I'm a terrorist, har-de-har-har
This past weekend seemed to be The Weekend of Meta-Parody; or, The Weekend In Which The Candidates Prove They Have A Sense Of Humor.
Thursday evening I was idly watching CNN while chatting with a friend, when I realized what was on. It was footage of the Al Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of New York, a white-tie event in which Obama and McCain sat on either side of the cardinal in charge of the Archdiocese in a room full of rich Catholics. I’ll set aside the weirdness that McCain, an Episcopalian who often appeals to those who are leery of the Catholic church, and Obama, a pro-choice member of the Church of Christ, participated in this event. The surreality set it when I realized what it was I was actually watching: a nationally televised roast. Of the candidates. By the candidates. Two weeks before the election.
Nothing they said was anything new. They were making fun of themselves for being all those things the other side has been saying they are: arrogant, inexperienced, funny-name burdened (Obama); old, rich, often compared to George Bush (McCain). But really, even though they made it seem like they were making fun of themselves, they were making fun of each other. They were teasing each other about the same things that they’ve been attacking each other about for the past five months in ads, through surrogates, at debates. But at the dinner — which anyone with a TV and access to CNN could see — they laughed heartily at each other’s jokes, smirked knowingly at their own, and hugged at the end.
“I was just kidding around about all that stuff,” their behavior seemed to say. “No hard feelings?”
Saturday night the self-reference got even weirder, when Sarah Palin made a cameo on SNL to parody Tina Fey’s parody of her. Or maybe she was parodying herself. Or maybe she was parodying Tina Fey. Or maybe she was parodying the liberal gotcha media. Or maybe she just likes being famous. It was hard to tell.
In any event, she interrupted a skit in which Tina Fey was making fun of her for not answering reporters questions by … making fun of herself for not answering reporter’s questions. Later, she smiled and danced along to an Amy Poehler rap about her, touching on all the things that everyone who finds her ridiculous always ridicules, and it was really unclear whether she knew we were laughing at her, not with her.
In the midst of all of that, I went to see W. with my mom on Friday night. Talk about surreal. While less of a parody per se, it was a sort of-humorous sort of-realistic depiction of the tragi-comedy of the last eight years. As a work of film, I actually liked the movie a lot better than I thought I would: it was well-acted (in terms of character portrayal, not impressions), had a well-developed narrative structure, and entertained me. As a comment on recent historical events, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
How can you make a retrospective bio-pic about a president who’s not only still alive, he’s still in office? How can you even begin to analyze the motivations and implications of a war that not only hasn’t ended, but doesn’t even have an end in sight?
The movie offered an interesting (albeit not entirely convincing) thesis about George Bush’s character and his rise to power. What bothered me so immensely about it was its apparent attempt to chalk the past eight years up to a spoiled rich kid’s attempt to show his daddy what he was capable of achieving, and dismiss it at that. A cute movie idea, sure, but a dangerous misstatement of reality. Oliver Stone is not a historian, and George Bush is not confined to history. We are here, living this, right now.
And that goes to the heart of why this movie was so bizarre for me. Josh Brolin’s impersonation was as good as any I’ve seen, but it doesn’t compare to the original that we’ve been seeing on the news every day for the past eight years. As Manohla Dargis said in a pretty apt review, Bush “doesn’t belong to history but to the present and, by extension, to us.”
We will be grappling with the implications and consequences of the Bush presidency for many, many years to come. It’s real, and has a true and material effect our lives.To try to characterize it and fictionalize it before its over is inappropriate and denies us our primacy of experience during this long, strange trip.
Similarly, Americans are invested in this presidential election. We take the candidates seriously when they attack each other, and when they defend themselves. Humor is necessary, but it shouldn’t be from the candidates. It’s confusing. When Obama and McCain have a chuckle together over some of their allegations, it makes us think we were silly to believe them in the first place, that it’s all a game.
Parody, in this election season as ever, is an incredibly important tool to cut at the heart of some of the more ridiculous elements of the life of any public figure. But when the candidates themselves engage in the parody, it gives the impression that they don’t take themselves and their own statements — and by extension, our nation’s future — very seriously.
1 year ago