Steven Krause links to the video for Neil Young's song "Let's Impeach the President" and touts the clip's smart deconstruction of the cable news genre. Certainly the video also relies on culture jamming--a la Andy Warhol and Adbusters Magazine--the co-opting of icons from mass media to create an ironic piece of subversive art (spray-painting the words "eating meat" on a stop sign).
The other night I saw the faux documentary "Death of a President," in some ways a similar artistic artifact. Director Gabriel Range pieces together a "documentary" that looks at the 2007 assassination of George W. Bush. The audacious concept of the film overshadows the aesthetics, the affect, and the pathos, and the interesting-but-flat film chugs along on its one note. Still, the second and final act follows the investigation and that act's plot presents some surprises that I didn't see coming. Like Young's video, DoaP mashes up fiction and non-fiction, jamming icons. We see the real Bush delivering a real speech in Chicago. We see the real "President" Cheney (shudder) giving a real the eulogy--actually a clip of Ronald Reagan's funeral, according to all the reviews I've seen.
South Park offers an absurd and low-fi version of this brand of mash-up. So do Robert Smigel's "Saturday TV Funhouse" segments of Saturday Night Live, which use real audio soundbites dubbed over cartoon versions of politicians. Jimmy Kimmel's uproarious "Unnecessary Censorship" clips (Bush is a frequent target of the segments), where Kimmel pixelates celebs and politicians and beeps out their audio, make it seem like the famous are naked in public and/or saying wildly obscene things.
Culture jamming is thriving on the web, on television, in the world of music and film. George W. Bush may go down in history as one of the key figures in the mash-up revolution.
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