Annotated 36-25
Nobody recognized the inspiration for Pardo’s speech in panel 3, which is shown above. I tagged in to write Pardo’s lines, and was maybe being a little unfair to 2006 Clooney by using (some of) his words… I get the point he’s making in that acceptance speech, and it’s true you can’t always follow the crowd. But there is a certain… infuriating self-satisfaction to Clooney’s sentiment, too, especially since the last fifteen years of history has shown how sorely influential liberals underestimated certain political cults.
What an art this art is. We slip into less extreme trapezoids, partly to accommodate the transition back to the capital and partly to centralize panel 2, with its Dutch angle and its tilty inserts for our four 8-O faces.
Syr’Nj in panel 3 has no rational basis to be more worried now than she was twenty years ago. But she has a bad feeling. Flo’s comment here:
This is honestly what’s been keeping me stuck for such a long time. How do we get Syr’Nj into the action quickly without making it Deus Ex Machina?
Eventually I reasoned that Syr’Nj is a natural worrier, and she knows how dangerous their situation is and there is just a point where she can’t sit by and not help fight herself, politics be damned.
She’s a woman of action, and always will be.
Well I had a big chuckle just now, reading Pardo’s speech before noticing that video, because it sounds so hilariously idiotic, and yet so typical of certain politicians, you know?
Meanwhile, maybe it’s just the shadows across her eyes, or maybe I’m just projecting because it’s after midnight, but Syr’nj looks like she’s trying not to fall asleep here.
I see it to, those are they eyes of someone holding their eyes open because otherwise there is nothing stopping them from going to sleep
I will agree with your own sentiment in the annotations, it doesn’t quite seem fair to Clooney to have his words used like that.
If I understand the speeches correctly, Pardo seems to talk about how somewhat ignoring the things “common folks” point out as problems makes them better leaders, while Clooney talks about Hollywood actually putting the spotlight on certain issues, even if people say that the world isn’t ready yet.
We can argue whether that is actually the case, but the message seems very far apart from Pardos (again, unless I’m misinterpreting something).
Clooney’s argument strikes me as somewhat in bad faith. The complaint that Hollywood people are “out of touch” is not, generally speaking, a complaint that they’re not racist and sexist and otherwise prejudiced enough: it’s a complaint that they’re distanced and apt to misunderstand most of the America that their movies (and TV) claim to represent. It’s true that others have equated “in touch with real America” and “white supremacist,” but that doesn’t make it any more right for him to do it. The problem with being out of touch, proudly or otherwise, is you start saying things like “Hillary’s got this in the bag” or “Byron’s humiliated the Cultists again and again, and he’s no doubt doing it yet again, no need to worry.” And then reality shows up and bites you in the eyes.
Pardo is also a little bit of a better match for Clooney here than the other Heads would be: his own sensibilities, as we’ll see later, are fairly idealistic and left-leaning.
As I said, I’m a bit conflicted… I do feel like Clooney’s got a respectable point buried there that maybe a good speechwriter could’ve saved… but that’s why I looked there for inspiration.
Well, not being an American myself I might misunderstand something here. I just got a VERY different message from Clooney’s speech compared to Pardo’s.
As I understand his speech, he’s interpreting the accusation of being “out of touch” as “the stuff you talk about is not the stuff I want you to talk about”. I’d say that is often true for Hollywood movies, and in the sense that he frames it — addressing social issues and uncomfortable topics that some rather not think about too much — also a good thing. And having watched the movie he got that Oscar for, I would say that perspective is very much justified in that situation. Syriana does not have a clear line between good guys and villains, and with a happy ending where the good guys win and the villains lose, just because focus groups said that that’s what they prefer. There must have been immense pressure to conform to those expectations, and Clooney did well not to give in.
Taking the wider view, I don’t think his perspective applies too often. I find nothing good in the way in which any Michael Bay movie is out of touch with real life, and that layer of …Hollywoodisation?… that Hollywood applies to everything it touches is just … like, even when they try to be dirty and grimy and all, they can’t stop putting that Hollywood polish on until everything shines. It’s just what they do. Which isn’t to say it was all bad, but also with the genuinely good pieces, their aim is almost always off a little, and it would be nice of if someone in Hollywood acknowledged that and tried to counteract it.
Also: Clooney is not a political leader (elected or otherwise). If he was, that speech would take on an entirely different meaning, as it does here in the comic.
Agreed. Your concern, T, seems to be more with which issues leaders choose to prioritize, and not as much about how aligned those priorities are with the hoi polloi. I think both you and Clooney are right; sometimes you absolutely need to be in touch, and sometimes you have to press the unpopular case no matter the blowback. Being right; that’s the rub.
I have occasionally been confused by some of the “jumps” in this story, where we leave some thread alone to focus on something else for a month or more, then come back … this cut is much smaller, but it is, to my memory, the most effective one. What an amazing contrast.