It so happened that I had re-watched Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, as I am wont to do about once a year, the night before the news of the Republican National Convention’s surprise guest speaker leaked. And so I dutifully tuned in to see “Clintus,” as he was once nicknamed by his friend and mentor Don Siegel (D- IL), without having seen any of the previous three days of the RNC—more because of pre-existing professional commitments than because of apathy, although I have plenty of that quality to go around. Other than what could be gleaned through the crawl of social networking updates by predictably indignant liberal friends, the extent of my knowledge of the event was that the leviathan known as Chris Christie had, on a previous evening, opened for 3 Doors Down.
There is a particular sort of disorientation that comes of watching network television, particularly the absolutely insane commercial breaks, after a long period of going without. You are exposed to a whole host of stimuli that you’re no longer immunized from or acclimated to and, in that brief, bracing moment of re-entry, you see them as though you had never seen them before, nakedly exposed in their full ludicrousness by the stark light of novelty. I have heard many people attempt to approximate this feeling; I most recently experienced a species of it during an evening spent re-watching an hour or more of TV show opening credits from 1991-92, a binge that brought back the trapper-keeper graphics and various other pop tropes of the Bush Sr. era in one hot shot, OD rush.
Of course all of this now looks profoundly dated—as the particular stylistic devices that the mandarins of media have today decided denote “realism,” “cutting-edge,” etc., will look profoundly dated in another two decades. My professor at Wright State University, Dr. William Lafferty, who has an unusually robust sense of the absurd, once kicked off a lecture by entering the classroom wearing a camo cap that read “The Future is Stupid”—a bit of merch from the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s Survival Series. The idea, as I recall it, was to instill us students with a healthy respect for history by way of disrespect, proceeding to lead us along a perilous line of logic. The past, which, to arrogant moderns, largely appears ridiculous in its fashions, superstitions, and prejudices, was once “modern” itself, and presumably regarded itself with the same egoistic esteem that we do. Our self-regarding present will, however, one day become the past, and a future present will in turn laugh at it, as we laugh at ersatz flying machines and dance marathons and bell-bottoms. And so too will that future present one day become the past for a future future present, and so on, ad infinitum. If the past is stupid, it follows that the present is stupid; if the present is stupid, it follows that the future will be as well.
This, in its negative way, mirrors Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that “every generation is equidistant to God,” which has long been central to my historical thinking—the implication of “The Future is Stupid” being that that equidistance is very distant indeed. This line of thinking is basically Dr. Lafferty’s stock-in-trade: “I’m just trying to prove that Ecclesiastes 1:9 pertains to film,” he told me of his current syllabus when last we spoke. As vividly as “The Future is Stupid,” I remember the curt reaction of another film history professor, Dr. Charles Derry, when some gormless undergrad audibly scoffed at a piercing off-screen screech during the Comanche attack at the beginning of John Ford’s The Searchers: “How would you sound if someone slit your throat?” Quite sincerely, I will never cease to marvel at the quality of education that I received for a few mailed-in cereal box tops.
I had begun to talk about the shock of re-exposure because, prior to watching last night’s RNC blowout, I had—excepting a brief ride on the Herman Cain train—foresworn of watching televised politics since 2009 or so, when I finally shook an unhealthy Washington Journal problem. So, dear reader, imagine my confusion at tuning in to watch Taylor Hicks undulating on stage, to see the introduction of a parade of Olympic champions in a mysterious sport called “Skeleton.” What fresh hell is this?
After a well-produced getting-to-know-your-candidate video, capped by one of those dull and interchangeable coach quotes that Americans seemingly cannot get enough of, the moment I’d tuned in for arrived. A friend described it in a manner that I could not possibly hope to improve upon: “Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood took to the stage at the Republican National Convention tonight to deliver an unscripted conversation with a stool that held an imaginary President Barack Obama.” By the end, I was quite ready for orange slices and fetal spooning.
Pink-cheeked and tow-headed Eastwood’s apparently off-script act managed to stay just barely on the right side of coherency through most of its uncomfortable duration. The most successful moments involved the invisible president, in a voice heard only to Mr. Eastwood, presumably instructing both presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and Mr. Eastwood to “Go fuck themselves.” Eastwood has in the past teamed very well opposite mute comic partners, most notably the orangutan, Manis, in Every Which Way but Loose, but I do not see this late-career turn towards prop comedy developing into a cornerstone of his repertoire.
Eastwood’s piece of incredibly shabby sub-ventriloquism was followed by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the baby-faced assassin, who actually got into a good rhetorical roll until muffing his crescendo with an unacknowledged gaffe in which he stated that a central tenet of the American dream was a yearning for “more government instead of more freedom.” Rubio in turn introduced the Republican presidential candidate, whose most compelling features are his Touch of Grey Mr. Fantastic sidewalls and vague spiritual resemblance to Guy Smiley. During a long, soft speech mostly concerned with establishing an origin story that should’ve been pitched to the American people months ago, Mr. Romney did briefly pique my interest by implying that his mother was a Hollywood actress of some note, though there is little evidence to support this claim. And most eerily, by the time Mr. Romney’s tissue of woven-together homilies had ended and the balloons dropped, the psychedelia of the scene settled, and began to seem very familiar. I was comfortably breathing the air of TV politics again, and I suppose I will know none other for a long time to come.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.