the ominous parallels
Music: All India Radio: Echo Other (2006)
[Booming kettle drum]: "He's the biggest celebrity in the world. But, is he ready to lead?" So begins the narration on McCain's latest web-based, negative ad to take on Obamania, to date the most controversial of the presidential campaign. The controversy stems, of course, from its rapid, opening montage: shots of the large crowd who came to hear Obama speak in Germany are layered over a paparazzi-covered shot of Britney Spears, which quickly dissolves into a shot of Paris Hilton, then to a shot of Obama. These images are layered over a soundtrack of people chanting "O-BAH-MAH! O-BAH-MAH!" while a female voice asserts the senator is "the biggest celebrity in the world." The enthymeme, of course, is obvious: Paris and Britney are stylish but lack substance and character. Obama is stylish, therefore, he too lacks substance and character.
Controversy about the ad is not limited to pointing out fallacious reasoning. Some have argued the advertisement is a coded message to evangelical Christians that Obama is indeed the Antichrist. Others have asserted the juxtaposition of purportedly promiscuous white women with Obama is the equivalent to a racial slur. I think both of these readings are a bit of a stretch. I do think the ad is more complicated than it initially appears, however, and the key to unraveling this complexity is Sergei Eisenstein's montage theory.
Montage, Eisenstein argued, is the "nerve of cinema." He thought that if one could "determine the nature of montage," then one would be able to "solve the specific problem of cinema." In other words, montage was the skeleton key to cinema's specificity. That specificity, he believed, was dialectics: montage juxtaposes different shots---much like thesis and antithesis---in order to achieve a sort of sublative shock-effect. This is done in a number of ways: though time and rhythm, tone, intellectual appeal, and so on. Tonal montage is perhaps the most relevant here, as it refers to the use of emotional resonant images "on top of one another" to create either a calming or jarring effect. The montage of Britney, Paris, and Barack is clearly a tonal one, designed primarily to provoke an emotional response over the concept of celebrity.
The tonal montage of the McCain ad does follow Eisenstein's dialectical theory: young white women are juxtaposed with a black man in order to point up a presumed similarity (this is why I don't buy the racist reading; it's about a deeper structural homology, not racial difference). Despite their obvious differences, Obama is like Hilton and Spears because they are transnational celebrities. They are valued, the ad suggests, because their images have exchange value. These are transactable people in the popular imaginary; they circulate. The likeness that emerges from the tonal montage is thus their common circulation value. Hence the question posed by the ad, "but, is he ready to lead?" could be rendered as a simple statement: circulation value does not qualify one to be president.
More is going on here, however, than a critique of celebrity circulation. Most definitions of celebrity tend to associate circulation value with a false sense of intimacy: we feel affection for celebrities as individuals we know personally. This affection need not be outright adoration, as both Britney and Paris are loved to be hated, of course. Nevertheless, celebrity is defined not simply by circulation but by the affection that is a consequence of circulation, positive or negative. This is to say that McCain's add is not simply asserting Obama is all style and no substance; it's also suggesting that people love Obama because he circulates, and that this love may be misplaced. For this reason, the "Obama as Antichrist" reading is not too far off the mark (though it is, of course, off the mark): the chanting of Obama's name that provides the ad's soundtrack is meant to evoke another historical celebrity, a German man who was loved because of his beautiful circulations, his aesthetic sensibilities, his strident eloquence, and his ritual or cult value.
What the McCain montage reveals is a "negative" message about the folly and blindness of love. It warns the viewer not to fall prey to what Lacan termed a "realist imbecility," an error that we tend to make in which the signified is lost in favor of some trans-contextual referent. Here I'm riffing on Joan Copjec's observation that television (and other media outlets) tend to clamor for the referent at the expense of the "marks of enunciation." What Copjec means by this is that the signified is irrevocably tied to a person, someone who speaks and bears forth meaning in an intersubjective manner; a referent is presumed to be external to interpersonal presence (think here of history as a field of truth that stands outside of the enunciation of the victor—documentary without a voice-over). Copjec talks about the "realist imbecility" of the mass media when they attempted to expose the patent lies and misdeeds of Ronald Reagan: "So absorbed were the news staffs in pinning down the president's lies and errors---his referential failures, let us call them---that they neglected to consider the intersubjective dimension of the whole affair; they forgot to take account of the strength of the American audience's love for Reagan." Analogously, I think this is precisely what McCain's ad is really going after---the love of Obama. Yes, it's a "style versus substance" kind of argument, but I think the evocation of the term "celebrity" takes the critique further: don't vote for a man because you love him; vote for a man because of issues (like, for example, off shore drilling).
If we read the McCain ad in this way, the message is basically "don’t' vote with your heart." I find this message, consequently, fascinating and rhetorically savvy. Let's face it: McCain is a hard man to love. There's absolutely nothing sexy about him, and in a wet t-shirt contest he would loose. McCain is the Battlestar Galactica equivalent of Colonel Saul Tigh. It would make sense, then, that his handlers align "sexy" with fascism, and "eloquence" with love appeals. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are celebrities in part because they are sex-objects; they have prurient appeal. So, too, does Obama: he has Sam Cooke appeal, he makes women faint, he sexes you up.
What the recent McCain montage thus communicates is a choice: either you pick the grizzled old man who (drinking issues aside) has the intellectual fortitude to make hard decisions, or you choose the smooth-talking lover who circulates like the popular jock. Do you want a lover, or do you want a daddy?
Me? I'll take the lover. But unlike a lot of Obamaniacs, I like to use protection. Anyway, my point is this: This presidential campaign is in some sense a battle over love. I think the McCain camp is right to warn us about the blindness and folly of our affections. Even so, I think eight years of death is enough; love is not always a bad affect. How did that Lita Ford song go? "C'mon pretty baby, kiss me deadly!"