Quick Thought

I was at the supermarket the other day when I saw the cover of the latest TIME cover featuring a split image of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with the title, "There Can Only Be One."


By the way, the idea for that cover was ripped from the NBA's playoff campaign where basketball superstars are perfectly aligned side-by-side (see BenMVP.com for more). Their campaign called, "There Can Only Be One," seems to be a slight variation of a very popular tagline from the movie, Highlander (1986). The actual line is "In the end, there can be only one." Anyways, I digress ... again ...

I get the idea that the Democratic Party ought to choose a presidential nominee now but the race between Obama and Clinton is so tight that choosing one will be enormously difficult. Such a decision will come down to the nitty gritty details in order to make the distinctions clearer. Fine. I get that. But I remember back in late March of another cover from The New Republic of a morph between Obama and Clinton. I think TNR called it "HillarACK" which sounds like someone was saying Hillary's name before barfing his dinner out.

So this I also "get" but it's extremely problematic. Again there's a similar dynamic that because Hillary and Obama are extremely popular, very resourceful, strong candidates in their own right that making a decision is proving to be much harder than anticipated. There are consequence in the long run if no candidate emerges with a definitive lead especially for the Presidential race against John McCain. But through the beauty of morphing graphic technology, instead of choosing one, we can take the best of both candidates and create the super-candidate for the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. What do we get when we blend Obama with Clinton?

A white guy. WTF???? So instead of embracing the specific identity of race through Obama or the identity of women through Clinton, this representation positions "white male" as not only the "best of both worlds" but also reinforces it as the default subjectivity for all matters regarding race and gender. This is more than an inability to choose between one or the other; it's a dangerously misguided and idealized representation about discourses of race and gender.

So what makes the TIME magazine cover so interesting, and subversive, in juxtaposition to TNR? We still have to choose between two candidates; it's a choice that is also intimately bound up in questions about race and gender. Either one will still be a political and historical exclamation point for the US.

But the TIME cover still uses the same visual strategy where the head, hair lines, eyes, nose, and lips are, for the most part, perfectly aligned, instead of morphing the facial elements together. There is still an echo of an idealized candidate though it is not as distinct as TNR's representation. Instead, the visual and political effect is more pronounced in TIME's cover and the tagline. Suture theory (Yes, I'm playing around with film theory) describes the process whereby subjects ( "us" ) are "drawn into" a film (identification), taking up positions as "subjects-within-the-film," so that our meanings and experiences become defined by the film's narrative. OK so the cover is not a film but it is a representation that demands textual analysis. I'm sure there's a communication studies theory that is applicable but I'm more familiar with film theory and suture theory is what popped into my head. I imagine hearing the anguish and utter horror from a psychoanalytic film theorist as I butcher a well established film theory. But I'm a cultural studies scholar and we're trained to use theory in less than traditional ways. So deal with it. Anyways ...

So if suture theory describes a process of subjectification then what the TIME cover has done was to not only force a character identification, but also a choice. It is a demand on the viewer (that is, "us") to choose a friggin' candidate. The world encapsulated in the representation of the TIME cover is the same world that we inhabit. This is the major difference from the TNR cover because the morph is an imaginary completeness that functions to disguise an inherent lack (Yes, this is my best use of psychoanalytic film theory). There is no demand on the viewer to do anything more other than to abide by a fictionalized narrative that is politically problematic as a discursive construction and as question of agency. The TIME cover on the other hand is not at all ambiguous or ambivalent about what is at stake. It reads as a kind of refusal to an idealized candidate and the misguided appeals to a race-less/gender-less utopic narrative. Instead, it compels a very pragmatic and deeply political act: choose one.

I thought that this was going to be a quick thought but apparently it went further than I anticipated. Oh well.