anti-theatricality and politics (McJobsworth / That's Angertainment)

Perhaps no stunt in the history of U.S. politics deserves more ridicule than the grotesquely embarrassing mummery Trump put on at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s today. 

- Seth Abramson (bonus anti-theatricality points for use of the archaic term "mummery")

Donald Trump - a 78-year-old who’s spent his life screwing over workers, who's never earned a real paycheck in his life -  was putting on a show today playing dress-up at McDonald’s to act like he’s one of us. 

Kamala Harris doesn’t have to put on a show. She actually wore the uniform

- Shawn Fain, UAW

So the place wasn’t even open. It was all staged and fake. He didn’t work for real at a McDonalds. It was a staged fraud just like every other event.

- Ron Filipowski

The Trump McDonalds thing was choreographed and staged. The restaurant was closed down, covered in Secret Service, the people going through the drive through were handpicked, careful and intentional camera placement. All staged.

- source unknown

A reminder that the whole Trump McDonald's thing yesterday was fake. Just like him. Store was closed. "Customers" were Trump Cult Members. They had scripts. They had rehearsed. There is NOTHING Trump won't lie about.

- Keith Olberman

So in an effort to highlight his claim that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, Trump pretended to work at a closed McDonald’s where he served pretend orders to supporters pretending to be customers

-  New York magazine

If it weren’t fake it wouldn’t be authentically Trump

- Philip Gourevitch

Donald Trump, born on Easy Street, dreamed of more, insisted. And got it all. Palaces, women, minions, power, supreme fame. Everything...but real pride, or friendship, or love. And at 78 realizes he can’t quite distinguish between a dream and a nightmare…in the Twilight Zone

 - Kurt Andersen

The Yelp reviews:

Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves. Repeated himself several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the showers at the golf club? 

Free lies with every shake. You just don’t want to see who’s shaking. 

I asked for an Arnold Palmer. Old man told me I couldn’t handle it.

“The fries were too salty as if someone who lost a major election had been crying over them for an hour.

The person who was at the drive through vaguely resembled someone who I saw on the news for being a convicted felon.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Job performance versus the job of performance

Biden was been outstanding at the job of being President. Where he fell short was meeting the media's demands for the performative parts of the job, which they value exponentially more b/c they think it's all just a TV show and not real life

- Scarylawyerguy

Neologism of the month

"If you don’t like how things are going in Washington, he’s responsible for it. He’s introduced this type of angertainment where you just get people upset and then you podcast about it and write a book about it and make some money on it"

Colin Allred on Ted Cruz

Kamala CNN Town Hall versus No Show Trump the Final Debate That Wasn't 

"CNN doing theater criticism while the other guy threatens to round up tens of millions of people and sic the military on his domestic foes (including journalists) is surreal to watch. They can't let go of the idea that this is a normal campaign."

- Aaron Rupar

Rally sizes 

Some people will argue that Harris only outdrew Trump because Harris had so many cool special guests at her rally. But that just underscores the point. If Trump were able to attract any cool special guests to his rallies, he’d be doing it. Instead he’s out there limping along almost on his own. He’s the only star of his own show, and it’s not a show that anyone wants to watch anymore.

- Bill Palmer

Waltz Time

 Chap at the Atlantic wakes up to fact that politics is performance and never more so when it is a performance of authenticity (Mark Leibovitch on Tim Walz)

"Tim Walz is trying very hard to make it look like he’s not trying too hard....

"When Harris picked Walz, she knew that this would be an abbreviated race, with limited time to make an impression. The campaign clearly saw Walz as embodying an archetype of American masculinity that would stand in contrast with the noisy grievance guys in the red MAGA hats and creepy venture-capitalist types like Vance, who can’t order a damn doughnut without breaking into hives..... 

"Several people in Walz’s crowds held signs reading coach, a reference to Walz’s former career as an assistant football coach at Mankato West High School before he ran for Congress in 2006. So what if it’s been nearly two decades since Walz has worn a whistle around his neck? The coach thing has been a key component of the regular-guy shtick, one that he does tend to lay on a bit thick....

