SCOTT DUCHESNE
This article concerns itself with the performance of politics. It is focused primarily on Mike Harris, the current premier of Ontario, and how in particular instances he has promoted and defended the Common Sense Revolution--the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party's own five-year plan of social and economic reform. In other words, it is my intention to examine how the revolution was and has been, on and at certain stages, performed. Specifically, how it had been enacted by Harris himself in order to promote a particular kind of 'confidence' which swept the Tories into office on June 8, 1995 and, despite such controversies as potentially detrimental cuts to education, health care and welfare, brought them into a second term on June 3, 1999. Through a close reading of his performances in a series of television advertisements aired in late 1996, I will contend that in these we witness the crux of an ongoing propaganda campaign which, through Harris, attempted to hail a specific segment of the population of Ontario by way of a carefully crafted and semiotically rich play of persuasion. This will lead to an examination of a televised interventionist performance by actor Mary Walsh of CBC Television's This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I will argue that through her own contesting semiotic play of confidence, she attempts to deconstruct and disrupt the cohesion the Harris Tories had up to then carefully established and maintained through the performances of their leader.
Cet article traite des aspects performatifs de la politique. Il s'agit a priori d'un examen de Mike Harris, le premier ministre actuel de l'Ontario, et de savoir comment, dans certaines situations, il a fait la promotion et défendu sa «Révolution du bon sens»: le plan quinquennal de réformes sociales et économiques du Parti progressiste conservateur de l'Ontario. Autrement dit, il est dans mon intention d'analyser comment cette révolution a été représentée (performed) à certains moments. Plus spécifiquement, comment elle a été (re)présentée par Harris lui-même afin de promouvoir un type de «confiance» spécifique qui a mené les Conservateurs au pouvoir le 8 juin 1995--malgrédes controverses telles des coupures aux budgets alloués à l'éducation, la santé et le bien-être social--l'a aidé à être réélu le 3 juin 1999. De par une analyse minutieuse de ses performances dans une série d'annonces publicitaires télévisuelles diffusées vers la fin de 1996, nous verrons ce que je crois être le point crucial d'une campagne de propagande qui, par l'intermédiare de Harris, a visé un segment spécifique de la population ontarienne et ce, par le biais d'arguments astucieusement construits. Ceci servira d'introduction à une analyse des interventions de la comédienne Mary Walsh de l'émission radio-canadienne This Hour Has 22 Minutes. J'affirmerai qu'elle tente de déconstruire et d'interrompre, par le biais de ses propres stratégies performatives, la cohésion que les Conservateurs sous Harris avaient jusqu'à ce moment établi et maintenu par les performances de leur chef.
The rungs torn from this ladder can't reach the tumor
One God, one Market, one Truth, one Consumer
- Zack de la Rocha 1
On June 8, 1995, the citizens of the province of Ontario gave the right-wing provincial Progressive Conservative Party (also known as 'the Tories'), led by the Member for Nipissing Mike Harris, a significant mandate to form the next government. "It wasn't so much a big blue machine that chugged its way across Ontario's political landscape" wrote the reporter Christina Blizzard on the back cover of Right Turn, her gushing account of the P.C.'s campaign. "[I]t was more a big purple bulldozer [royal purple replaced the traditional colour blue of the P.C. Party since, according to Tory strategists, it "looked better on television"] driven by [Harris] and a new breed of Tories" (Blizzard 11). This 'new breed' was quickly dubbed the 'Harris Tories' early on in the election campaign. What fuelled this big purple bulldozer was the Harris Tories' mission statement, a 21-page pamphlet entitled The Common Sense Revolution, released a year before the election, and allegedly developed out of an exhaustive four-year consultation with what Tory strategists called, in deference to the American brand of Conservatism they wholeheartedly embraced, 'main street Ontario.' According to John Ibbitson, in his 1997 book Promised Land, "[The Common Sense Revolution] was a modern masterpiece of voter divination" (Ibbitson viii), and there are few who would, at the very least, question its effectiveness.2
The validity of the platform as policy is not the focus of this article. What is under consideration, as the Harris Tories return for a second term, is: how in specific instances this Common Sense Revolution has been promoted and defended since 1995; how it is and has been, on and at certain stages, performed; and how, specifically, it has been enacted by Mike Harris himself in order to promote a particular kind of confidence. This confidence swept the Tories into office, enabled them to maintain at least a 30 - 40% popularity rate despite potentially detrimental budget cuts to such institutions as education, health care and welfare, and brought them back with a sixty seat majority government on June 3, 1999. Through a close semiotic analysis of a series of television advertisements aired in late 1996, I will contend that, in Harris' performance, we witness the crux of an ongoing propaganda campaign which attempts to create and sustain an ideological cohesion through a performed style of confidence.3 This will lead us into an examination of a televised performance by veteran East Canadian actor Mary Walsh which, through her own contesting semiotic play of confidence, attempted to deconstruct and disrupt the cohesion the Harris Tories carefully established and maintained by way of their leader's carefully crafted media persona.
