, incoherent, and algorithmically fragmented. I no longer though believe the idea of life they sold. In hindsight, these movies read as dead ideology and the naive optimism of the Obama administration. They are emotional propaganda artifacts for a liberal order we can see now is failing to hold itself together.
Media nowadays operates under entirely different socio-political semiotics. We went from "Post Recession Obama-core Global Optimism" to "Collapse-core Realism". The global order is no longer shown as harmonious. Films like Civil War (2024), Eddington (2025), No Other Land (2024), and Evil Does Not Exist (2023) insist on unabridgeable fractures. No post-racial, post-conflict discourse here: the world is made legible via its violence, ailenation, displacement, and social collapse. The affectation is now mired in grief and dread for a future we don't want to predict.
Here's a question for you: if Obama-era cinema was optimistic to delusional fault, do you think Trump-era media is pessimistic to that same end? Is the world significantly worse off than before, or are we just more willing to admit when things are bad now?
Here are more Obama-core media bits for you:
1) An Inconvenient Truth. Anything Michael Moore honestly.
2) The Cove
3) The Secret Life of Walter
4) (500) Days of Summer
5) Hamilton (Warning: Extreme Obama-core; Lin Manuel Miranda is more Obama than Obama himself.)
6) Her
7) The King's Speech
8) Chef
And Collapse-core:
1) First Reformed
2) Midnight Mass (TV Show)
3) I'm Thinking of Ending Things
4) White Noise
5) Severance (TV Show)
Feel free to contribute more in the comments.