"In a video that the campaign released last week, Walz can be seen popping his head up from under the hood of the figurative turnip truck in his driveway. The vehicle is in fact his 1979 International Harvester Scout, which has served as a recurring prop in Walz’s stage set—just as Harris has deployed Walz himself as a kind of prop.

"In the ad, Walz is schooling his online audience in the finer points of keeping a dirt-free carburetor. “You can always tell something about somebody’s maintenance by how clean their air filter is,” Walz said, picking up the truck’s filter and then putting it back down again (for the record, his hands are also immaculate). He is like a midwestern version of the Car Talk guys—except that Click and Clack could never pivot as seamlessly as Walz can into a discussion of, say, the evils of Project 2025.

".... Let me pause now to remind everyone that Tim Walz is a politician. He is a former six-term congressman and two-term governor who until recently served as chair of the Democratic Governors’ Association. He can hustle, grandstand, “misspeak,” and be opportunistic, just like the rest of them. When Biden dropped out in July, Walz saw an opening. He seized it.

"... Having a good shtick is part of being a good politician,” Brendan Buck, a Republican communications strategist...

"Walz has benefited from the frenetic pace of contemporary politics: the fact that people tend to experience candidates as impressionistic blurs and pay little attention to anything that lies below the surface. Being able to cultivate a persona and ace a role can get you a long way. Olson said that Walz has unquestionably proved himself a talented political performer throughout his career. But veteran Walz watchers can also grow weary of his practiced yokel act. “Oh, he is totally full of shit,” Olson said of Walz. “And he’s also really good at being full of shit.” Olson seemed to mean this as a compliment.

In a crass sense, being “really good at being full of shit” distills a certain essence of what it means to be a good politician.

.... Oddly, since Harris picked him, Walz has been largely hidden away from the national media. The campaign has been content to deploy Walz as more of a cartoon than a multidimensional character: dress Coach up in camouflage, pop in the Bob Seger eight-track, juice him up on Diet Mountain Dew, and send him onto the stage. His rallies are loud, boisterous, and well attended, usually more so than Vance’s.

"Perhaps this will change after Tuesday. The debate—between two midwestern populists of very different backgrounds, styles, and sensibilities—will be fascinating. Walz can detonate a line with the best, packs a lot of words and umbrage into tight sound bites, and has proved adept on TV. But how will this translate against the cool, cerebral vitriol of Vance? Will Walz’s default nonchalance survive the high stakes of the event?

"What’s clear from watching Walz these past few weeks is that he can land a speech. He is honing his lines as he goes and trying out new ones that he’ll likely reprise against Vance. And he projects a particular relish on the stump when attacking his opposite number.

"... Walz is a winning retail politician, a prodigious hugger who laughs easily and is always passing out little pins imprinted with loons—the Minnesota state bird—to the kids he meets. At every stop, he is endlessly deferential to Harris and careful to portray himself foremost as a servant to her success....  Walz.... carries himself as a charmed political lottery winner, plucked from the prairie.

“Look, I just want to help,” I kept hearing Walz tell people. He cuts a convincing beta figure, content to play the ultimate assistant coach. Minnesota has a proud and winning tradition of vice-presidential candidates: Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s and Walter Mondale in the ’70s. (Both fared less well when they tried to run as alpha nominees, Humphrey losing to Richard Nixon in 1968 and Mondale to Ronald Reagan in 1984.)

"Walz takes the stage to “Small Town,” the rollicking hayseed homage by John Mellencamp, released in 1985. The tune is fun, familiar, and apt for Walz’s rural upbringing in Butte, Nebraska, where he says there were 25 students in his high-school graduating class, 12 of them his cousins.