In his 1996 book A Culture of Confidence historian Richard Nelson defines confidence as "an active, utilitarian calculation of advantage. Though it seems an ephemeral emotion, even an insubstantial source of hope, confidence is actually the most basic of desires and pragmatic of tools ... [I]t is the single recognized product that legitimizes economic and political institutions ..." (Nelson 32). He later writes that
Confidence ... is an instrumental approach to power ... [I]t is not necessarily instrumental in the mere vulgar sense; rather, it is a hidden aesthetic of power. It transforms doubt into belief through doubt, just as any original work of art is rendered authentic through its artificiality. (56)
It is, Nelson claims, a strategy based on a "psychology of action, as is all performance." It is a "'quest for certainty,' with 'cash value'" which "succeeds against doubt only when, as a form of rhetoric, it suppresses doubt through the power of self-persuasion" (88). Confidence in this context, then, in an act of political alchemy, transforms doubt into belief through doubt. A relevant--and spectacularly unsuccessful--example of this strategy was exposed in early July of 1995 when then Ontario education minister John Snobelen "allowed himself to be videotaped talking management babble to a collection of senior bureaucrats" (Ibbitson 118). The tape, leaked to the media some time after, showed Snobelen "claiming that [the ministry of education] needed to 'invent a crisis' in education in order to prepare for major reform" (118). Snobelen, on a particular "quest for certainty" with concrete "cash value," proposed that the seeds of doubt could be planted in the minds of the citizenry by the government itself, by way of a false crisis. The "major reform," which would resolve this crisis, would then transform its artificially induced doubt into belief, and, ideally, further translate into voter confidence regarding both said reform, and the government in general. Although Harris' response to Snobelen's strategy was a stiff shrug and a terse comment, I will contend that this strategy forms the foundation of the success of Harris' performances in the commercials under scrutiny.
***
Like all competent advertisers, the Harris Tory strategists appear to understand that even the best rhetoric available requires above all else a performed style. By style I mean a "broad semiotic phenomenon, the metasign, whose function is to sustain difference and cohesion, and to declare the ideology of the group" (Hodge & Kress 81). Metasigns "take on a number of forms, but typically they are pervasive in messages, and they continually refer to and monitor the social relations of semiotic participants" (79). The "broad semiotic phenomenon" of a pair of jeans, for example, may take on a number of forms. In tandem with other metasigns (brand name, additional clothing, etc) they may advance an image of rebelliousness; in other combinations of commodities, a blue-collar or back-to-nature 'look.' In his excellent 1989 study "The Jeaning of America" John Fiske writes that "the desire to be oneself does not mean the desire to be fundamentally different from everyone else, but rather to situate individual differences within communal allegiances" (Fiske 3). And these individual differences (i.e. a teenager hanging out at a local mall and a corporate executive on vacation, for example) are effectively sustained through the unifying material phenomenon of jeans --which promises consumers both a sense of individual and collective identity, and in return ensures healthy and continuous profits for their manufacturers. In political advertising there is arguably a long tradition of associating a style and its attendant metasigns with a particular ideology in order to reap a profit of confidence. This strategy, if successfully performed, could "sustain difference and cohesion" by way of situating "individual differences within communal allegiances"--that is, people with otherwise differing opinions regarding specific issues could still come together under the general shared belief in, in this case, "high quality" education and health care.4 In the two commercials under scrutiny, there are two primary metasigns I will analyse, the one (literally) material, open to semiotic analysis, and the other, less tangible, falling into the arena of the performative, and the phenomenological. The first is the male Suit;5 a familiar combination of commodities (dress shirt, matching jacket, slacks and tie, dress socks and shoes) which create a potentially influential tool. The second, and more important, is the enactment of what I will term a 'centerized,' or 'softened,' Conservatism. As I will examine later below, Mary Walsh specifically, and significantly, targets these two metasigns in her own revolutionary performance.
