A Real Blockbuster
Entertainment coverage often feels a lot smarter than our old-fashioned political coverage.
by William Powers
Atlantic online
At 9 o'clock Tuesday morning, just as John Kerry was about to take the stage in Pittsburgh, a CNN anchor told viewers that "the final role" in this year's presidential campaign had been "cast." Kerry then made it official: For the role of veep, he'd cast the hot young heartthrob from North Carolina, John Edwards.
Now we can all sit back and enjoy the movie.
That's what modern presidential campaigns are, after all—elaborately staged big-budget productions in which every line that's uttered, every piece of scenery, is carefully calculated to win over the public. Hollywood seeks big box-office returns, while political parties are after big poll numbers, but otherwise the two games are remarkably similar. Each employs artful writing, set design, costumes, makeup, and brilliant manipulation of image and sound in an attempt to make an utterly synthetic story—a script, a candidate's vision for the country—seem real and convincing.
This is not exactly news, of course, and on a superficial level, the media appear to understand how entertainment values have transformed politics. The language of the former has so infiltrated coverage of the latter, we barely notice it anymore. Nobody blinks when a journalist speaks approvingly of a candidate's "star quality," as CNN's Judy Woodruff did shortly after Kerry's Tuesday speech.
In fact, from the moment Edwards entered national politics with his 1998 Senate campaign, he has gotten the full Hollywood treatment. In 2000, he made People magazine's list of the world's sexiest men. In July of 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported: "The presidential election may be three years away, but for Hollywood—awash in money and political passion—the search for a new leading man has already begun.... And many of the glitterati are abuzz over Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, a blow-dried, smooth-talking curiosity who has impressed in his auditions."
It's one thing to use Hollywood references for sheer cuteness or to convey a certain entertainment-age savvy, although this device is so hackneyed, it's now the opposite of savvy. It's another trick entirely to pierce the game itself, to explain what the manipulators are doing, image by image, scene by scene—how they're selling their story to us, seducing us with their magic.
This week's Edwards announcement is a prime example. As CNN waited for the speech to begin, it gave us a shot of the very presidential Kerry motorcade leaving the Heinz estate outside Pittsburgh, with awed comments by the anchor-folk about the immensity of the demesne and the enormous wealth of its owner, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Cut to the crowded city square where the speech would happen—a sunny American scene where a Springsteen tune was wafting over at just the right volume. Suddenly, there was Kerry himself, with Teresa at his side; she somehow never looks scripted, and that in itself has become a great theatrical asset, a node of authenticity you can grab onto when the staging gets to be a bit much.
As he spoke, Kerry stood against a tiered backdrop of attractive supporters who formed a beguiling human tapestry—old, young, black, white, etc. There were two guys off to the left who nodded in agreement at crucial moments in the speech, particularly at a line about restoring old foreign alliances and forming new ones.
Kerry was in fine form, displaying the muscular looseness, the air of absolute comfort with himself and his mission, that he's picked up in recent months and that has made him seem commanding in a way that Al Gore never was. No sooner had he announced Edwards's name than some of those nice backdrop people were suddenly holding—surprise!—signs, professionally printed Kerry-Edwards signs. Odd, since the announcement had been a secret until about an hour before the speech. Then it hit you: This is a movie scene, every element thought out ahead of time.
Duh. Right? We all know this is how it works. But our knowledge of the game doesn't diminish its power. To me, the mystery is why these elements don't get more attention from the media. As a culture, we are extremely sophisticated about the way image and sound work together in the movies to make us think and feel a certain way. Yet our political journalism feels like a remnant of the 1940s, with its creaky emphasis on electoral mechanics—the swing-state obsession—and earnest discussion of which Big Issue, the economy or the war, will matter most.
Sure, those things will matter. But it's the election movie itself, the enormous, costly multimedia production we'll all be watching every day for the next four months, that will really decide this campaign. And it deserves to be taken seriously and dissected on its own terms, the way we dissect Hollywood products.
Inside the journalism trade, entertainment coverage is not taken very seriously. It's the realm of fluff and hype, while politics is the major-league beat, the place where brainy, meaningful journalism supposedly occurs. But to me, entertainment coverage, the media's obsessive treatment of movies and TV, often feels a lot smarter than our old-fashioned, boys-on-the-bus political coverage.
It's not what the candidates said yesterday, or what's in their position papers, that will give us our next president. And noting that Bush issued a "sound bite" or Kerry did a "photo op" is no longer sufficient. These media catchphrases are not a sign of knowingness, but of laziness. How did the photo op work? Was it successful or not? Why?
We care enough to ask these questions about Hollywood productions. Does presidential politics deserve anything less?
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