Texans Getting Campy

Laura Thain — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:33:56 +0000

Hey y'all, in case you haven't heard, we're electing a new Lt. Governor this year here in the great state of Texas. With four Texas Republicans competing for the position, a campaign is taking shape to see who can be the cowboy-iest candidate of 2014. With a fight like that, you might expect to see some campaign ads that border on self-parody. And what, my friends, do you get when sincerity fails? Well, of course, a whole lot of camp!

Incumbent David Dewhurst, who is (for real) a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, released an unusual campaign ad this week. Before we view it, let’s take a look at a more serious cowboy call from contender and current Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples:

Ok, so we’ve got some typical campaign rhetoric going on here with a little bit of cowboy flair, but nothing too unusual. Staples' team shows that our Texan values are threatened by the specter of the Democrats and big government (specifically, the evil Obama and his friend the state of California). And it’s no surprise that the ad finds a way to say “Todd Staples” as many times as possible while showing him practically BURST across a true Texan field on a horse. He’s a cowboy in shining armor. Let’s take this as an example of non-campy cowboy. There’s nothing particularly failed about the sincerity of this campaign video—its effectiveness rests firmly in the success or failure of its polemics. This is a candidate who’s clearly courting Tea Party conservatives and ready to toe the Republican party line, taking no prisoners. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s considerably behind the other three candidates in a recent poll.)

But here’s what happens when the cowboy antics get a bit more theatrical: check out a favorite of mine (courtesy of Cate Coleman here in the DWRL), from current US Senator John Cornyn’s 2008 campaign:

The particular kind of camp we see here is determined by the audience:

Image Credit: Screenshots form Cornyn's campaign video

It is the campaign’s attempt to be serious and the utter failure of that seriousness that makes this over-the-top cowboy spectacle campy—and it’s the risk that many conservative appeals to “traditional” Texan-white-rancher-values take.

How, then, might a conservative campaign make the same kind of appeals to individualism and masculinity without resorting to the cowboy cliché? Take a look at Dewhurst’s recent campaign video as a response to that kind of rhetoric:

That’s right, folks. No cowboys. No news coverage. No dark and foreboding shots of Washington or California. Just a simple, sustained (nearly twenty full seconds) demonstration of bodily masculinity. Contrast our TX t-shirt wearing SuperBeard with the California hipster literally fondling a shake weight. Could it be that, unlike John Cornyn’s campaign, Dewhurst is intentionally using camp in his campaign rhetoric?

Image credit: Screenshot from Dewhurst's campaign video

It’s a strange move that I think attempts to accomplish a few goals simultaneously. First, in response to radical right complaints that Dewhurst isn’t “Republican” enough (perhaps because he has on occasion dared to try and cooperate with Texan Democrats in the State Senate), Dewhurst’s campaign produces a video so machismo that you almost can’t help but laugh. The camp seems self-conscious—which we might infer from the heavily stylized camera filter and a variety of other formal elements of the film itself—but it is serious in its implications, that is, that the Texan economy is absolutely tied to strong, hyper-masculine leadership. Bigger is better. Bearded is best.

I dare say the video also makes sincere attempts to appeal to younger voters, although this might represent the limits of the campy aesthetic. The crude, Instagram-like styling of the film (which, upon further scrutiny, is most interesting because it appeals to nostalgia for a time that young people in Texas never experienced outside of The Wonder Years and photo filters) has the most potential, despite its sincere intent, to fail.

Perhaps this lesser-watched Dewhurst video can tell us more about the campaign’s strange appeal to a hipster aesthetic. Watch it and see if you think Texas is ready to “walk down the aisle” with Lt. Governor Dewhurst all over again:

Does it remind you, too, of a Royal Tenenbaums style narration? What do you think of Dewhurst's campaign rhetoric?

Knockout Ads: Sexism and the Super Bowl

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:04:21 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

Since almost everybody else on the Internet is commenting on this year’s Super Bowl ads, I couldn’t resist offering my take. The obvious issue with the Super Bowl ads this year is their fairly blatant sexism.

Whether declaring how men need Dodge Chargers because women emasculate them, or entreating men to “wear the pants,” the Super Bowl commercials addressed themselves to a male audience, as noted by the New York Times:

There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are. That theme recurs in Super Bowl ads because so many of the viewers are men and so many of the products advertised are aimed at them.

Or, as James Poniewozik from Time put it:

Wow, Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

The visuals of the Charger ad in particular, entitled “Man’s Last Stand,” are particularly creepy; the ad features a montage of men staring into the camera, ending on a closeup of one man’s intense eyes before shooting to footage of the car zooming over the landscape as the words “Man’s Last Stand” appear on the screen. The deadpan of most of the men’s expressions doesn’t directly express hostility, but the voice and the script, which dully intones that “I will carry your lip balm. I will watch your vampire TV shows with you,” implies a building hostility that can only be recovered through the car’s fast speeds.

What I find interesting about this, though, is how seemingly tone-deaf these ads are to a potential female audience. According to the Nielsen Company, this year’s Super Bowl reached more than 106 million viewers—it seems obvious that many of these viewers would be women, right? Why would they risk alienating a potential audience, many of whom are the people who go the store to buy the beer that their families will drink while watching Drew Brees and Peyton Manning? (At the Super Bowl party I was at, there were ten women and six men—and while the women weren’t all major football fans, we all watched the ads attentively.)

However, in looking at the most successful of the ads, the Snickers ad “Game” that featured Betty White, the message isn’t dramatically different. Betty White is actually Mike, who is “playing [football] like Betty White out there.” Once Mike eats a Snickers provided to him by an attractive girl, he becomes a young man again, as the tag line assures viewers that “Snickers satisfies.” While Betty White getting tackled in a football game is amusingly incongruous, the basic message of the commercial is still the same: being a man in sporting events is good, and whatever product makes you a “satisfied” man is to the good as well. Maybe the issue with the Super Bowl ads this year wasn’t their sexist content, but rather that the amount of sexism has to be tempered by equal amounts of humor. Women can take a joke, but just not too much of one, so advertisers need to not express their angst about the economy and their lost jobs to avoid knocking out a valuable audience.

viz. - misogyny

Texans Getting Campy

Knockout Ads: Sexism and the Super Bowl