John Edwards' Hair
I almost didn't post this because I'm, well, really leftist, but Harry Shearer offers up this
satellite feed of John Edwards obsessing about his hair [page includes 100K WMV stream].
The clip is taken from a raw satellite feed, the transmission that occurs while the camera is still on, but either before or after the section that's "officially" broadcast when the feed is dropped into a live news show. (See the amazing 1992 documentary on the New Hampshire presidential primaries, composed almost completely of raw feeds,
Feed for an early history.)
What's interesting about the Edwards clip isn't really that Edwards is obsessed with his hair, it's that politics today is so consumed with image, with
calculated image, that if Edwards appeard on a news show with messy hair, the media would have been all over him. If you've worked in or observed media production at all, you know this sort of activity is both ubiquitious and crucial. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but (odd as it seems coming from a postmodernist) it distorts reality: normal people don't look like tv people. But given the constantly mediated nature of high-level politicians, normal politicians are required to always look like tv politicians. But--importantly--tv politicians aren't supposed to reveal the fact that they spend a lot of time transforming their normal politician looks into tv politician looks. So while the other three platform candidates certainly spend enormous amounts of time primping before interviews, the fact that Edwards was the hairstyle front-runner makes this sort of gaffe inevitable.
(The clip is part of a
Slate piece about Shearer's art installation, "Face Time," [link has no video, so it's relatively low-bandwidth], now in a D.C. gallery.)
Posted by johndan at October 20, 2004 10:23 PM
| TrackBack