Unauthorized Fictions: Political Conflict as Spectacle and the Question of Trust in the Age of Trump
About the book chapter:
Why do supporters of former US president Donald Trump make short tribute videos which resemble mainstream action film trailers with their idol as the protagonist? And why does the Trump campaign use a similar trailer template for video of rallies and campaign spots? This contribution traces the increasing use of cinematic storytelling templates in the digital media environment, particularly for Trump’s right-wing authoritarian politics. We focus on tribute and campaign videos which appeal to the viewer’s tacit knowledge of the trailer format to make political conflicts legible as dramatic confrontations. We argue that their stylization of political conflict as spectacle should be understood as an example of “ocular democracy” (Green 2011), in which the gaze, rather than the voice, is the source of popular empowerment. To the extent that these films signal a threat to liberal democracy, it lies not in the narrativization of conflict in cinematic terms, but in the propagation of generalized distrust in combination with particularized trust in the figure of the demagogue.
About the book chapter:
This publication introduces the concept of tacit cinematic knowledge to designate a broad variety of epistemic environments in which knowledge is configured in and through cinematic practices, and in the interaction with moving images – from political campaigns to medical care, corporate communications and the study of animal behavior.
