Feed, The War Room and the awkward reality of… | Little White Lies

Feed, The War Room and the awk­ward real­i­ty of Amer­i­can politics

21 May 2016

Words by Alex Chambers

Circular black and white eye icon with radiating lines.
Circular black and white eye icon with radiating lines.
How two ear­ly 90s doc­u­men­taries exposed the media machin­ery that helps deter­mine US elections.

In late 2015, 15 hours of uncut footage shot for Ted Cruz’s cam­paign TV spots appeared on YouTube. Nev­er intend­ed for the pub­lic, the video was uploaded in order to share it with Cruz’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions team. Nat­u­ral­ly, the creepi­est high­lights were soon cut togeth­er and reu­ploaded.

The footage con­firmed what every­one already knew, that the authen­tic, whole­some image politi­cians are so keen to project is the result of can­ny man­age­ment and media train­ing. But the orig­i­nal video is also fas­ci­nat­ing in its unscript­ed awk­ward­ness – all the times Cruz’s fam­i­ly mem­bers trail off or go blank in the mid­dle of an anec­dote, all the mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions and uncom­fort­able paus­es. Cruz looks so vul­ner­a­bly and almost touch­ing­ly real. It’s like acci­den­tal mumblecore.

It can be kind of facile to point to the messy real­i­ty of politician’s press per­sona and decry it as an exam­ple of media manip­u­la­tion. Two doc­u­men­taries fol­low­ing the 1992 US elec­tions explored the world behind the images, but instead of deliv­er­ing scathing exposés they found the same unscript­ed real­ism of the Cruz footage. Feed, which came out in 1992, was assem­bled from the raw satel­lite streams of the net­work tele­vi­sion crews that cov­ered the New Hamp­shire pri­maries, most of which was nev­er meant for pub­lic con­sump­tion. Released a year lat­er, The War Room fol­lowed Bill Clinton’s cam­paign staff and their craft­ing of every aspect of his media pres­ence. They both take you, in the words of David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the McCain 2000 cam­paign trail, sub­stan­tial­ly far­ther behind the scenes than you’re apt to want to be.”

In The War Room, true to the ciné­ma vérité roots of film­mak­ers film­mak­ers DA Pen­nebak­er and Chris Hege­dus, this means embed­ding them­selves deep in the envi­ron­ment of the cam­paign head­quar­ters: the poly­styrene cof­fee cups, the rolled-up sleeves, the papers cov­er­ing every sur­face in the flu­o­res­cent­ly-lit rooms. It’s so effec­tive because these are the crum­my accou­trements of authen­tic­i­ty, the debris left in the wake of some seri­ous­ly fraz­zled cam­paign aides like a tes­ta­ment to the fleshy real­i­ty of the whole process.

The cen­tre of the storm is cam­paign man­ag­er James Carville, who coor­di­nates the swirling chaos of news that’s just bro­ken or threat­en­ing to break, spin­ning it all into a catchy pro-Clin­ton mes­sage to be beamed laser-like into the minds of the vot­ers. When it’s revealed the Bush campaign’s out­sourc­ing its sign print­ing to Brazil, one of the first things Carville asks the strat­e­gy team is what rhymes with Rio?” The machin­ery of an elec­tion cam­paign relies on the relent­less momen­tum of peo­ple like Carville.

Feed focus­es on exact­ly the points where the ener­gy fails, on the peo­ple exhaust­ed from gen­er­at­ing quip after quip for the cam­era crews con­stant­ly trail­ing them. Instead of moments of ora­to­r­i­al inten­si­ty, direc­tor Kevin Raf­fer­ty assem­bled all the painful clips of dead air, of the silence fol­low­ing a joke that didn’t quite land or the mute­ly grin­ning face of a politi­cian who can’t hear the inter­view on the oth­er end of the satel­lite link. This is where doc­u­men­tary and 247 news over­lap. It often feels like the famous clos­ing shot of The Grad­u­ate, as if the cam­era has rolled on slight­ly too long and caught some­thing it shouldn’t.

Direc­tor Andrew Bujal­s­ki, speak­ing about what influ­enced his 2013 mock­u­men­tary Com­put­er Chess, describes a base­ball game he saw broad­cast on pub­lic access tele­vi­sion. The coher­ent nar­ra­tive of pro­fes­sion­al sports cov­er­age was replaced by dis­ori­ent­ing fram­ing and arbi­trary edits, and the result was, thrilling because at every moment I was being forced to recon­sid­er what this base­ball game was.”

There’s noth­ing arbi­trary about the deci­sions that the film­mak­ers make here. But by going out of sync with the con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive of polit­i­cal dra­ma, by focus­ing on the minu­ti­ae of what is nor­mal­ly pre­sent­ed as big screen cin­e­mat­ic stuff, the films make you recon­sid­er exact­ly what an elec­tion cam­paign is. Feed and The War Room trade the image of the stage and podi­um for the idea that sweep­ing nation­wide change, the seri­ous life and death stuff of gov­ern­ment and lead­er­ship, is just as much the work of a bunch sleep-deprived staffers packed into small rooms, brain­storm­ing bad puns on whiteboards.

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