In late 1996, when the Harris Tories announced the closing of dozens of hospitals across Ontario, as well as arguably damaging cuts to education funding, the negative critical backlash from front line workers, union leaders, administrators, and private citizens was immediate and widespread. Although the Harris Tories had already attempted to justify the restructuring as necessary--given the current economic conditions allegedly brought about by the actions of the centerist Liberal Party under David Peterson (1985-1990) and the left-of-centre New Democratic Party under Bob Rae (1990-1995)--it seemed that a message from the new leader himself was needed. The world inhabited by Mike Harris in the two commercials I will analyse are, I contend, a stylized world in which every object (especially the leader himself) is a Harris Tory metasign, semiotically overdetermined, clustered into a thirty second announcement. He is performing a confidence painstakingly designed to appeal principally to a specific segment of the population. The primary goal is for the performance to be rendered authentic through its very artificiality, thereby assuaging doubt and producing confidence. I will argue that the primary audience of these--and preceding--commercials are women.6 In these commercials Harris, in Richard Nelson's terms, is playing a calculated advantage, which is deployed in both what he is saying and how he is saying it. His physical performance and the text he reads can be identified with a malleable, centrist position. However, within this performed style he is simultaneously deploying metasigns identified with a hardened right-wing ideology--primarily, the combination of his own presence and the suit he wears--which, depending on the viewer's response, may enhance or contradict his spoken performance and the content of the text.
In the first commercial, Harris takes on the topic of his government's education reform. He is dressed (as in the other commercial under analysis) in a dark blazer and pants, white shirt and royal purple tie. The pacing of the commercial is unhurried, with two basic shots: medium and close-up. He is perched casually on the edge of a teacher's desk and speaks to the viewer in the deep, slurred tones for which he is now renowned. From the first frame attention to Harris is demanded; the composition of each shot forces the viewer's skeptical, or converted, gaze to be met by his determined, confident gaze. In the background stands what seems to be an ideal Tory classroom--slightly blurred so as not to draw the viewers attention from Harris himself--filled with computers, drawings and a single plant. It is neat, efficient and devoid of a teacher--not to mention students. Or is it? I would argue that in this context Harris is clearly constructed as the well-groomed, common sense instructor and the viewers, mainly the doubters and outright dissenters, are positioned as his students, possibly remaining after class for a gentle-but-firm reprimand. The text of Harris' performance--subtly underscored by a solo piano playing a melody similar to one played when a family sitcom needs to 'get serious'--is as follows (the words in italics are ones on which Harris places emphasis in his performance):
High quality education is something we all want for our kids. To get it, we have a plan to make our school work smarter, with a more challenging curriculum for higher standards, province-wide testing, and a focus on the basics of reading, writing, math, science and technology. There'll be better results, more accountability, less waste ... Because it's time we put Ontario's kids back at the head of the class.
The final image of the commercial is a tableau--as subliminal as the classroom background and partially hidden behind a 1-800 telephone number--of a group of nine elementary school children, seven girls and two boys, two of these visible minorities. They are gathered around a globe, supervised by a casually-dressed white female teacher, who lingers at the periphery of the frame.7 A female voice-over informs the viewer where they can order a free copy of this particular facet of Harris' common sense vision.
