WashPost
Thursday, October 28, 2010
With their "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" this weekend, political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are late to the party. This weird campaign has been Comedy Central all along.
The main source of hilarity has been the Tea Party movement and its candidates, quite a few of whom give every indication of being several sandwiches short of a picnic. Whether they win or lose - and yes, there remains the possibility that some might actually be elected - they leave us with mondo-bizarro moments that may require years of psychoanalysis for our collective political psyche to purge.
Chief among them is an all-time classic of weirdness, right up there with those campy 1950s sci-fi/horror flicks like "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers." You've probably guessed that I refer to Christine O'Donnell's incomparable "I'm Not a Witch" television ad.
Much has been written about the "witch" ad, but I'm not sure anyone has done a proper deconstruction. If you regard it as a short film of the kind that might be entered at Sundance or Cannes, it may be a work of genius. The jarring contrast between what is said and what is seen can only be deliberate: O'Donnell delivers one message - not-a-witch - while the image presented on screen powerfully signals the opposite. She sits alone, against a black background that suggests infinite darkness; her makeup and lighting have been contrived to lend her face a ghostly pallor. Clearly, the viewer is being manipulated to think, "If you're not from some Other Realm, lady, you could have fooled me."
(More here.)
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