#15 - JRL 7300
Moscow Paper Slates Parties' 'Boring' Television Election Advertisements
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
19 August 2003
Article by Anton Savchenko under "Elections" rubric:
"From
Hamster to Stanislavskiy. Parties Open Up Television"
Even if you have spent the past three years in a lethargic sleep, the number of political advertisements which have appeared, in which people with burning eyes show concern for our long-suffering country, will make it clear that we will soon be participating once again in the political spectacle entitled "The Elections." To judge from the prologue -- the television advertisements -- the dramaturgy is boring, and the finale entirely postmodernist, albeit preprogrammed.
By 2004 there will not be a single hamster with sharp teeth left in the country, every hairdresser will have a good husband, dwarf bureaucrats will stop using people of normal build as a chair, and sanitary engineers will come without waiting for you to call them out. To judge from the television advertisements, this is the range of benefits that threatens to enter the lives of the electorate after the Duma elections. It smacks somewhat of a madhouse, but the advertisements maintain that this is what a strong Russia must look like.
At least, this is how the main heroes of the "play" -- the parties with more or less established ratings -- and the "extras," who seek to emulate the "soloists," all imagine Russia: According to the director's concept, the less intelligible it is, the better.
The Russian Party of Life is in the lead here. The huge strawberry appearing out of the darkness of the screen is clearly meant to symbolize something -- either the sweet life, or concern for agriculture, or the color of the electorate. But, to judge from the action in defense of an animal with the half-decent name of "desman" and the ratings data, only a desman with a strawberry in its paws will go and vote for the Party of Life. However, the mysterious symbol does have another meaning. Since the Party of Life is the most alcoholically minded party (let's drink to love, let's drink to science, let's drink to life, and it only remained to quote Sharikov (character in Bulgakov's novel "Heart of a Dog"): "I want everything"), the strawberry is just an appetizer -- admittedly, one with a petit bourgeois taint.
The agrarians ask themselves just one question in a simple, peasant manner: "Who is against?" Although it would be more logical to inquire: Who, in fact, is "for"? The advertising of the Party for the Rebirth of Russia also contains a hint of strong-arm methods: To make (how?) the state (precisely whom do they have in mind?) ensure a worthy life (what is that?) for pensioners, for example.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Yabloko have not yet submitted their psychological studies: Actors do not expend energy (or money) in the summer season, which from the viewpoint of the effectiveness of advertising is a dead season.
The diversity of the advertisements is only an illusion. Despite all their outward differences, they are united by their lack of any formulated idea whatever (not counting the parties' names) and of any addressee who must be imbued with this idea.
To judge from the advertisements, the majority of the electorate takes not the slightest interest in politics. People are engaged on their own thing and have ordinary human wishes. Whether or not Citizeness N. will drink "to love" is in no way dependent on who wins the elections. How victory in the elections for a certain "political force" will help a tired Russian woman is a mystery. It seems that the parties, while airing such advertisements on television, simply do not realize how "terribly far removed from the people they are." But they also have a strange idea of the people, to put it mildly. The Chekhovian principle for constructing a play -- "people have dinner and say silly things" -- is fine for a full-fledged three-hour play. But when a 60-second advertisement is constructed on this, the concentration of that very silliness works against the heroes of the advertisements. A hairdresser carelessly cutting the hair of a client cringing in a chair, a hauntingly striking blonde who wants one thing -- that there not be war -- and, by way of a resume, a staggeringly politically literate phrase from the lips of a well-known actor: "We already have the country, and it only remains to make it strong and beautiful." This is not the most flattering portrait of the electorate.
But the parties are unable to offer anything of their own even to such an unimaginative and unassuming voter. Against the general background even the most intelligent advertising, constructed on an attempt to resolve more or less real state problems, inevitably drifts down to a pseudo-everyday level. Reform of housing and municipal services turns into a happy fitter who materializes at the first sound of a whistle.
This demonstration of the parties' burning desire to "enter every home" and make everyone happy, from Fido to the head of the family, is a show that has been done to death. It is called "Timur and His Team" (title of children's story by Soviet writer Arkadiy Gaydar).
Stanislavskiy would not have believed it.
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