Arguably, A Visual Argument

I stole this idea from a thread on Somethingawful. If you don't recognize the face, that's Hillary Clinton (standing in for Laura Palmer). If you don't recognize the film, it's David Lynch's prequel to the Twin Peaks series -- Fire Walk With Me. It may defeat the purpose of a visual "argument" to talk about it, but I'm going to anyway. Something about the current presidential race gives me a heightened feeling of "unreality" -- an almost uncanny sense of the silliness and absurdity of systems of political representation. Watching one of Hillary's press conferences the other day, I went through a series of stages, moving from a feeling of "unreality" to visceral boredom to mild nausea during the course of about 15 minutes. The struck postures, the talking points, the photo ops, the mad promises . . . it was all too much, and at the same time too little -- like a surfeit of nothingness. I kept thinking how these insane promises would change depending on the audience addressed, how the professional politician changes tactics and agendas from town to town, scrambling for universal acceptance. I noticed with fear and trembling the awkward smiles aimed at various cameras, the forced hugging, the intentionally chosen and carefully arranged "multicultural" entourage. The ephemeral quality of the discourse reminded me of the digital phenomenon of "viral" media -- images, videos, texts that proliferate across the internet overnight like some kind of cannibal bacteria. The idea for the above image came from such a "viral" source: superimposed Hillaries showed up all over the place after Somethingawful started a thread based on an unflattering image of Ms. Clinton. So I decided the form fit my purpose for this assignment. The Lynch film reinforces the sense of the unreal (especially since it is a kind of "remake" of noticeably lower quality than the original series), and the image itself is a symptom of a viral phenomenon that has already peaked and started to die off. It is a kind of two-dimensional monument to the ephemeral and the absurd -- a fitting image of contemporary politics, I would say.