Spots Electorales. El espectÃ¡culo de la democracia - Soymenos.net

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Campaign Diary Roberto AlfaCampaign Diary Roberto Alfa64 65Day 8TV debatesstarts, everything becomes surreal. Seated infront of the television, the entourage cheer ontheir candidate, applaud their clever phrases,whistle the opponent, make barbed remarks,thump the walls to rub the noses of the opposingteam in the next door dressing room insome sharp remark or especially ruthless attack.Quite often someone from the TV stationhas to come along to ask them to keep the noisedown. I hate going to these things, but I haveno choice. And I know I’m not the only one. Isaw Miguel in a corner, taciturn as always.We exchanged stealthy looks and greeted eachother with a brief raise of the chin. Neither ofus dared to take the first step. Battles alwaysleave their scars. Finally I went up to himto shake his hand, but more like two footballmanagers at the end of a game: quick andwith no hanging around.When the debate finished, everyone congratulatedeveryone else, not for the candidate’s performancebut for giving the right advice, forhaving suggested a tone of voice, for havingchosen a tie. It’s the excitement of a studentwhen they’ve finished an exam and the tensionis released. The boss’s back is constantlypatted. When he gets back into the car that isto take him home to bed, the first thing he’llask is about how well he did, in other wordswhether he stuck to the script we’d written forhim. It would never cross anyone’s mind thathe was asking about how successfully he’d gotacross his programme or his ideas.“In the main, the contemporary masses are no longermasses capable of joining together in riots; they havebecome part of a system in which their property as massis no longer adequately expressed in physical assemblybut rather in participation in programmes related withthe mass media. (...) In it one is a mass of people whileremaining an individual. Now one is a mass of peoplewithout seeing the others. The result of all this is thatcontemporary, or if you prefer post-modern, societiesare no longer immediately guided by corporal experiences:they only perceive themselves via media symbolsof masses, discourses, fashion, programmes andcelebrities. It is at this point that the individualism ofmasses of our time has its systemic foundation.” PeterSloterdijk, Die Verachtung der Massen. Versuch überKulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft.Is there anyone with half a brain who couldsay who has won a debate? I don’t knowanyone. As the candidates turn up with theirscripts, it is virtually impossible for a debate tothrow a campaign off course. In our privatepolls no-one can ever say who they think thewinner is. It’s all made up by the media,which uses the debate to further their ownpartisan interests. Most of the media say we’vewon. But I couldn’t say that. However, thisin and of itself is very interesting. People feelbewildered after the debates because they can’tsay who’s won. They feel stupidly alienated bythe mechanics of politics. It’s thanks to thesesorts of media confrontations that people saysthings like “they’re all the same” and “I don’tunderstand anything about politics”. Youhave to start from this knowledge to approachthe rest of the campaign: make your boss assimilar as possible to the others, so from thatpoint on his face won’t appear in the ads.Only metaphors, fiction and emotion; onlyresources that hide the specificity of a candidatevis-à-vis the rest. Trying to persuade thevoters with political messages and argumentsat the end of a campaign is not very effective.The best thing is to reach out through genericimages and emotion, not characterised bythe candidate. Beyond what the polls reveal,most people say they want to take part in amovement for collective hope, one that givesordinary people a leading role, with a projectwhich impacts on the daily lives of families,and so on and so forth. At the end of the campaignthe emotive ads always work well, theones everyone can identify with. Except me.However, as the saying goes, I only work here.John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon figured in the fi rstgreat TV duel in 1960. Kennedy was standing for Presidentfor the first time and Nixon was seeking electionafter having been Vice-President. But TV showed howpowerful it can be. A badly-shaven, sweating and hardfaced Nixon came up against the youthful image of acharismatic and telegenic Kennedy. From then on thingswere to be different.One of the most interesting documents about electionsdates from the same year. Primary (1960), by RobertDrew and made up of images taken by Donn Pennebaker,Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock, is a turningpoint in the history of the cinema and a milestone inthe chronicle of election campaign documentaries. Shotas an experiment and commissioned by Life magazine,the film shows the battle between the youthful John F.Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey to win the Democraticnomination for the 1960 Presidential race. This freshformat clicked with a young and resolute Kennedy whowas far from the idea of the ready-to-use politician.Some theorists argue that this film marks the start of‘cinéma vérité’, which suggests its purpose; a catalyticcamera that can trigger the interaction of the subjectsthat move in front of it.It was Dominique Wolton who warned us that “Thepopular and trivial nature of television tends to make itgloss over the questions which really should be thoughtabout.” And it is precisely the awareness of this “intellectuallaziness” which touches on the phenomenon ofTV election campaigns. It is hard to find a medium soembedded in our daily lives and yet at the same time sounreachable and hidden as television, capable of suckingup types, genres, discourses and ideologies like asponge. Television has been the main means of bringingwhat is popular into the general sphere of cultureand of blurring the barriers between the private andthe public. Television has brought politics into homes,but a kind of politics made into a game, a show, thepools, a soap opera, a pastiche, a game show, a drama,a sitcom; an audiovisualisation of politics definitivelydistanced from people and subjected to the frameworkof the television set, politics finally made part of one ofthe questions affecting others that is most beloved bythe public at large.
