Imagine you are a filmmaker, an auteur who has just released a short film to the waiting public. Every image, every word was painstakingly chosen to convey a single message. This single-mindedness of theme is reflected in the tiniest details — down to the style and coloring of every letter that appears onscreen. You edit and re-edit until every second, every frame reinforces this single theme. Your finished product is seamless, relentless, forceful and uncompromising.
Now imagine that after all that work, all that laborious craftsmanship, you find yourself forced to go before the public in order to deny that this single, unmistakable theme was the intent of your film. In interview after interview you are forced to lie again and again. “No,” you say, “that’s not what the film intended to convey, not at all.”
Those interviews would be painful, humiliating work. Some part of you — the craftsman, the artist — might be secretly proud that your intended message had gotten through as clearly as you had hoped. That small part of you might feel rewarded and gratified to see your skills recognized. Yes! you’d be thinking, they got it. But at the same time, you’d be forced to deny that this was really the message of your film. You’d be forced to try to convince these astute viewers that you were, in fact, an ineffective and talentless filmmaker who had failed, miserably, to convey the “true message” of your film. It doesn’t mean what it seems to mean, you would have to say. It means something else.
The scenario above is not hypothetical. It’s happening now, in the real world, to real filmmakers. And it’s not happening overseas in some foreign, authoritarian land — it’s happening right here, in America.
The unfortunate filmmaker in question is a man named Fred Davis. His short film, entitled “The One,” was shot as an ad for John McCain’s presidential campaign. Watch the film for yourself and savor the care and artistry Davis put into it:
There’s not a second wasted here — every image, gesture, note, word and allusion points in a single direction, everything in the film says a single thing: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. Yes, it’s propaganda, but like the films of Eisenstein or Riefenstahl, it’s also art — unsubtly didactic, yet beautiful in its unity of purpose.
Tragically for Davis, however, it turns out that accusing your political rival of being the Antichrist is considered a bit over the line. Apparently according to conventional American political mores, the claim that your opponent is the ultimate personification of evil, the 10-horned beast of the Apocalypse, is regarded as sleazy gutter politics of the worst sort.
This created an uncomfortable situation for Davis and for the entire McCain campaign. They obviously couldn’t release the ad with the candidate’s endorsement — that would only make it seem that John McCain was an egregiously offensive, dishonest and unprincipled bottom feeder, willing to stoop to any low to try to score political points. Yet it would seem like a shame to waste all the time and money the campaign had already spent producing Davis’ brilliantly insane masterpiece.
So the solution McCain’s campaign decided on was to release the ad, but then to send poor Fred Davis out to make the disingenuous claim that it’s evident message was not intentional. Thus for the last week, the poor artist, betrayed by his patrons, has been forced to make the rounds, abasing himself, denying his own skills and discrediting his own handiwork.
A sad, sad tale. (Either that or Fred Davis is a shameless, disgusting hatchet man, willing to destroy America if that’s what it takes to get his boss elected. It’s one of those.)
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