Sunday, June 11, 2006

The cognitive style of Al Gore

I have been to the Fox Tower, and I have seen "An Inconvenient Truth."

I attended the 8pm showing Friday night. The 7pm showing sold out early, thanks to the Progressive Happy Hour/Blue Oregon people (as we were filing in for the next show, the ushers were still sweeping up the prawn shells and champagne corks). Our showing had only a few open seats sprinkled here and there.

I'm not an avid student of the subject of global warming; I'm an occasional browser at best, my exposure driven mostly by my contrarian reading habits in general. So I didn't have the feeling that I learned much that was news to me; certain bits of numeric data came as a surprise, but there were very few graphs whose trendlines (basically creeping along near the X-axis for about ten millennia, then shooting dramatically upward starting in the late 20th century) weren't utterly famliar.

A film about a PowerPoint show sounds like a steamy expose of paint drying, doesn't it? But I'll say this: It's a well-designed and executed PowerPoint show, and the film is directed and edited to play to its strengths. I've seen a lot of corporate slide shows, and they can be not only aesthetically excruciating but intellectually stultifying. This one's designed with a clear understanding of the limits of a PP show, the kinds of intellectual connections it can and can't illustrate between data bits and discursive ideas. It's been designed--and production values of the film unquestionably help--to create a sense of theater, a degree of interaction between slides and presenter, that keeps you engaged and your attention focused. The occasional bits of voice-over and biographical scenes almost become a distraction, as odd as that sounds.

As I listened to the sympathetic murmuring around me during the film, and as I looked at the audience when the movie ended, I knew that, if ever there was a choir that had stood in line to pay $9 to be preached at, this was it. I remember a lot evidence, both anecdotal and somewhat firmer, indicating that Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" created a surprising number of conversion experiences--people coming in prepared to detest the movie and disagree with its argument, but leaving with their certainties shaken if not overturned. I don't yet have that sense that "Inconvenient" is going to work any such miracle. It might; I'm just saying I don't see the signs yet.

But I don't think that's really the point. This is a film about the right argument at the right time, by the man who's in the right position to sell it. What makes "An Inconvenient Truth" potentially powerful is not any particular details of its message, but its presence as an event.

And along those lines: The photos of Kilimanjaro's receding glaciers were striking, but the takeaway image was the Al Gore who looks reasonably comfortable inside his own skin.

I'm one of those people who takes Gore at his word and doesn't expect him to run in 2008. It's true, he hasn't given the media their "Sherman moment" of absolute and utter renunciation of presidential ambitions in this and all possible universes--he hasn't undertaken a blood oath on camera--but he's said "I have no plans to be a candidate for President again," and "I don't expect to ever be a candidate for President again." His supporters and ill-wishers both clamor for ever-more-terse and unambiguous formulations of the same thing, but that's just silly. The man first set his sights on the presidency decades ago. That's gotta be a tough thing to let go of. If he made his present intentions any clearer--if he actually said "I will never, ever run for president again no matter what"--his head would probably explode like he'd met a scanner.

The yearning of many for yet another Gore campaign reflects the Catch-22 that has come to dominate American presidential politics: Americans would like--or at least think they would like--a president who isn't grasping, opportunistic, money-grubbing, and two-faced. And it's a whole lot easier to manifest those qualities--and so fit that ethereal ideal--if you aren't in fact running for president. It's a variation on an old bit of cynical political wisdom: Anyone who's willing to do what it takes to become president should, on no account, be allowed to do so.

And there's no denying it; the man who once got away with making jokes that he was so dull his Secret Service code-name was "Al Gore" has achieved, within a certain slice of the public, something like rock-star status. A fellow blogger--no need to name names here, but she knows who she is--has confessed to me that Al's at or near the top of her list of fantasy indiscretions. One of my favorite images from the splendid "A Hard Day's Night" is at the end of one of the lads' performances--if memory serves, it was "She Loves You." The camera catches one indelible image: Among the screaming teeny-boppers, a thirteen-ish girl, face streaked with tears, silently, longingly, achingly mouthing the name "Paul." In "Inconvenient Truth," there's a woman in the on-screen audience of Gore's presentation--you'll know her when you see her--who is the spiritual, if not biological, daughter of that young girl some forty years ago. I don't claim I actually saw her silently, longingly, achingly, tearfully mouthing the name "Al," but there's no doubt things were headed in that direction.

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