In the other commercial under consideration, Harris attempts to assuage doubt concerning the Tories' changes to health care--specifically regarding province-wide cutting or the outright closing of hospitals--through the manufacturing of confidence in the future of health care his common sense government will produce with their policies. The first several seconds of gray, grainy visuals are taken up with the dimly-lit halls of a hospital and its equally dimly-lit empty rooms filled with empty beds and rolled-up mattresses. The soundtrack--this time produced by a synthesizer--is low and dissonant, as Harris, in a solemn voice-over (at least an attempted solemnity), informs us that: "In Ontario, patient needs and services should come first. But empty wards like these cost money, and cure no one." Harris then appears--once again in his semiotically rich apparel--in a brightly-lit hallway (the familiar piano melody sweetly playing once more). He is now the common sense doctor and the viewers are his chronically misinformed and misdiagnosed patients who need to be told the bad news, but also need to be reassured that there is hope for a full recovery, if we take the right medicine. As he stands in front of what seems to be a research laboratory--hospitals of the common sense future seem to be more concerned with profits for pharmaceutical corporations than with patient care--Harris tells the viewers that:
We need to put money where you the patient will benefit most. Modern hospitals and the latest equipment. This year we'll invest more in health care than ever before, so you'll have the right care, in the right place at the right time ... It's a healthy start towards making Ontario's health care system work even better.
The final image of this particular commercial is another tableau: a smiling elderly white female patient--the archetypical grandma--receiving treatment by an equally cheerful white female doctor. The background of this tableau is notably ambiguous; it suggests both a typical doctor's office--what looks like diplomas hanging on grey office walls--as well as the home of the elderly woman (there are cushions as well as what seems to be a couch). Once again a voice-over, spoken by a woman, restates the telephone number to call for a copy of Harris' health vision.
***
The proliferation of females in these mini-testimonials--voice-overs, children, professionals--suggests an attempt on the part of the Harris Tories to offset the concrete actions of the explicitly right-wing, macho common sense revolution with the encoded performance of a 'kinder, gentler' Harris, in order to appeal primarily to alienated female voters, who have consistently borne a significant portion of the brunt of Tory policies. Above all, these commercials work to counteract the notion that a bottom-line mentality fuels these cuts and closings, and Harris' performance is a crucial element to this endeavour. His gentle-but-firm gestures, rounded intonation and attempted facial expressions of sincerity in both commercials may remind one of a man attempting to convey the notion of being 'in touch' with himself and his patriarchal duties. The rhetoric, the foundation of Harris' strategy of confidence, also lies at the heart of this center-ized, or de-machismoized strategy. Education reform is just as much about 'the kids' as it is about accountability, and Health Care reform is equally concerned with healing as it is about "the latest [healing] technology." He is attempting to perform a kind of confidence which situates "individual differences within communal allegiances"; this then sustains an ideological cohesion in the citizenry. In placing a focus on the allegedly underlying social and emotional need for change, however painful, ultimately to better the lot of Ontario's citizens,8 Harris is attempting to persuade target audiences to set aside the differences they may have with Tory policy overall and align themselves with the party on these two issues, which, as Harris claims, the party has given a high priority.
In these commercials, however, aspects of Harris' material presence is deploying meanings which arguably contradict the text he woodenly recites. The most apparent of these is his costuming--his suit. Semiotically, the suit in North American culture means business. What I mean by this is that the combination of materials which make up the suit--as North American culture recognizes it--bear particular meanings which are, taken together, viewed as the primary image of business culture in the Western World.9 The suit is a broad semiotic phenomenon which encompasses, among many others, the male CEO at the shareholders' meeting and the man on trial for first degree murder, who both wear the suit to convey a message of credibility and/or innocence. Like a pair of jeans, the suit also situates "individual differences within communal allegiances," and I contend that the primary allegiance among most, if not all those who put it on, is the encoding of a particular kind of confidence--that is, the confidence of business culture: the appearance of stability (emotional), reliability (economic) and overall trustworthiness. This is deployed in both the wearer and the receiver, who decodes the intended message of confidence based on, in this instance, their opinion regarding the reliability and trustworthiness of the Harris Tories, and of Harris himself.
