The Hillary 1984 video has been called an emotionally powerful ad, a generational protest, and a breakdown in centralized control over political campaigns. Perhaps it is these things.
Still, I wonder if Hillary 1984 isn't also an assasination video and whether there are going to be a lot more of these to follow once presidential campaigns really heat up.
Certainly, there is an enormous violence toward Hillary Clinton in Hillary 1984. The surface idea is that the woman throwing the hammer into Hillary's face is supposed to be distinguishing herself from the inert masses and the lurking storm troopers. The woman is supposed to be declaring her freedom by breaking the spell of Hillary's magnified face and voice. The hammer toss into Hillary's face doesn't break the rhythm of the video sound-track and doesn't serve as a counter-point to the either the pictures of the shuffling masses and the storm troopers. To the contrary, the sequence of images builds the emotional violence of the marching masses, storm troopers, and woman with hammer in relation to the sound of Hillary's voice. The hammer toss into Hillary's video face is a crescendo of the oppressive violence rather than a break away.
The crux of the question here is whether the video ultimately intended to smash Hillary Clinton's video face or her actual face. That's a complex question but the beginning of an answer lies in fact that Hillary Clinton's face looms largest for the people who hate her. Democratic elites outside her own circles aren't positive about a Hillary candidacy. The mainstream media isn't excited about Hillary and the left-wing blogosphere is negative if not hostile. Hillary does not have the kind of institutional support that would make her larger than life in the manner of the video image being attacked. In fact, where Hillary Clinton looms largest is in the minds of all the people who view her as an outsized Medusa or witch figure. It's Hillary-hatred that creates the outsized Hillary image on the screen and Hillary-hatred that's attacking the image it created itself.
The problem is that it might be impossible to separate Hillary Clinton's actual face from her enhanced video representation. Because Hillary Clinton is the Britney Spears of politics in the sense that the media has vetted every detail of her personal life, it's even more difficult to separate the woman from the image-making apparatus (including her own image makers) than it is for most presidential candidates. In the case of Britney Spears, it appears that destroying herself as an actual person is the only way that she can be released from the grip of the media apparatus. With Hillary Clinton, one has to wonder if Hillary-hatred won't consider itself to be free of Hillary Clinton's image until it destroys the actual person.
That's the "politics of personal destruction" represented by Hillary 1984.
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The Hillary 1984 video is about liberation from the "machine", the establishment machine that wants Americans silently and slave-like to accept the idea of sixteen years of a husband and wife in the White House, like the Marcoses in the Philippines. Hillary's one-way "conversation" is a good choice of speech for her in the video - it was never going to be two-way, and the video is perceptive on that.
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