The Etiology of Palinism

for Republican Vice President was just as much a form of mediated strategy as it was gender pandering. The cinematic moments of Obama’s speech at Denver’s Invesco Field were smothered by the next morning. The mass media immediately jumped on the opportunity to circumscribe the unknown woman—Sarah Palin. In these early moments she was always-emerging; every new fact and detail did nothing less than create a spectre of Sarah Palin. We begged her to be humanized, deconceptualized. As a columnist at Slate Magazine predicted, “after Palin steps down from the podium, TV commentators will fall over themselves with astonishment, feigned or sincere, at Palin’s brilliant performance.”[1] Let us remember the reversal, however—the oneric rendering of the recent political narrative. What must be taken from Palin’s comparison to the other Gilda, the one trapped in a dangerous replaying of Gilda’s confinement, isn’t pure synchronicity; the blonde Camilla Rhodes doppelganger, assuming all the (libidinal) liberation of what would be the (brunette) femme fatale, isn’t the spectre of Hillary Clinton or some other symbolic blonde. No—what must be precisely taken from Mulholland Drive is purely systematic and performative. The immediate liberal backlash against Sarah Palin is largely due to her antifeminist conservatism and ultra-religious zeal, that much is certain. And that much is somewhat acceptable; there is a ubiquity to these criticisms in regards to both endorsement by either gender. Sarah Palin’s political views shouldn’t come as surprise to anybody who actually has visited a place like Wasilla Main Street. However, what is singular about this election is the extremity of her—or her image’s—ability to proselytize, to convert, to offend particular affiliations. Casted in one role and then intensely rehearsed for another. But instead of this divergence solidifying political positions, Sarah Palin’s essence is perceived in continual flux—love/hate. She is polysemous—a multiplicity of meanings. Thus, there is a need for an appropriate language to discuss and interpret the performative effect of Sarah Palin. In Mulholland Drive, this apparatus is Club Silencio, a nightclub where both Rita (Camilla Rhodes) and her lover,

Diane, drift off to one night. Club Silencio serves as the portal for transference into diverging realities; a common analysis is that Rita and Diane’s experience in Club Silencio returns them to the Real. However, as Mulholland Drive unravels this return is skewed by the fact that this reality is the same side of the coin—a Möbius strip. The cross between the two worlds creates performance of performance, or third-order simulacra. The Rita Hayworth channeled in Mulholland Drive is a “copy of an original that never existed”[2], much like Sarah Palin’s “hockey mom and a pit bull.” Consequently, there is not only a need for discourse for the logic of this matrix, but a dissection of precisely how this re-rendering creates a problematic study of feminism’s role in this election. Let’s start with two corresponding ideas for reaching these objectives:

The Media

To redefine the election in terms of some analysis of how Palin reconfigures the essential figure of Woman seems to me entirely to be missing the specificity of what is happening in this election.[3] Palin is a virtual candidate, whose role in the campaign is to generate support for and increase the intensity of the McCain campaign by providing a source of potentiality and possibility onto which voters and the media can project their own beliefs and desires. This virtual candidacy works by intensifying the affect of both McCain and Obama supporters, for whom the reality of Sarah Palin means and feels quite differently, and mobilizes and amplifies different premediated networks of practices, behaviors, and beliefs.[4] Both of these accounts discount the idea that this election is not exclusive. The challenges to feminism are thus media-centric and capital-centric, rather than psychoanalytic, Lacanian. Some critics see this as a widespread collapse of ideology, an inclination to form over content. Instead, we must see it as a continuation of the skepticism since the proliferation of information technology. The ability for a candidate to “[provide] a source of potentiality and possibility onto which voters and the media can project their own beliefs and desires” is a result of such an increase. The failure of psychoanalysis

is, thus, not because of the lack of meaningful content, but simply because there is no way to understand the veracity of content without knowing how the message is being transmitted. Accordingly, a remapping of the female form—as has been suggested by many political theorists (and Lacanian thinkers [5]) as the significant effect of Sarah Palin’s nomination as the GOP’s Vice Presidential nominee—needs the latitude of extending beyond a particular historical significance. This does not mean that such a reconfiguration isn’t taking place; it just is noted that these are reactions, corollaries as opposed to being “moments” in themselves. In other words, what is being performed by Sarah Palin’s self-declaration of the quintessential working mother is all “stage,” subterfuge of the truth, in the sense that she boldly believes it even despite the fact that it’s a purely inaccurate routine. The virtuality of American Politics—from its inception during the Reagan gubernatorial years—has reached its highest point yet. The “affect of both McCain and Obama supporters” is exactly the sensation of this peak. This particular reading doesn’t mean the negation of the importance of Sarah Palin, nor feminism’s place within this election. We have reached the point where the decreasing credibility of news sources, online journals, and other web resources has resulted in the increase of the “premediation.” Environmental catastrophes—tornados, snowstorms, hurricanes—are predicted and broadcasted before their events. The plethora of scientific data from previous natural disasters allows for news stations to show footage of what’s to come, creating news stations as the new pattern of contemporary film production. Politics have the same ability; 24-hour news channels are able to consistently alter the character of the political candidates through nonstop coverage of their every step. With a new candidate, particularly one that enters late in a highly contested presidential race like Sarah Palin, these stations are forced to acquire a rapid amount of information and display coverage. The disparity between news sources creates a distortion during this process; coupled with the high-intensity of the information-influx and the subsequent partisan and bipartisan judgment, the previous political associations of voters are thrown

