Today's post is for aficionadoes of propaganda. The fine art of fooling and manipulating The People through the media, which started with the public relations work of Edward Bernays in the early 20th century, has evolved a great deal over the years. Our example today is the trailer for Barack Obama's campaign film The Road We've Traveled. An AFP news story gives us the essentials.
A steely Barack Obama stands alone, reeling off tough decisions on multiple crises in a new movie narrated by Tom Hanks, which will debut as the president's reelection bid cranks into life.
Obama's campaign Thursday released a two-minute trailer for the dramatic documentary which will come out next week, featuring key administration figures relating his role in saving the economy and killing Osama bin Laden.
It is indeed clear that these will be the "highlights" of Obama's 1st term—saving the economy and killing Osama bin Laden.
"How do we understand this president and his time in office?" Hanks asks over footage of Obama's euphoric victory rally in Chicago on the night of his 2008 election triumph.
Which is to say how are we meant to understand the president and his time in office? People clearly can't think for themselves—the Obama people (among others) have done their best to make sure that's true—so we need to be told how to think about the president.
"Do we look at the day's headlines, or do we look at what we as a country have been through," Hanks said, in the movie "The Road We've Traveled" by Academy Award winning director Davis Guggenheim.
In so far as Obama didn't solve any problems during his first term, although he has created or exacerbated a few, we need to look to the past to see where we've been and what we've been through. We need to appreciate just how tough the tasks Obama had to confront were. We need to appreciate just how tough Obama's heroic struggle to save the nation has been.
In short, Obama was confronted with nearly impossible, herculean problems which no ordinary mortal could possibly have solved in such a short time. Clearly we need to give him more time to finish the job. If we merely look at today's headlines, we might conclude that Obama has been an utter failure.
The film is an attempt by the Obama campaign to place the daily struggles and bitter partisan fights in a larger context, and a bid to spin Obama as successfully steering his nation through troubled times...
And Vice President Joe Biden relates the dramatic, and lonely moment of decision for Obama on the high-risk Navy SEALS raid which killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May.
"As he walked out of the room, it dawned on me, he is all alone, this is his decision and nobody is standing there with him," Biden said over a still photo of Obama in the shadows staring out of a window onto the south lawn of the White House.
One man's lonely struggle to ... preserve the status quo. And one more thing:
In this kind of filmmaking nothing happens by accident. Using Tom Hanks to narrate, the choice of award winning director Davis Guggenheim, the choice of supportive speakers like Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, what they say in the film and what was cut, the background music, the still shots, the voiceover narration, the basic film editing, the camera angles and movement within scenes—all of this has been done carefully and deliberately. Nothing you see in this trailer was left to chance.
Oh My God! Update — from Glenn Greenwald, with another video. The trailer itself follows.
Please just watch this two-minute interview of [film directory Davis] Guggenheim by CNN’s Piers Morgan in which Guggenheim explains that nothing critical can or should be said of our President other than the fact that he is so Great that his Greatness cannot be sufficiently conveyed in a single film...
For anyone wanting further education/understanding:
From Bernays...
http://thoughtmaybe.com/video/the-century-of-the-self
To Luntz...
http://thoughtmaybe.com/video/the-persuaders
Well worth each and every fraction of a second.
"The slogans are replaced, bye-the-bye"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIHJ9RMAVGI
Hey, Dave...Could I have some remedy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qD72NCJSkk
Posted by: Diogenes | 03/10/2012 at 10:55 AM