Harris, like many others, dons his own conservative version of this persuasive metasign in these commercials in order to achieve certain objectives.10 The most crucial of these, of course, is to mean business--specifically, the business of Ontario, which includes both health care and education. His goal is to create confidence in the present and future state of the province, and the positive effects its growth will have on the province as a whole, and to argue for his government's leading role in this growth. He means to act, essentially, as its most effective representative, and in so doing, in Nelson's terms, legitimize the state of its economic and political institutions. The particular 'business' Harris represents--the multi-national corporate sector--is fuelled by and large by an explicitly right-wing agenda: tax cuts, usually at the expense of public sector services, and to the benefit of the wealthy; absolute government deregulation; and, in the context of Ontario, the replacement of welfare for 'workfare.' High quality education and health care is achieved, in the language of the right, through 'deep' cuts and closings. And one of the keys to the success of his performance in terms of meaning business is the commodities he wears--not only in the commercials in question, but on an everyday basis. The crisp hems and dark hues of his suits further encodes Harris' verbal messages with white capitalist authority, to clearly deploy the idea that what he is saying requires, at the very least, the receiver's undivided attention, if not assent. And if a viewer is looking for such meanings, Harris readily presents them. However, I believe that the underlying, authoritative right-wing imagery in these commercials contradicts the text and Harris' physical performance, which, as I have illustrated, clearly attempts to construct a more centrist image. Despite the encoding present in his voice, gestures and text, Harris-in-his-Suit (or 'Harris-the-Suit') creates a juxtaposition which may have in the end fatally corrupted the message encoded in the commercials.11
His performance, however professionally executed, is compromised by Harris himself. From the outset, his party had constructed him as the unquestioned leader and central image of the Common Sense Revolution. As a result, those who opposed its policies, opposed him in particular. His visage became the semiotic centerpiece of protests, exaggerated and manipulated in various media (puppets, political cartoons, posters, etc ...). The selected costuming did not help matters. Those already suspicious of Harris' agenda--presumably including the intended target of these commercials--would probably not be swayed by 'Harris-the-Suit,' who by 1996 had already made several comments specifically relating to women's issues which engendered significant hostility (for example, referring to the Women's College Hospital, to many the symbol of commitment to women's health care in Ontario, as a "dingy old building"). In short, his performance, a combination of an appeasing text and mollifying gestures, was negated and eclipsed by the cumulative effect of many of his previous statements, as well as the phenomenological effect of his simply being there, which includes the very fact that he had openly encouraged the association of his face as the face of the Common Sense Revolution. He could not, and cannot escape the controversial nature of his corporeal presence.
Arguably, no amount of 'softening' of his performance could diffuse the profound mistrust those opposed to Harris carry with them. As preceding commercials proved, to effectively highlight the positive aspects of the Revolution at all, Harris had to be removed from the frame entirely. In these two advertisements, then, we witness an attempt on the part of the Harris Tories, by way of their leader, to "centerize" their own hardened right-wing media persona, in an effort to create and maintain ideological cohesion through a modified strategy of confidence, including: (a) the overwhelming presence of females, from children to professionals to patients to voice-overs; and (b) the attempted 'softened' performance of Harris. As I have illustrated, the contesting nature of the messages deployed in the commercials may have doomed them to failure. Significant proof of this contention occurred on March 10, 1997, when Mike met "Marg, Warrior Princess."
***
March of 1997 saw the height of controversy surrounding the then-possible passing of Bill 103, or the Megacity law--possibly the most contentious and potentially damaging piece of legislation of the Harris Tories' mandate--which would amalgamate the six major cities surrounding metropolitan Toronto into Toronto proper, thereby radically altering the way in which such essential services as health care and education are funded and governed. It was not only the bill itself which engendered such anger; the way in which the Harris Tories positioned themselves in terms of public doubt also provoked hostility. As the bill creeped closer to the status of law, Harris' right-wing persona shifted into high gear, with him once again standing in for the government, stating that the bill would be passed regardless of public opinion, which by most surveys proved to be greatly in favour of rejecting the bill.