awry. An informational gravity pull generates further dissociation between the two parties and exacerbated feelings regarding Sarah Palin. As far as Sarah Palin being a foil to feminism, the issue becomes that this type of unilateral discouragement is “amplified” and displaced by the sensitive matrix of mass media. The media acts as the same dreamwork as the unreality of Mulholland Drive. The new Camilla Rhodes, the Sarah Palin, is translated into incessant reruns of a reversal of her intended value. The classical brunette femme fatale was conceived as sexual vice; she would be a projection of men’s fully conscious desires for seduction. However, this much must be clear—“she” would never desire. The desiring qualities of Sarah Palin—her impression as someone wanting to be a projection of one’s political satisfaction, an answer—should be interpreted for their illusion within the media paradigm. In other words, the imprisonment of Rita Hayworth at the end of Gilda was punishment not only for her allure but also because she does not desire—she simply is. This much is important. The re-rendering of the opposite of this performance skews the effectiveness of this psychoanalysis. The disparity between what liberals see of Sarah Palin and what conservatives see is because of the uncertainty of her form: which Rita Hayworth are we seeing?

Class and Feminism

The key moment in this Vice Presidential election was not the second-wave backlash against Sarah Palin because of her ineptitude during the prime-time television interviews but the reminder of class consciousness through the stock market crash and the subsequent bailout. During this time, Barack Obama recovered in the polls. McCain faltered. The American public quickly rushed to the opposite side of the room of the candidates, who were for once united in their unanimous support of the Congressional recovery plan. The Vice Presidential debate preceded the Presidential debate on only in occurrence but in the passing of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. While interpretation of the bailout bill ranged from “socialism

for the rich” to a “jumpstart for the economy,” the simple fact was the message that both of the Vice Presidential candidates sent out was anti-populist. The American public had shown enormous disapproval of the bailout plan, and, moreover, the unapologetic, insouciant stand of Wall Street. The Chief Financial Officer of Lehman’s brother fumbled over a scripted apologia of his and his company’s actions. Accordingly, the debate became a socioeconomically defining moment in that Sarah Palin—and Biden—used a repertory of class-conscious phrasings and gesticulations. Therefore, their message was anti-populist populist, a sort of factual endorsement of one thing through the histrionic but persuasive backing of the image of the other. Sarah Palin used a variety of colloquial, small-town phrases (“Joe six-pack,” “darn right,” “Main Street,”) and facial movements (winking, folksy smiling) in order to create the appeal of being the working-class mother. It was a highly contested battle for empathy. The concentration on Palin reveals that her appeal for the credulity of the masses is female-centric, mother-centric…as indicative of class, a transposition of the traditional maternal role as populist. Pure substitution. Nevertheless, we must account for this being the continuation of identity politics that began with Ronald Reagan. The ability to wholly endorse one thing (an anti-populist economic policy) through the performance of another (white, small-town mother). Reagan’s presentation was an earlier form of this; he didn’t simply endorse a class-conscious ideal, but rather, he performed as through the television monitor, utilizing its uncanny effect to heighten the properties of the Presidential image. This increased movement is accounted for in J.G. Ballard’s influential pulp essay, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”: I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie, The Killers, his last Hollywood role. In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan’s manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other.[6]

The fallacy of image preceding reality is lost in translation through television. Or, as J.G. Ballard further writes about his essay, “[the] TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth.” Is not the rift that Reagan benefited from, between “what he was saying” and “the simplistic far-right message,” the same as Palin’s usage? The latitude that Reagan benefited from, between “what he was saying” and “the simplistic far-right message,” was it not akin to the manipulation of Palin’s endorsement of the bailout’s bourgeois economic vouchsafing? Her moments of excruciating eyewinking and family anecdotes performed with staccato rehearsal appeared to compensate for the disadvantaged political inexperience she had going in to the debate. Many reviews were mixed, a likely result of the polarization of American politics, but her performance was greeted with much appreciation for her “authenticity” and “down-to-earthness.” Palin’s mollification of the hurt feelings that the masses have about the bailout bill came through her populist affiliation. However, there’s still the need to account for gender; the duality of Camilla/Rita is important here. The female gender in its most “effective” state in classical Hollywood cinema is a tool of omnipotent wielding. Montages in Mulholland Drive in the purported waking world show Camilla Rhodes as a lusted Hollywood actress. She has the attractiveness to simultaneously satisfy both men and women, much like how Gilda’s beauty is inherent to young and old. Within identity politics Sarah Palin is capable of assuming this ability to satisfy the masses with her femininity, her maternalism. Through the interwoven popular treatment of gender and class, Sarah Palin is able to remedy, or remediate, with emphatic remarks of her experience as a small-town mother. Joe Biden makes the case for the gender uniformity of “kitchen-table” politics through the self-sympathies of his personal tragedies (lost of his wife/ daughter, economic despair of his hometown); however, the polling after the debate reveals him as still being lost behind Washington parochialism.