Campaign Diary Roberto AlfaCampaign Diary Roberto Alfa66 67Day 9Politicians/actorsDay 10By land, sea and airA product should offer the prospect that itwill meet your expectations; a candidateshouldn’t. An election advertisement is basedon the small interval which connects what thecandidate has done – derived from what he’dpreviously said he’d do – and the chances ofguessing that impulse in that face, in thatlook, in that gesture, in that smile. Yes, peopledo vote morally even though this may goagainst their interests. Abstention is above allthis: not compromising morality for some mereimmediate interests. That’s why I think thatabstention has become a symbol of individualfreedom against democracy. Because democracynames everything and there are some thingsyou can’t name. I like people who abstain.Electoral campaigns are increasingly similar to one another.Even though a few years ago the differences betweenthe European Union, the United States and LatinAmerica were large, there is an increasing trend to similarstaging and even in some cases they become perfectlypredictable. One of the features they all share isthat the candidates appear as professional actors whoare playing their roles in front of different sets and withdifferent scripts that are more or less dramatic or comicdepending on the case or agenda. They are expectedto be persuasively effi cacious and credible on stage, tospeak clearly and not hesitate and so on. There is awhole interpretative exercise that, even though it is nolonger so important live due to the decreased importanceof meetings as cohesive events, has resolutelyshifted over to image and video politics.What I mean is that in the same way that governments try to take the war to the cities, becauseall the fronts are always very far away, we take the campaigns to the very centre of social apparatuses,contaminating everything. In the fortnight that a campaign lasts, everything hasto be campaigning: a dog, a train, a tomato; everything becomes a symbolic campaign elementwhether or not the dog or the tomato minds. Every conversation, every joke, every poll must formpart of the great script of the campaign.Everything is momentary and a one-off, nothing lasts, but it has to seem the most intense thingin the world. A candidate will say something one day about how much he loves a hamster andpeople will laugh at him. But if he’s clever he’ll know he needs to talk about the hamster againhowever ridiculous it seems. The hamster will be everything, they’ll talk about him in newspapercolumns; other parties will run ads with mice to make fun of him. No problem; the hamster willbecome a powerful brand. At the end of the day, it was a politician who said that the importantthing is that they talk about you, even if they say bad things.An ad is a face. Everything else is metaphors that give it a frame of reference which it can beassociated with. I’ll tell you one thing: in ads, the candidates are released from politics, they’rejust actors. That’s the great strength of an ad. The voters judge the candidate as if it were atalent show. The viewer is trapped in its thirty seconds by the morbid and gossipy fascinationof seeing “how they do” in front of the spotlights and with the script they’ve learnt. In the sameway, in a debate people are attracted by the “nerves” a candidate experiences when faced with somuch pressure: millions of viewers, thousands of communication specialists, the home straight,the opponent turning the screws, dissimulating their own defects. We want a leader and we putthem to the test. In short, an electoral campaign is nothing other than the game of psychophagy;the consumption of other people’s psychology, and moreover that of the aspirant to be a hero.A campaign means getting everything to be pure emotional shuddering, intensely momentary,designed and destined not to last.Once again it is they who are the undecided.This morning I received clear and precise indicationsfrom the party leaders to take the fearroute. Of course, that’s a strategy we alwayshave in mind. You only have to see the slogan.But the orders were more than precise: “Gofor the jugular”. It’s a bit late for that sort ofstuff. I won’t go into how much they are shittingthemselves at the top – and they are – butrather how delicate going into rubbish binscan turn out to be. Taking the rubbish outinto the street to put it in the wrong bin alwaysentails the risk of being seen by a neighbour.The important thing is to get someone else totake it out. It’s obvious I have no choice, if Iwant to get my way in the medium term. We’llgo for it, but we’ll have to calculate the shockwave carefully. I’ve already got three of myguys in the audiovisual archives, not only inthe ones we have here but also in other partsof the world. We’re going to make four adsalong the same lines. The first will deal withlast year’s conflict in Algeria: those touristswho were caught in the police raid after theattack and tried to seek shelter in the embassyonly to find no-one would open the doors tothem so as not to offend the Algerian governmentwhen economic ties were close. Everyonewill remember those angry tourists in front ofthe embassy, thumping the railings and facedwith diplomatic silence. Next we’ll touch onthe President’s friendship with the governmentof Iran, and then on the “open door agreement”with Africa, and we’ll finish with thegovernment’s encouragement for the Tupamaromovement. It’s going to be easy. We’ll justedit the material down to ten seconds with a“Can you imagine that?” type ending. I reallydon’t like these kinds of things: it’s like goinginto battle with a borrowed rifle, you neverknow if it’s loaded with real bullets or blanks,and that’s not a nice feeling when you have todefend yourself.Much has been said about the bellicose language Alfauses to talk about election campaigns. Expressionssuch as campaign, war, tactics, front, enemy and so ondo not appear to be out of place in the light of the techniquesused in political struggles. Although the mostwell-known part of the work done by political marketingprofessionals is what is usually called an “aircampaign” involving the press, radio and television, thesuccess of an electoral campaign is based on a balancebetween the air campaign and the “land campaign”. Aland campaign means getting out on the ground andgoing into towns, neighbourhoods, streets, marketsand so on to get face-to-face contact between thecandidate and the voters. However, recent campaignswould suggest that the air dominates, and here wemean only the preponderant use of the media. It couldbe said that the selling of ideas is increasingly moreabout selling air. Who’s worried about the bodies inthe electoral campaign other than as part of the “abody equals a vote” equation?
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Spots Electorales. El espectÃ¡culo de la democracia - Soymenos.net

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