In that same month This Hour Has 22 Minutes, an English Canadian comedy programme broadcast on CBC, aired a segment entitled "Marg, Warrior Princess," performed by veteran comedic actor Mary Walsh. This character was a variation on Walsh's much loved persona Marg Delahunty, an often bed-ridden and bitterly sarcastic social commentator, who had already enacted the interrogation of such luminaries as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Prince Philip, and Garth Brooks. In this particular instance, Walsh, in a parody of the internationally popular television adventure-drama Xena, Warrior Princess, dressed in a red leather tunic, gold-trimmed breastplate and boots, and wearing a gold sword--along with Marg's garish earrings and saucer-size glasses--interrupted a press scrum outside the Ontario legislature, to deliver what I consider to be a classic monologue. As I will examine below, from the moment they meet, Marg/Walsh is immediately contrasted in semiotic terms with Harris, and her text and performance add layers to this difference. A significant part of her monologue is worth quoting:
... [T]hey're [the public] not calling you and your cohorts Satan's spawn. They're not saying you're some kind of heartless, demonic, vicious authoritarian philistine, oh no, let me reassure you that it's still a Mikapalooza out there. Most of the Ontario voters still believe that the sun, the moon and the Chevron sign shine right out your back passage. All they're saying is slow down, where's the fire, y'know, why not carry on with all those election promises to cruelly harass the poor and the powerless? ... Now what I want you to do is to go in there, and I want you to do the right thing. And I'm telling you Mike, don't make me come back and smite you, 'cause I will my darlin', I'll smite you! I'll grind you under my warrior's heel, utterly and finally. [Now] it's nothing personal Mike 'cause let's face it you're kind of cute for a premier. But it is my job, for I am Marg, Princess Warrior! ['Smash']
Walsh accomplishes, in front of a receptive crowd of reporters and later This Hour viewers, a brilliantly complex deconstruction of Harris' performance style. The basis of this deconstruction, similar to the elements of the commercials examined above, is (a) costuming; (b) text; and (c) her performance of said text.
Two necessary conditions allowed this performance to take place at all: Walsh herself, and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a show she created. Walsh was a co-founder of the comedy troupe CODCO in 1973, which produced both stage shows and a popular, long-running series on CBC television of the same name, with largely the same cast. By the late 1990s Walsh had become a loved performer and celebrity in Canada. By 1997, "[f]our years after it hit the beach in Halifax," This Hour, according to its publicity, had "grown to a comedy tidal wave sending sassy, satirical salvos into the fat hull of Canadian politics," and an average of one million people were tuning into the weekly program. As I pointed out above, Walsh and co-stars Rick Mercer and Greg Thomey had conducted similar acts of guerrilla television in previous seasons on high ranking Canadian civil servants and various other notables, national and international. Their victims, especially the Canadian politicians, seem to understand that their refusal to participate could somehow damage the media persona they had constructed--based in part on being 'in touch' with their constituents--on the very medium in which they appear the most, and on a Canadian program with one of the largest audiences in the country.
Walsh's costuming provided a rich set of contesting elements which had an immediate impact. In dressing as "Marg, Warrior Princess," she visually informs Harris and her audience that this kinder, gentler appeal to women voters has been, at least for some, unsuccessful. She arguably relates by way of her costuming that she, and possibly others, have aggressively decoded his messages as deceptions based upon stereotype and/or arrogance, and that some, like her, might in fact strike back in some form. On the surface, the recognizable earrings and glasses of Marg Delahunty seem to contradict the assertive garb of the Warrior Princess; and for the effect of comic juxtaposition, they do. Semiotically, however, the combination presents an even more powerful statement: those opposed to the Harris Tories might well be ordinary citizens--in this case women--transformed into Warriors precisely because of such actions as arguably damaging cuts to education and health care. The costume of Marg/Warrior plays in opposition to Harris' Suit in that it means another kind of business altogether. Like Xena herself, the primary target audience of the commercials, taking a negotiated or altogether oppositional stance to them, might feel obligated to rise up in the face of their enemy and take on the business of the activist, which might be, among other things, to interrogate and contest the business Harris works to represent.
The fact that Harris does not speak during this incident is significant. As I have argued, it is his verbal performances which have proven to be a crucial element of the "centerization" of the party's message. In launching her verbal tirade uninterrupted, demanding Harris' attention at all times, Walsh is countering Harris' confidence with a confidence of her own, created through image and text in an equally artificial manner. She sees through Harris' performance as an audience member might see through hers. Her performance exposes its own ideology (the line "why not carry on with all those election promises to cruelly harass the poor and the powerless?" will undoubtedly go down as a classic moment of Canadian political performance), and informs Harris--who smiles and laughs his way through her brief intervention, genuinely or otherwise--that she and many others understand that his "centerized" Conservatism is just as superficially produced for political profit. When Walsh, albeit comically, threatens to "smite" and "grind" Harris under her "warrior's heel, utterly and finally," some may laugh not only because she has gotten away with saying it, but--in sensing Walsh's underlying outrage and the outrage of the people for which she speaks--because she is, in terms of performance, confident that she can smite and grind the centrist persona the Harris team has created, leaving the hard-right wing core exposed and open to attack.