Contemporary, post-millennial feminism has the frontage of its detachment from class; or if that is conceded, then there is a principal impression that it must have the desire to do such. However, the “feminism” propagated by Sarah Palin is a sort of false-pragmatic feminism, a statement of assuming the onus or blame of her own mystique as indicative of misogyny. In other words, by professing the intricate blend of small-town, provincial politics and maternal, strong-willed female resilience, Sarah Palin recodes feminism as class-centric, or able to be manipulated in the same way as class. Much like the amorphous, yet mechanical efficiency of late capitalism, feminism engenders continuation in its current form—or to invoke Frederick Jameson, capitalism “which has a fundamental interest in social equality to the degree to which it needs to transform as many of its subjects or its citizens into identical consumers.”[7] Disregarding the Marxist connotations, this statement discloses that feminism’s drift towards capitalist centrality is programmatic and inherent. Sarah Palin is able to appeal to our want for egalitarian principles of anti-classism and feminism by simultaneously endorsing the desires of a ruling class. Roles are skewed, inverted, and collapsed through the translation into another reality, much like Rita/Camilla Rhodes in Mulholland Drive. Reinforcing the commonality of female roles in one dimension retracts the problem of the element of ruling class masculinity—in this case, the stock-market investment personnel. However, we must emphasize that these realities are mediated through their relation to identity politics. Sarah Palin is incapable of simply suggesting that we should support the bailout plan because she says so; instead, she is telling us that we can equate our class-based and feminist concerns through her embodiment of those ideals. It doesn’t matter that Sarah Palin isn’t even equitable to these elements—her views are largely anti-feminist, actually. With the careful manipulation of signified, affiliated gestures and appearances, Palin captures these ambivalent attitudes towards the bailout plan. Therefore, feminism hides behind virtuality in this campaign; it is unable to be realized because it is simply part of the populist instrument to garner political and ideological support.

With the concurrent ability to be both agent and victim, Sarah Palin reemphasizes the Möbius strip quality of Mulholland Drive. Her ostensible lack in one respect is the very device for exerting force in another. This doubling is portalic—it is reducible only to its inverse relation in another world. In order to retrieve agency in one world, Camilla Rhodes/Rita must ensure that reality has another person to assume the inverse translation. In Mulholland Drive, this person is Camilla’s ex-lover, Diane—a pathetic, unsuccessful actress who is obsessed with Camilla. In order for Camilla to be deprived of agency, the blonde Diane must be converted to an actress rife with it and vice-versa. Accordingly, in order for Sarah Palin to be emphatically supported by one group, she must be intensely despised by another. Part of this ability for dual occurrences is inherent in the dichotomy of American politics, but it’s also, and more importantly, the result of Sarah Palin being tapped for her performative function—her ability to galvanize a particular group. The actress always needs an audience.

Works Cited

[1] Timothy Noah. “Why success is foreordained for the vice-presidential nominee’s convention speech.” Slate Magazine. 3 Sept 2008. <http://www.slate.com/ id/2199322/>.

[2] Jean Baudrillard. Simulation and Simulacra. The University of Michigan, 1994: p. 17-18.

[3] Steve Shaviro. “An Issue That Won’t Go Away.” Pinnochio Theory. 13 Sept 2008. <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=669>. [4] Richard Grusin. “Virtually Sarah Palin.” Premediation. 12 Sept 2008. <http:// premediation.blogspot.com/2008/09/virtually-sarah-palin.html>. [5] Jacques-Alain Miller. “Sarah Palin: Operation Castration.” Lacan dot com. <http:// www.lacan.com/jampalin.html>.

[6] J.G. Ballard. “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” The Atrocity Exhibition. Re/

Search Publications, 1990.

[7] Frederic Jameson. “Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film.” Signatures of the Visible.

Routledge, 1992: p. 34.

Celina Williams

It was late, and I was up past my bedtime. We’d watched the movies and played the games, but we weren’t tired so we turned to conversation. Not overheard, not eavesdropped, but spoken to me: Adult talk—things I shouldn’t hear yet? Perhaps, but my parents think, “We learned too late” and “She’s mature for her age.”

And so against all reason, they speak of all the drugs they tried, all the schemes they pulled, and all the battles they lost. E pluribus unum and why that never included them or me. Reagan and policies that pumped drugs into dark streets. Their laughter when drugs found the way to Suburbia.

They ask me about school, what I learned of MLK Jr. and Malcolm X and Black Panthers. They smile at my textbook inaccuracies. My dad admits the autobiography of Malcolm X is the only book he’s read from start to finish.

They talk about the possibility of another Jr. or X and how if he actually posed a threat… the dirt they couldn’t sling, the dirt that wouldn’t stick, would fill his grave.