The place to start such seeing is at the pictures, where we can view things vividly, theatrically, larger-than-life. Sitting on your own in the dark, choc-top in hand, might prove more productive than scribbling truisms on butcher's paper with a texta at a management seminar. Movies were originally the talking equivalent of comics, before they morphed into drama, spectacle and even the pretence of an art form. Going to the pictures therefore offers a few uniquely eclectic, eccentric lessons in governance.

At the cinema as in the royal presence, we can see, then believe. The Queen herself might pick up some cues from re-runs of The Crown, Victoria or Meghan Markle's wedding. We groundlings can look elsewhere, within the nooks and crannies of the human comedy, in search of tips on how to govern ourselves and our countries.

As always, we need to take care not to look in the wrong places. The most obvious blind alley is the canon of soppily sentimental, ponderously didactic films, which actually purport to teach us lessons.

Frank Capra's renowned saga of Everyman, Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), depends for its moralising on an interminable harangue followed by an improbable suicide. Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939, remade in 1969 and 2002) is meant to portray worthy, sexless devotion to educating toffy English boys in Latin puns. The film might have been better focused on Chips' long-suffering wife, a suffragette with spunk. In the same vein, the smudged focus in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) muffles and muddles the film's critique of racism and its defence of the disabled. As for A Christmas Carol (1901 onwards), a treacly and bossy story trying to bully us into being good, the less said the better. Governance is not learned by tugging out a Kleenex to wipe away a tear.

Gangster films are a bust as well. James Comey compared the Trump administration with the mafia, albeit the failed Gambino family rather than the Corleones in The Godfather (1972). Nonetheless, any national government vulnerable at elections would be remarkably disciplined, efficient and ruthless to impose and maintain a silent circle of assent, with the boss in complete control, loyalty oaths imposed, an us-versus-them worldview prevailing and compulsive lying the order of the day. Perhaps Nixon tried but failed? Surely the mafia code of omerta is not compatible with leaking, public squabbling, hyperbole, grandstanding, background briefs and tweeting.

Modern political movies also seem a let-down. They tend to be formulaic, written from the outside, never quite explaining what happens behind closed doors or under the bonnet of the political machine. (I grant limited exceptions for Z (1969) and The Candidate (1972), one mordantly grim about Greece under the colonels, the second brimming with sugar-coated irony about American elections.) The most helpful advice in a recent political movie came in passing in The American President, when the President's daughter counselled him to compliment his date's shoes. The most evocative political images and symbols in our day were contained not in a film but in a mere commercial, running for one minute only, Bernie Sanders' America (2016). The Harvard professor of rhetoric who taught me explained advocacy and argument not from politics but from war, using a brief exchange with Union stragglers in Gettysburg. Those soldiers sign up to risk their lives: Harvard advocacy works.

Where, then, should we look for enlightenment? No one should patronise homely fare, films you watch while dozing because the kids want to, as low-maintenance baby-sitting. The twilight bark in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) is a model of comity and community both, as an all-dog alert for 15 lost puppies proceeds from Hampstead Heath up a drainpipe, through an artist's studio, into a pet shop, on top of a limousine, then away to a farm. Members of the team work with and for one of their own, helping and guiding. We might gauge public opinion with a twilight bark rather than a Newspoll.

If a woofer cacophony appears too frivolous, then the other end of the spectrum might be Twelve Angry Men (1957), a case-study in rancorous consensus-building where 12 jurors wrestle with the truth. Their arguments are empirical, evidence-based, yet all the ensuing quarrels have to do with the quality of our judgments, the security of our bearings and the depth of our consciences.

In between, we might profitably pause at Cat Ballou (1965), ignoring the silly title song and a lame Jane Fonda to concentrate on Lee Marvin's rejuvenation as a gunslinger. That is admirable therapy for anyone in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. Drunken shakes are banished, accumulated filth is soaped away, a natty black outfit is donned, and the killing may begin. Emperor Marcus Aurelius might have had Marvin's character in mind when he insisted that any one of us could always re-kindle the ashes. Those among the powers that be who are fretting about their careers would be more easily comforted by Cat Ballou than by an unobserved allegory about the unending tedium of IDCs (Groundhog Day, 1993). Everyday lives may be more likely to end with a whimper rather than a bang, but – with luck - not a whimper as dismally boring as that.

To round off a quartet of consolation, I recommend the final scene in Casablanca (1942), when Rick and Reynaud wander off together at the start of a beautiful friendship. Theirs is a friendship grounded in exile, forged in gambling, nurtured by alcohol, redeemed by murder, but real. As Emmanuel Macron remarked of his marriage, so might Rick say of Reynaud: "we are a couple, nonetheless". For Casablanca addicts (and who is not), friendship may well underpin comity, community, consensus-building, even rejuvenation.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.