"But for what it’s worth, every time I hear “Small Town,” I think of a previous Democratic running mate, another self-styled fighter for the little guy with a small-town rap: John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, a two-time presidential candidate, and John Kerry’s running mate in 2004. Edwards was a dazzling political performer in his own right, and he, too, used to wear out “Small Town” at his rallies. The lesson here is that shticks don’t always age well, and neither did the story of Edwards. His sweet-talking country-lawyer routine—righteous champion of justice and handsome family man—would eventually vaporize in a swirl of $400-haircuts, extramarital liaisons, legal woes, a lovechild, and other tabloid unpleasantness.

Yes, Walz, like Edwards, was born in a small town (and he could breathe in a small town). But no, Walz is not John Edwards. He’s much more accomplished and less slick than Edwards ever was. These are very different political times, and just because he and Edwards have the same campaign song doesn’t mean that Tim Walz is also destined to come crumbling down.

"The comparison, however, does ring with a cautionary echo. Very little in politics is truly authentic. And nothing is as simple as it seems—in a small town or on a big stage.

Further Back and Faster

 

"I know a thing or two about performing, m'boy"

 fragment, from an essay about something else, on my favorite film 

“I am a bullet”—Chas Devlin

The essence of mod is the connection between Englishness, style, and violence. 

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock’n’roll movies) but it had never represented it musically or enacted it onstage.   The mod sound was expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  It's latent violence was dramatized by The Who in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing: the orgasmic release that mod music and mod neurology required.

From violence aestheticized, to a kind of aesthete of violence:  Chas Devlin, the smooth criminal protagonist of Performance, a Donald Cammett and Nic Roeg directed film made in 1968 but released a couple of years later. Played by James Fox,  Chas  is an enforcer for a “firm” (criminal syndicate) in East London, a virtuoso “performer” who collects protection money and puts the squeeze on “flash little twerps”.  Chas is also a bit of a mod, what with his short hair, thin ties and sharp suits. He’s a narcissist who may have a homosexual past but currently goes in for S&M games with his girlfriend involving whips and mirrors. In one scene, we see Chas in his  bachelor pad in a posh apartment complex, dressing with great care. In a shot that seems to look ahead to Richard Gere in American Gigolo, Chas selects gold cuff links from a drawer that contains about a dozen sets, and then obsessively fussing over the placement of some magazines on his coffee table, making millimeter adjustments so that they are square with the edges of the table.  Then he’s off to threaten the owner of a betting shop who is being coerced into merging with the firm: the camera cuts from Devlin’s almost prissy sartorial rituals to a dustbin being hurled through the betting shop window by one of his thugs.  

Later, on the run after killing the betting shop owner, with whom he has some extremely personal history, Chas winds up hiding from the law in the Ladbroke Grove house of Turner, a burned-out and decadent rock star modeled on the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones but actually played by Mick Jagger. Phoning an accomplice, Chas says he’s “on the left” (i.e. West London) and complains about the “long hair, beatniks, druggers, free love” atmosphere of his hideout. Chas is uptight and as Performance unfolds Turner and his lover Ferber (played by Brian Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg) loosen up their sociopath guest with hallucinogens, in order to break down his character armor and poke around inside his inner workings.

Whether deliberately intended as an in-joke or just an instinctive choice, the confrontation between the Rolling Stone and the mod-like Chas is inspired. Mods loathed the Stones, regarding them as scruffy art-school bohemians with dirty long hair. The very things that made Jagger, Jones and Richards anti-heroic role models for bourgeois students the world over was what convinced the mods they were posh middle class kids slumming it.  The antipathy endured:  echoing Pete Meaden’s definition of mod as “clean living under difficult circumstances”, Paul Weller once declared his belief in “clean culture, real culture. Not all this bullshit… rock fuckin’ image and…. elegantly wasted wankers, like Keith Richards.”   

One of the key figures behind Performance was David Litvinoff. He’s credited as Dialogue Consultant and Technical Advisor, but his most important role was serving as the conduit between the demimonde of upper class Chelsea and the East London underworld inhabited by the Kray Twins (the sharp dressed mobsters who provided the model for Chas’s firm).  

