He Carried Yellow Flowers- Prologue

Perhaps the most wonderful critique of American campaign advertisements lies in the latest Herman Cain video, and this one has a title. 

     ‘He Carried Yellow Flowers’ is a scary masterpiece of performance art. It is either the most terrifying thing that could happen to America, or a great mirror at what we consider “American.” The video begins as a riff of old-style Westerns, sticking with a country American theme. Shots of a man riding horseback is super imposed with title captions beginning with “There was a time in America” and ending with “where a man on a horse was a man on a horse.” This statement, a reflective conjunction of the two previous captions, is performative by nature, because it is remarking upon itself. As is leading up to the action so slowly. The rider is actor Nick Searcy (famous for Cast Away, where the supporting role was a volleyball named Wilson). Searcy is well known enough to have clout in the business, but not immediately recognizable to a majority of the public (unless someone went ‘Look, it’s the guy from Cast Away! That volleyball movie!’). This is a tactic to maintain a level of seriousness before revealing the big surprise. After a comment against “card carrying liberals”, Searcy throws a staged punch, and the scene stops, and it is a movie set, not reality in which this video is based. Basically, the entire video is revealed as fake, a fiction, a scene of a movie, something that is carefully planned out, written, and performed.

     The next part is back to a standard campaign support advertisement, where a celebrity (most likely an actor) does a direct address to the camera in support of the candidate in question. Nick Searcy has to get to the chair first, and the walk to the chair says more about the implications of the ad than he does. After being handed a margarita (smoking and now drinking?) and threatening someone’s job security by forgetting the straw (employment issue, anyone?), and shutting down a compliment from a makeup artist with “Like you know anything” (women’s workplace issues), a female crew member is heard off camera telling Searcy “they’re gonna love you in Guam.” Guam is an official United States occupied territory in the Micronesian Islands, whose official motto is “Where America’s Day Begins” and whose second largest source of income is the American military. As a US territory, Guam does not get a vote in the electoral college, and cannot decide the US presidency. To imply that an actor that is the center of the ad is going to do better in a territory than in the States implies the overall reach of success the campaign has. Also very interesting that the interactions are all with women, and he takes the overly dominant role, being outright rude.

     His address is as “an international film star” (again, name one film with Nick Searcy off the top of your head). His speech talks about being “real” and being “real tough” is not “reading lines that somebody else wrote for me” which is exactly what he is doing. And while he makes some digs at Obama as a community organizer, which is so 2008, the more interesting action is what happens behind him. His stunt double has taken over the fight scene, and in the fight scene, his character is getting beaten up. And it is all happening within frame behind his head. The use of a double being beaten up severely weakens the argument in the foreground, especially when a jump cut takes you to a completely different part of the fight where he is magically on his feet again, throwing a punch, before being thrown against a post.