A pivotal moment in the 1998 movie "Pleasantville" comes when an unusual remote control pulls a brother and sister into their television set. They emerge on the other side, inside the world of the show they are watching.
A pivotal moment in the 1998 movie "Pleasantville" comes when an unusual remote control pulls a brother and sister into their television set. They emerge on the other side, inside the world of the show they are watching.
Such is the experience of being at the Democratic National Convention and watching it two ways at once _ on a TV screen like much of America, and from the arena floor where the actual event is taking place.
On a day of momentousness, a day when Democrats anointed the nation's first black nominee of a major party, poking at the corners of the stagecraft is one way of illuminating what's going on.
Which is, to some extent, this: "We really do think of ourselves as players in a TV production."
That's Cynthia Glozier, a high-school English teacher and delegate from Rhinebeck, N.Y., sitting in her seat Wednesday and inhaling the spectacle that surrounded her.
And what a spectacle it was.
Around her swirled a cast of thousands, all harnessed for one purpose: to sell a political party's deeply believed message by using the most modern tools possible. The effect is as if Cecil B. DeMille had directed an episode of "The West Wing."
In one direction was CNN's Wolf Blitzer, atop a platform interviewing Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, their riser arranged with the stage as background. In another, volunteers distributed preprinted Obama signs to be waved on cue, creating a flowing visual for the cameras not unlike the opening ceremony of an Olympics. Leitmotifs _ including elevator music between featured speakers _ pushed along the script.
And the stage itself: To see it in real life is to be overwhelmed by an intricate five-story, multi-sectioned video monitor that undulates with stars, stripes and sometimes clouds, and would have been utterly terrifying to your great-grandfather. The human speakers themselves, tiny in real life at the bottom of the proscenium, aren't really the point; most people are watching their towering, pixellated counterparts anyway.
American stories today are often told through filters. Rare is the national message that we experience unmediated. This is why YouTube and Twitter and the blunt, often refreshing voices of blogs are thriving; the appetite for something authentic is voracious.
In 1962, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term "pseudo-event," which he defined as something that takes place for the express purpose of being watched and packaged. A news conference, for example, is a pseudo-event.
But the Democratic National Convention is more complex. It's something vibrantly real and something completely fake _ something for the delegates and something for the television cameras _ all rolled into one.
This is not a value judgment. There is merit and magnificence in the modern political convention. It is not the smoke-filled room of yesterday, where outcomes were not predestined and real internecine warfare took place. But neither is it irrelevant.
As a production, it taps into the American yearning for stories and the ascendant visual culture. Democrats come forward and tell their tales, one by one, regular people alongside luminaries. They invoke their childhoods:
"I grew up in Levittown, Pa., in the 1950s …"
"I'm a rancher who has made my living raising cattle …"
"My great-grandmother worked as a maid in the home of William Howard Taft …"
"My grandparents were Italian and Czechoslovakian immigrants …."
These are real stories rolled into the big show. They may be packaged as propaganda, but they are dispensing _ to delegates here and voters at home _ the values of the Democratic Party. It is the "Sesame Street" of adult discourse: Learning can be fun, too.
Yet we say we want authenticity, authenticity, authenticity, and then we assemble affairs like this. And it's not a partisan thing, either; expect the same next week at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota.
Joe Biden has much to say, but must he have giant twinkling stars undulating on screen above him? Hillary Rodham Clinton's call to nominate Barack Obama by acclamation is a true historic moment, but do we need flashing arena lights that emulate a fireworks display? For conventiongoer and living-room TV watcher alike, isn't the reality of seeing history good enough?
Penni Pier, an associate professor at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, who studies narratives and political communication, believes such fanfare gets in the way of real life. "If people are being handled," she wonders, "what type of information are they really getting?"
The answer is hopeful and frightening, in equal doses. Sure, spectacle is a shortcut that allows a political party to excite today's supporters and attract tomorrow's. And, like religion, party politics is only as good as the new worshippers it can entice.
But aggressive, immersive packaging can undermine deeper understanding. Does a shiny stage bedecked with the latest wonders amplify an important message or obscure it? As the Goo Goo Dolls sang the year "Pleasantville" came out, "If everything feels like the movies, you bleed just to know you're alive."
Glozier, the New York delegate, has an interesting story to tell about her convention viewing habits. She watches parts of it from her seat in the Pepsi Center, then repairs to her hotel room to watch some more on CNN. She is double-dipping, watching event and "event" back to back.
"They're very different," she says. "The television version is far more intimate."
Because that's what TV does. It puts spectacle in your bedroom, brings the fight to you. Yet the intimacy creates distance, too. It's easy to feel like you've actually experienced something when really you've only watched.
Ultimately, the question is moot. We're getting rid of neither bells nor whistles. No one's going back. Bill Clinton, a man versed in the vagaries of the modern media, gets that.
Basking Wednesday night in applause that went on a beat too long, he knew what had to happen. And it wasn't about the delegates in front of him. It was about those of you keeping score at home. "Y'all sit down," he said. "We gotta get on with the show here."
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