Sarah Palin. Illustration by Nick Teddy / North by Northwestern

By this point in our lives, we have consumed so much media, and, being at a university, have consumed so much media about media, that we recognize when the media is trying to manipulate us. Good intellectual training means we should be suspicious anytime you suspect sentimentality, but the problem is you can’t always pick out the phoniness in a message that’s intended for you. You’re not trained to be aware of the manipulation when it actually works on you. This is an issue not just in media but about talking about media.

Besides the sight of Sarah Palin speaking in front of a giant video screen that made it look like the stage was on top of a giant body of water, the strangest moment of the conventions came right after Michelle Obama’s speech when she and her daughters gathered onstage in front of a live video feed of Señor Obama speaking from Kansas. As he praised his wife, one of the girls kept saying “Hi, daddy. Daddy? Where’s daddy?” Obama responded in an endearingly goofy way that he was in Kansas. It was adorable and all but I know that a seven-year-old today knows more about the Internet than I do and sure as hell knows that daddy can be talking from another state.

So, Sasha’s “hello daddy” was staged saccharine. Not a big deal. We’ve all learned that politicians manipulate by appealing to sentimentality. But the emotions or experience it was trying to appeal to exist nowhere in real life—only in Lifetime movies. It wasn’t intended for us. Neither are the rhetorical tactics of film or media criticism. Still, as we enter our twenties in an age when we have no need for those outdated metaphors, we use them.

John McCain. Illustration by Nick Teddy / North by Northwestern

In popular criticism, it’s easy to give definition to a work by making a comparison. But what’s more manipulative are the negative definitions—the comparisons that define something because it’s not something else. After seeing The Dark Knight, my friend explained to me why he liked the film: “It’s not a campy comic book movie, like the old Batman.” Excuse me, but when in the past decade have we actually expected a “campy comic book” movie? Every single adaptation during this superhero craze—The Hulk, X-Men, even Iron Man (he’s an arms dealer—wow, edge)—has aimed to be taken seriously. Since the days of the supposed “dumb Blockbuster” in the 1980s and 1990s, Time Warner and other conglomerates realized that their cultural dominance could only continue if they convinced us that their products had legitimate importance. The dubious depth of Batman enabled us to like movies branded by Warner Bros. without feeling guilty. The old Adam West Batmans are a myth; they never had an emotional impact on us because we were always told that they’re campy.

So, while we may already recognize that some media messages are outdated, we need to create our own rhetoric to discuss and write about media. Sasha’s “daddy!” is a bloodless example, but what happens when the Obama campaign’s manipulation through pop-culture references actually works?
The night of his acceptance speech, Obama emerged on stage to U2’s “City of Blinding Lights.” I normally can’t stand U2 but I was moved by it. Maybe it was the moment, but more likely it had to do with my memories of The Devil Wears Prada. The song is in a small insert scene with Anne Hathaway looking out the shiny windows of a limousine, foregrounded by Meryl Streep, and I could feel possibility, hope and all my guilty desires for fabulousness and the fulfillment through luxury goods. This translated to the image of Obama coming on stage—a chance for hope. It helps that the media construction of Obama might replace Prada as the luxury good of the year.

Barack Obama. Illustration by Nick Teddy / North by Northwestern

I’m fine being manipulated, but I want to stay aware of it. Trouble is, as people our age start becoming the chief creators of pop culture, it’s going to be harder to distance ourselves. We’re old enough to have sentimental attachments to figures who have aged and changed in front of our eyes to the point where they might as well be people we know personally. “Baby One More Time” was released almost 10 years ago, and this year at the MTV Video Music Awards, Britney “made her comeback,” winning multiple awards after last year’s performance breakdown. It became even clearer that Britney’s path from up to down to fragile isn’t so much about her, but rather our need to create a mythic narrative.

But again, Britney isn’t a very personal example. What’s interesting is that media can incorporate the iconography of any B-list celebrity, anyone you have some kind of sentimental attachment to. This fall, Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has a role on FOX’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles as an evil CEO. It was weird to see my gay icon on TV “acting.” But then again, she’s in a cheesy blue corporate suit with a weird popped collar, looking at a crowd below her window, which is so obviously a grip holding a silver reflecting board to the camera. Her delivery is so stilted, and the situation so badly written.

Maybe Manson wasn’t cast on her own merits as an actress, but her character’s goth black eyeliner draws on her Garbage persona that is largely forgotten. Or maybe this redhead almost-has-been was cast because Tilda Swinton was too expensive. So the scene does have some pathos—time has passed and career fortunes have shifted for my icon—but in the end, it’s just a low-rent knock-off of something else.