subliminal messages - GOP pres. cand. Pawlenty's amazing "Courage to Stand"

Run time: 01:26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkNEq1XioE   Posted on YouTube: January 24, 2011 By YouTube Member: GovernorTimPawlenty Views on YouTube: 314   Posted on DU: January 25, 2011 By DU Member: rivertext Views on DU: 622

 
Talking Point Memo's comparison of this ad to a trailer for the disaster movie Armageddon...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq6q2BrTino&feature


has generated a great deal of talk about how much the two are alike:


http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/tim-pawlenty-releases-action-movie-campaign-trailer-video.php?ref=fpa


Lost in the reaction to the over-all disaster movie style there is also a close discussion of the film's use of subliminal imagery.


The thread I was most interested in began with ggersten:

"Take a look at the word on the vehicle behind the guy's face at 0:58. Heh heh."


My take on this went like this:

Is it possible that this subliminal message is an accident?

There is nothing special about that B-ROLL clip with the word "DISMAL" in huge red letters on an ambulance in the background behind a white worker in a hard-hat. I suspect that it would have been chosen BECAUSE the word "DISMAL" was there. This image occurs while Pawlenty, says "We are the American people..." and the film at this point shows several different images of only white men. ??!?

For those of you who haven't edited this kind of film, the term "B-roll" here refers to footage not of Pawlenty speaking that is used to illustrate his speech. This footage is always carefully and deliberately chosen -- because it has nothing directly to do with the subject there is an almost limitless amount of possibilities to choose from.

Famously, liquor ads that showed close-ups of whiskey 'on the rocks' are alleged to have once commonly featured pictures of screaming women air brushed into the ice that were supposed to trigger alcoholics to buy more alcohol. There is a general disaster-movie tone of fear in the film.

** Is this subliminal message supposed to trigger fear in white workers or something? **

How many think that showing the word "DISMAL" on an ambulance in the background of that shot is only an accident?

------------

Others have questioned:

:: the use of the "zombie audience" that seems to recall something out of the famous 1984 Apple commercial. (and Pawlenty is speaking here, so, although I think this is a valid observation its purpose, if any, completely mystifies me.)

:: whether or not the opening shot of the clouds recalls the beginning the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (I think, this would just have to be an unintentional result of the same hubris that into the making of that film)

Anyone else find anything particularly interesting about this action movie political candidate introduction?

Do you think political video is masterful manipulation aimed at the insecurities of the white working men Pawlenty wants to reach or raw incompetence?

So he's selling fear now.

As someone who lived in his state during his governorship - and seen our schools, roads, economy, safety net, etc. go to shit while he left the state with a $6.2 BILLION deficit - I am not worried. Pawlenty is ruthless. Pawlenty is a liar. Pawlenty will through people under the bus. However, he is an amateur at all of that within his own party. They will kill him in the primaries as a deficit spender.

And they will be right. And then they will chew the gristle off his bones and move on to the next.

Reminds me of the classic actor joke "Sir you're outstanding in your field. But it's a corn field!" Damn is he ever standing in it. That is the corniest piece of political self-promotion I've seen since McCain's "build the dang fence!"

:rofl:

well, no one else wants to talk about this films "specialness" I can't seem to get over it.

There is one scene early in this hymn to white men at 0:23 where a determined looking white man with the beginnings of a beard is looking out an office building as if he is a man of vision and the camera holds on him holding still for a couple of seconds. Later in the film there are other pictures of determined white men, if more threatened blue collar white men, and there is maybe once a young white girl -- camera holds still on all of them. But not on Pawlenty. Is it that he can't hold our attention, can't look us in the eye, that the camera seems to always slip and slide over him, look at him askew -- have him moving out of the frame.

Why didn't they hire an actor to play him right?

I get the feeling that the trailer is ashamed of its lead.

And I didn't see any Latinos or Asians or Indians etc.
They might be there but I didn't see them.

Yes, there are two black & white clips of American heros, icons, who are black. Clay (before he became a muslim and changed his name) and King -- then its all white, and mostly all white men. Blue Collar white men -- the so-called Reagan Democrats that the Republican media machine has been trying to brainwash into believing that Obama hates.