Was it a coincidence that, on the podium in Tampa, the ice blue in Paul Ryan’s tie and in the abstract background projection brought out a similar tone in his eyes? If so, it was a marvelous one. For whenever the candidate — with the “confidence and clarity” he ascribed to a Romney-Ryan administration — turned and stared right into the camera, his gaze was electric, a sexy look of youth and intensity that one suspects is going to be of high value this fall.
That sense of political ignition was not in oversupply this week, in a Republican production that, for a viewer at home, was at times excruciating: the singsong, under-rehearsed speeches of so many of the professional politicians who received air time were so stilted that sounds of rain slicking the streets of New Orleans on the Weather Channel showed more rhythm. Then again, you had to wonder: Might there have been method here, too? Was the rhetorical parade managed in such a way as to make a Wisconsin congressman with killer peepers and only middling vocal skills seem by comparison like Cicero?
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Media commentators who’ve been parsing strategies and personalities for months are far better than I at revealing what was true and what was spurious in the tornado of words spinning out of the Tampa Bay Times Forum. What I tried to key on, as I sat through the hours of television coverage — mostly on the cable channel providing the purest filter, C-SPAN — was a different sort of impression, the one conveyed, by device or happenstance, by the unfolding convention pageantry. In the performance art of the convention, the machinery of stagecraft and spectacle were used to give folks in the cheap seats a decent show.
Recognizing, though, that entertainment was not priority No. 1 — and that many viewers were watching strictly through the prisms of their own peepholes on the political spectrum — I tried extra hard to distance myself from the rhetoric and concentrate on the relative theatrical value of what was transpiring. Because for some part of the wider audience, mannerism and visual appeal and style does play a role in gauging a ticket — in this case, to one of the most classically telegenic in modern campaign history.
For Republicans, the production was akin to an out-of-town tryout: A new team was being described and road-tested. (We’ll know how the Democrats look in revival mode next week in Charlotte.) And so the last night of the gathering was devoted to a lavish knighting of Romney, in film and testimonials — including a truly bizarre “surprise” appearance by actor and Oscar-winning movie director Clint Eastwood.
In a rambling monologue cheered by the delegates but rife with non sequiturs, he pretended in extemporaneous remarks to be debating an invisible President Obama, in a chair next to him. It was the week’s one truly surreal interlude, and so it was riveting — a bit like watching the famous scene in the ’80s film “Tootsie,” when Dustin Hoffman, disguised as Dorothy Michaels, delivers a long improvisatory speech on the set of a live TV soap opera. Here was Eastwood doing the same in real time. “What do you mean, shut up?” he said, talking to the empty chair. It left an odd taste, and more to the point, it upstaged the other proceedings as the night’s unchallenged water-cooler moment.
Preview of “Eveningland,” a collaborative work by D.C.-based contemporary dance company Christopher K. Morgan & Artists and New York’s Skybetter and Associates.
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