presidential intimacies

Music: Alice in Chains: Black Gives Way to Blue (2009) Something wasn't quite right about the president's speech tonight.

I'm not talking about the vagueries of abstract initiatives---though, as a former Louisiana resident attuned to some of the local issues, I should mention that I fail to see how decades of the government's neglect of coastal erosion is now somehow going to be fixed; the damage has been done, and the tar is just the icing of insult. I'm also not talking about the way in which environmental crisis and war have been conflated, as if "we Americans" only understand the grunt and battle cry (the metaphors were really strained at best, and FDR's context was way, way, different---sorry speechwriters; you missed the boat rig). What I found bothersome about the speech tonight was what struck me as an inappropriate intimacy, an uninvited sense of "let me level with you." Initially my thinking was that the camera was too close, but after some cybersleuthing I decided that was wrong. I think, however, I figured it out.

This summer I'm teaching a kind of crash-course in film theory, so I've been thinking a lot about shots and narrative and so forth, and perhaps that's why I was hypersensitive this evening watching Obama's speech. I kept feeling the shot was too close, that there wasn't enough distance between the spectator (me) and the body of the president. In the grammar of film and television, a "close up" signifies intimacy and familiarity, and most of us in the West are taught (as we grow up watching screens) that the closer the shot is, the more intimate we are supposed to feel. A close-up of a face "means" that we are given a window into the mind and feelings of the person in the frame. A president giving a speech from the Oval Office already signifies a certain degree of intimacy. When televised speeches started in the Oval Office, the general "grammar" was to start with a wide shot to establish where the president was, and then to slowly zoom in. Over the decades that zoom has gotten progressively tighter, and any cursory searches on YouTube shows that this is the case. The zooming seemed to stop---where many address norms seem to---with The Buck, Ronald Reagan. Here's a screen shot on the left from his farewell address, where his body is shown from the chest up. Notably, his hands are not visible. Technically, we're somewhere in the zone between a "middle shot" and a "close up," a standard that I suspect was established by evening news broadcasts.

Because I felt Obama was all up in my grill, I supposed that for some reason the shots were tighter than those Reagan helped to establish as the norm. Yet, if you look at this shot frozen from tonight's speech, it's still a middle-to-close shot, again, focusing on the chest. This fact made me curious, so I started YouTubing recent presidential speeches from the Oval Office to see what it was that was making me take notice. I looked up Bush. Here's a shot:

Hmm. It's a little tighter in, but it is also still in keeping with the norms established in the 1980s. So then I checked out Clinton:

Strange. We still have the mid-to-close shot. So what is it? What's the thing that made Obama seem odd coming into my living room tonight?

As I watched the speech on my local PBS affiliate---still operating under the assumption that the shot was closer than the norm---I flipped to other networks to see how closely Obama was framed. Every network had Obama approximately the same size, which suggests, of course, the details of the shot were standardized and negotiated. The only difference I noticed between networks concerned color and sound. So what's different than these other presidents' Oval Office addresses?

As my colleague Jürgen Streeck might be quick to say: it's the hands, stupid.

If you watch a 30-second snip of the speech, you'll see something that---I think---is a little different from past Oval Office speeches. One sees the traditional wide shot and then a gradual zoom towards the president's face. However, the camera stops short---it does not go as far in as the camera has done in the past, leaving Obama's hands in view:

Obama's hands are doing a lot of the talking here, which signifies, I think, an attempt to deliver an affectively arresting message. If you couple the body-dance with the rather vague and detail-scarce content of the speech itself, you get a stronger sense of what the president and his handlers were attempting to achieve: a feeling of assurance, of earnestness, that our government is doing it's best to address the issue. This rhetoric is more visual than verbal, and decidedly so. The hands are doing a lot of the rhetorical labor here, and I daresay they are given more prominence of place than the English language.

Here's where my ignorance comes into play: I subscribed to cable television for the first time in my life about a year ago. My cable television experiences were limited to visits with friends and family or hotel rooms until relatively recently. I did have "free" cable for a stint in graduate school, but that was 1996-1998 roughly (and not my fault; I just tried it and lo, I had it). Regardless, it's been a decade since I've had cable television regularly in my home.

I mention my cable defloration because one thing I have noticed about "news" on cable is the use of hands, and the now chummy tone newscasters seem to adopt. On CNN, for example, the newscasters (I would need to be forced at gunpoint to call them journalists) gesticulate wildly with their hands---overly so, it seems. It's been an unnerving experience, in a way, because I grew up watching "talking heads" (er, and listening to them, since the band totally rules) deliver the news. Even today, the major television networks do not include wild hand gestures—especially my staple, the PBS News Hour. Newscasters are shot from the chest up, and if they use their hands to deliver the news, it's done minimally. This is not the case on CNN (and I suspect other cable news broadcasts).

What I'm noticing is that the president of the United States is giving an address to the nation in the "cable style," for lack of a better term. Because gesture studies is not something I am well versed in at all, I'm not sure what to make of this style, I'm not sure how to make sense of this new form of body-language in the presidency. I'm relatively certain, however, it's "newish" and it's an approach, conceived in cable news, that the Obama camp is deliberately adopting. I'm also thinking it's something rhetoric scholars should start tapping our colleagues in gesture studies to make better sense of.

My personal, knee-jerk reaction is that the new, gestural presidential intimacy is unfair or cheap in some way---that it's, well, that it's manipulative. But to invoke the Talking Heads once again, "same as it ever was." Even so: methinks Obama gestures too much.

That final line was the perfect ending to a blog entry, but I have to go all led zep and add a twofold coda to kill the dramatic closer: (a) I have a lurking suspicion that part of my dis-ease with the Obama framing has something to do with the fact that I have an old, cathode-ray television and that this address was broadcast with wide-screen, flat television displays in mind (which says something about class, too, but that's another post); and (b) the meeting place of those of us in rhetorical studies interested in the body and the visual and the sonorous is tone.