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Are you hot or cool?
More important yet, are the main party leaders hot or cool?
Jan. 1, 2006. The Toronto Star
PHILIP MARCHAND
Politicians no longer govern, somebody has observed, they
perform.
The election-year ritual of television "debates"
underlines this truth. Debates are about manner, not matter.
As Star columnist Chantal Hebert pointed on Dec. 14, Stephen
Harper was confident he won the English-speaking debate in
the last election because he "scored the most debating
points."
In fact, he lost the debate because he was perceived as too
"aggressive." As Hebert wrote, "For every point
Harper scored against Martin, voter anguish about the potential
installation of a right-wing government went up a notch."
Harper, in other words, was too "hot" for the "cool"
medium of television. At least, that's how the old master,
Marshall McLuhan, who invented this business of "hot"
media versus "cool" media, might have put it.
McLuhan was fond of pointing out that the high-definition
Adolf Hitler was a master of radio, a hot, high-definition
medium, but he would have been destroyed politically by television
- in much the same manner that hot radio talk show hosts such
as Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger fared very poorly
when their shows were televised.
Dr. Laura aside, are McLuhan's observations still valid?
In McLuhan's heyday, Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, and
Trudeau might have been invented to illustrate McLuhan's ideas
about cool. As a personality, Trudeau was elusive, hard to
define, blurred in his psychic contours. He was therefore
a natural for a low-resolution medium - the television screen
and its relatively blurry television pictures.
"TV is a medium that rejects the sharp personality,"
McLuhan wrote. "When the person looks classifiable, as
(Richard) Nixon did, the TV viewer has nothing to fill in."
But then Brian Mulroney came on the scene, a hot personality
if ever there was one. Addicted to over-statement, an in-your-face
personality, he was an eminently "classifiable"
character. It might be argued that his opponent, John Turner,
was equally hot, and therefore a similarly unappealing presence
on television.
Still, it makes you wonder about this business of television
and its supposed preference for the low-key, blurry character.
Two interesting books about McLuhan published this year -
Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications) by Janine
Marchessault, York University professor of film and video,
and The Legacy Of McLuhan (Hampton Press), an anthology of
scholarly articles on McLuhan edited by two Fordham University
professors of communication and media studies, Lance Strate
and Edward Wachtel - address this question.
Referring to McLuhan's "hot" and "cool,"
Marchessault writes, "As concepts they remain among his
least developed and confusing."
Changes in television technology since the 1950s and '60s
make such concepts even more slippery. "What is surprising,
however, is the extent to which his description of early television
continues to provide useful descriptive categories,"
Marchessault observes.
In an article in The Legacy Of McLuhan, another Fordham professor
of communications and media studies, Paul Levinson, admits
that "hot and cool as a tool of analysis has its limits
when applied to politics."
He also points out that television has been getting more
high-definition and therefore less cool as a medium. (Even
in McLuhan's day, his critics joked that he must have owned
a bad television set.)
Nevertheless, Levinson, too, maintains that McLuhan's distinction
between hot and cool is still a "useful" tool.
We just need to apply this tool with a little more finesse.
Harper and Paul Martin and Jack Layton, for example, not only
have to cool down, but to know when to heat up.
"What each of these guys has to do is to portray themselves
as both hot and cool as the situation demands," comments
Liss Jeffrey, director of the McLuhan Global Research Network
at the University of Toronto and a former television producer
with CityTV.
Whatever might have been the case in the early days of television,
nowadays the medium likes assertive personalities (hot) who
are also relaxed (cool). The trick, as Jeffrey points out,
is to know when to emphasize one or the other.
When Mulroney famously pounded John Turner in the 1984 television
debate about Liberal patronage - "You had a choice, sir.
You could have said no" - it was the cue for Turner to
become equally assertive, equally hot, countering righteous
indignation with righteous indignation. That he didn't simply
left viewers with the impression he was a wimp.
Adolph Hitler would have been destroyed by television but
was a master of radio, a hot, high-definition medium
Yet, Jeffrey suggests, our political leaders, who all remember
this incident, have taken the example too much to heart. "They
all absorbed the message - and what in the last debate did
they do as a result?" he says. "They pumped up the
volume."
Bad mistake. All four of the political leaders find it easy
to heat up, but all four of them desperately need to do the
opposite, to cool down.
They all need to remember McLuhan, in short.
Paul Martin "His image works best when he is cooling
things off, being avuncular, fatherly," comments novelist,
critic and student of McLuhan, B. W. Powe. "When he tries
to rev himself, he becomes shrill and unconvincing."
Liss Jeffrey points out that Martin does not need to be afraid
of the sobriquet "Mr. Dithers." The insult may sting
in the House of Commons, but voters are not turned off by
it.
"The whole `Mr. Dithers' thing is partly a negative
judgment on what it means to be a cool politician in our day,"
Jeffrey comments. "When people called him that, it just
meant that he was cool and he didn't have sharp edges."
What's wrong with a Mr. Dithers who ponders things and occasionally
changes his mind?
Stephen Harper "In that wide face, he looks often like
an angry child, glaring uncomprehendingly at the cameras,"
comments Powe. "He is in fact quite intelligent, but
the image he presents is of someone uncomfortable in his own
skin."
This quality makes it very difficult for him to lower the
temperature in his television performances. A successful witticism
during the debate would do wonders for him, but wit is a gift
from the gods and requires a bit of a nerve in a setting like
a television debate. His advisors' attempts to get him to
calm down and smile and stop glaring are helpful to a point,
but these cooling devices are also difficult to summon on
command.
Perhaps McLuhan's advice to Nixon to cool down his image
by growing a beard applies also to Harper. It might do wonders
to soften that face of "an angry child."
As a last resort, he might try to demonstrate a little sensitivity
and multi-dimensionality by talking about his love of the
short stories of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Nobody would
believe him, but "Mr. Scary" might begin to fade
away at the very sound of these names from his lips.
Jack Layton He has often been compared, in manner, to a television
game show host. Powe compares him in appearance to "a
smart gambler who knows the moves."
Either way, he must never try to become hot, as in the last
election debate, when he was the worst offender in pumping
up the volume. His best hope of achieving cool is, according
to Powe, to go "poker-faced, deadpan."
That's a very hard demeanour for someone like Layton - who
is used to good old barn-burning City Hall rhetoric - to maintain,
but it may be his best hope.
Gilles Duceppe He is a special case since, as Powe observes,
he plays differently in French than in English. "Watch
how at ease and how light and witty he is in French,"
Powe comments.
"In English he appears often awkward and bit desperate,
sometimes covering that panicky look with slickness and speed."
In the English debates, Duceppe should always take a deep
breath before speaking and remember that nobody minds fractured
English if you say it with a shrug and a charming Québécois
accent. After all, how much worse can you get than Jean Chrétien,
who was barely articulate in any language? Yet Chrétien in
his own thuggish way was quite a cool dude.
The Results So Far In the pre-Christmas debates, Harper and
Layton were still too hot for their own good, relentlessly
pounding away at Martin.
The latter took Liss Jeffrey's advice to heart and at least
used his tendency to go hot to advantage, when he talked with
some passion about raising his children in Quebec and how
that province was part of his heritage, too.
Duceppe was neither hot nor cool. In the English-speaking
debate, he seemed simply to be lukewarm, which is understandable:
He really had no business being in the debate at all, and
he knew it.
Hence no cool, Chrétien-style charm offensive for the square-heads
in English Canada from Gilles Duceppe.
Victor At This Point Paul Martin, but the upcoming debates
(Jan. 9 and 10 in Gatineau) will tell the rest of the story.
--30-
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