"Look, and I will show you something you will want to see": pictorial engagement in negative political campaign commercials.

• Author: Barbatsis, Gretchen S.
• Position: Special Issue: Visual Argument-Part 2

When Eisenhower's Presidential campaign introduced television spots to the political discourse, critics pointed to the unthinkable: treating a political candidate as a product. But the advertising agency responsible for creating these commercials found the idea very thinkable. They unabashadly intended to create commercials as effectively for a political product as they did for soap and toothpaste (Wood, 1982). However distasteful the idea might have been to critics, the advertisers got it right. Today it is not political commercials but, rather, a political campaign without them that is unthinkable.

Television spots in political discourse continue to raise compelling questions, not the least of which is negative campaign advertising. As early as Johnson's Presidential campaign, advertisers complemented traditional bolstering and comparative advertising strategies with the negative attack ad (Kaid & Johnson, 1991). Its purpose, which viewers consistently find distasteful (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995; Garramone, 1984; Merritt, 1984; Stewart, 1975), is to degrade the image of a rival candidate. Interestingly, this is not a preferred strategy for the likes of soap and toothpaste commercials because of its potential backlash effect, though once again, advertisers got it right. Negative campaign ads have increased with each new campaign season.

Why they got it right, both in introducing the televisual spot to political discourse, and in shaping that discourse with the negative attack ad, is another question. Clearly these forms of political discourse work because they engage viewers, but identifying how they do that has been anything but a straightforward task. Political wisdom holds to the image as critical in that engagement, which Kathleen Hall Jamieson's work addresses in its extensive analysis of negative political advertising. Jamieson (1992) describes a complex and interactive engagement where "what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not always what is heard" in which she emphasizes the role of visualization tactics. (pp. 9, 43-101).

In this essay I both focus on the pictorial component of a televisual text and propose that the engagement offered in a political commercial can be understood as we understand a viewer's sensemaking of any televisual text. I do so by examining a series of three negative campaign ads created for the 1988 Bush Presidential campaign, The Harbor, Revolving Door, and A Tank Ride. My examination of their pictorial structures proceeds with two propositions in mind: first, that the pictorial structure of a multimediated expression, whether print, film or televisual, can and should be addressed independently and in its own terms;(1) second, that realization of symbolic structures in pictorial terms need not be a matter of shifting their definitions to fit a particular symbolic mode (Barbatsis, 1993).(2) Accordingly, while I address the pictorial structure of a televisual expression independently and in its own terms, I do so with reference to a conception of textual structure that extends to equivalent constructions in verbal and musical modes, as well as to the multimodal televisual structure in which they all participate.(3)

Using work in reader-response theory, and particularly that of Wolfgang Iser (1978), I approach the visual component of these three commercials as pictorially constructed textual structures. I then describe these pictorial texts in terms of two pervasive features of televisual expressions, their narrative structure and their rhetorical mode of direct address.(4) I use the term pictorial narrative to mean the expression of a narrative structure in pictorial terms, and I use the term pictorial direct address to mean the expression of a direct address structure in pictorial terms.

Accordingly, I argue that these visual texts use pictorial direct address to simulate a camera-to-event encounter which engages the viewer as a participant in constructing the world of the text. Further, by constructing these photographic encounters with double-exposure, infrared, and freeze-frame techniques, viewers are offered enhanced vision which frames the experience as one of "seeing through." Thematically, each of the three attack ads asserts an unveiling of a "real" truth about the opposition candidate. Thus, as the camera substitutes for a viewer's eyes, and the viewer engages in a constructed visual encounter of seeing through, the themes of the three commercials are argued by the experience they structure.

VISUALIZATIONS AS PICTORIAL TEXTS

Reader-response theorists take meaning as the object of critical investigation, and place processes of meaning (and pleasure) production, which occur as acts of reading, at the center of interpretive inquiry. Iser describes this process as one of filling contingent "gaps," because both reader and text bring experiences to the relationship that the other cannot know. Not unlike the process initiated by an enthymeme, a text is understood as a schema which guides its process of meaning production by its structure of "given" and "not given" information. As Iser states:

What is missing from . . . apparently trivial scenes, the gaps arising out of the dialogue-this is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. . . . [The reader] is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said. What/s said only appears to take on significance as a reference to what is not said; it is the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to the meaning (1978, p. 168).

Because Iser is working with a text constructed linguistically, he describes the "given" information part of its structure in terms of statements made with words. In the schema of a pictorial text, the equivalent "given information" part is formed with images. Visual statements in the schema of a pictorial text occur in the form of shots and, as with their verbal counterparts, are characterized by both their content and compositional (syntax) qualities. Iser further identifies the "not said" spaces in a textual schema as vacancies or gaps. In the schema of the pictorial text such vacancies or gaps occur in the spaces between the shots.(5) Accordingly, The Harbor, Revolving Door, and A Tank Ride are each described as a structure of visual statements marked by spaces between the statements. Each visual statement is identified as an image (or shot) which is described in terms of its content and its compositional form.

THE HARBOR [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] begins as a title "The Harbor "fades onto a black screen. The black is replaced by an image of the skyline around a harbor as seen from the water in a moving boat; this first image at high tide and with a recreational feel, is replaced by an inactive image of a weather beaten pier at low tide, and then a series of dark and dirty images of sewer pipes, an open culvert, and contaminated, polluted water. Toxic, bubbling foam then fills the screen, forming a skull shape, and floating over a submerged sign with the words "danger, radiation hazard, no swimming. " A final foamy skull is replaced by images of dark, oily, stagnant water, heavily moving in place and then a shore line with water lapping on a garbage can lid, beer cans, and dead fish.

REVOLVING DOOR [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] renders its surrealistic world of...