In his BFI  Film Classics monograph on Performance,  Colin McCabe describes Litvinoff as “ suppressed, violent, buttoned up...”  But then again “buttoned up”, or it’s more common equivalent “bottled up”, could almost be the definition of  Englishness....

director's cut bit on Performance from S+A

The Man Who Fell to Earth  deserves its reputation as one of the most successful – artistically, not so much commercially – rock star as movie actor turns to date. Probably it’s only real rival is the earlier Roeg movie Performance, which he co-directed with writer Donald Cammell.  Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth go together, and not just because Bowie’s frenemy Mick Jagger starred in the former . The two movies form a conceptual pair, bookending the glam era. 

Filmed in 1968, Performance is absolutely Sixties, but it rehearses the themes of the pop era that followed swiftly upon the film’s delayed release in 1970. Decadence, sexual indeterminacy, the theatricality of performance are all in there, along with a persistent motif to do with mirrors (used to causing doubling and gender-blurring effects). There’s magic too: upper class bohemian Cammell was fascinated by Crowley and friends with Kenneth Anger, whose movies are clear influence on Performance. Cammell had a role in Lucifer Rising, playing Osiris the God of Death.

Just like The Man Who Fell To Earth, the plotline of Performance is really a frame for the draping of  highly-charged tableaux  and the elaboration of Roeg’s hallucinatory camerawork, with its disorientating edits and slippages of time and perspective.  The basic story involves the flight of an East End enforcer, Chas Devlin, who has incurred the wrath of his Kray Twins-like gang boss.  Posing as a juggler, Devlin takes refuge in the Ladbroke Grove house of Turner, a burned-out, reclusive rock star (modeled largely on Brian Jones, but  played by Jagger). Druggy, polysexual cavortings ensue, as Turner and his lover Pherber  Anita Pallenberg - once Brian Jones’s partner, by that point Keith Richards’s girlfriend) try to dismantle their sociopathic guest’s character armor and poke around inside his psyche.  

Long haired and made-up, the feminized Turner is the opposite of the proudly “all man” Devlin. Except that the East End gangland culture he comes from has a homo-erotic undercurrent: boss of the firm Harry Flowers dallies with toy boys, and it’s implied that Chas also has a homosexual past about which he’s in literally violent denial.  

Another glammy thread in the film relates to ideas of performance and identity.  The script was originally titled The Liars. Both rock star and gangster project a front as part of their trade. Devlin uses intimidation, a psychopathic aura, far more than actual violence.  In the movie’s critical exchange, Turner lectures the “juggler” Devlin (who he earlier described as “a performer of natural magic”) about theatre.  "I know a thing or two about performing, my boy!.... The only performance that makes it, that really makes it,  that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Am I right?”.

But Turner also knows that he’s lost his mojo: precisely the ability to believe the illusion he’s projecting. Devlin, whose name is close to devil, still has his “daemon,” as Pherber calls it. “He wants to know why your show is a bigger turn-on than his ever was,” she tells Devlin. She says that the criminal provides a “dark little mirror” that will perhaps help the fading rock star escape the hole in which “he’s stuck. Stuck!”

The second half of Man Who Fell To Earth - Newton under house arrest, passing time in kinky but listless sex, drinking gin by the gallon -  virtually repeats the  atmosphere of aimless decadence and psychic seclusion that pervades Turner’s West London townhouse. Roeg spoke of how Jagger and Bowie both possessed a charisma and physical presence that couldn’t be learned at acting school. “They’re not just a singer with a band. Their whole magnetism comes out in acting.” 

Neither film is strictly speaking about rock – Man Who Fell  To Earth isn’t at all, while Performance barely touches on music-making or the rock biz. But they jostle for first place as rock movies, capturing more of the spirit of their rock era – and more of their respective rock star in a starring role – than any of the films that more obviously deal with rock. 

 "and the only promotional poster that makes it, that truly makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves MADNESS!"

thankfully withdrawn poster for the movie!