Marg/Walsh's performance was also crucial. Like many of her characters, there is a deep current of righteous indignation in Marg, flowing beneath the thin mantle of her comic mask. The comedy in these instances seems to be based upon what Walsh-as-Marg can get away with, in words or in actions. Her primary objectives seem to be: (a) comically to undermine the media persona of the target in question, forcing him in a sense to 'act real' in the face of her satirical salvos; and (b) to contest the ideology couched in that particular persona by way of her own overtly artificial performance. In short, her artifice works towards revealing the artifice of the target persona. It is angry, comical, and above all else, as I have said, confident. Like Harris' appearance in the commercials in question, Walsh is taking, in Nelson's terms, an "active, utilitarian calculation of advantage"; she is making use of her own talent, celebrity and the popularity of This Hour Has 22 Minutes to access, to engage in a particular "quest for certainty," to interrogate and contest those in power. Through the artificiality of her performance, her attack is ultimately rendered authentic. And above all else, she is creating confidence by taking the potential doubt of those targeted in the commercials in question and her own (she admits in the monologue that "it's still a Mikapalooza out there. Most of the Ontario voters still believe that the sun, the moon and the Chevron sign shine right out your back passage"), and through the self-persuasion of her performance--she got her message out, however veiled in comic language, so maybe others can--Walsh potentially generated a kind of confidence which may have inspired her viewers either to take up an active opposition to the Harris Tories in some fashion, or refreshed or strengthened the resolve of those already engaged in the struggle.
Undoubtably, Mary Walsh's performance was a comic tour-de-force, but it ultimately failed to crack the pinstriped armour of the Harris Tories. And perhaps this was never her intention, since despite the relative failure of the commercials analysed, the Harris Tories retain a strong sway in Ontario. Through a certain kind of confidence, founded on a particular strain of ideology and disseminated through the medium of television by way of a performance which split itself between the semiotics of the right and the centre, Mike Harris seemed to have diffused the doubts of a close majority of the province's citizenry--though perhaps not the intended citizenry--and has carried out the terms of the Common Sense Revolution with something approximating impunity. More recently, his semiotic strategy has backtracked somewhat. In a June 8, 1998 interview in the Toronto Star, Harris, according to Queen's Park Bureau Chief Joel Ruimy, three years into his party's mandate, "has traded his gray suits for navy. And you don't see him in golf shirts any more. The message is plain--this is a government of serious, competent administrators" (Ruimy A7). Harris returned to the casual costuming of his 1995 campaign, in anticipation of another: black leather jacket, navy dress pants and dark blue shirt with a red paisley tie. On the subject of the 1995 election Christian Blizzard writes:
Victory was the pay-off for getting the message out early. It was the pay-off for picking a group of people who got along and believed in Mike Harris. While the Liberal campaign was built along a traditional brokerage model of picking candidates from the left and the right and balancing the team with women, the Tories asked only one question: Do you believe in Mike? (Blizzard 63)
It is interesting to note that although in early 1999 Harris appeared in a commercial broadcast on American stations extolling the capital potential of Ontario, in another series of commercials broadcast in Ontario around the same time concerning the Harris Tories' vision for health care and education, he was conspicuously absent. In one series actors portrayed the pain and profit of this vision, and in another, which featured white text on a black background, a woman's voice stated plainly the alleged positive changes to health care, thanks to the Common Sense Revolution. As I have claimed, the publicity wing of the Harris Tories seemed to have discovered that the appearance of their leader extolling the virtues of the Revolution only worked to sabotage their intentions. It may be that after several years of manufactured doubt and confidence, seemingly endless controversies and the occasional outburst of outright violence, the revolution is over, and the question has changed.
EPILOGUE: JUNE 1999
Clearly, the question did not change, at least for the Harris Tories. Similar to premier Ralph Klein's campaign in Alberta, their 1999 election commercials posed the post-revolutionary question: do you still believe in Mike? And the answer for a majority of Ontario citizens was yes. However, I do not believe that this result casts my thesis in doubt. I would argue, in fact, that the same strategy of confidence was applied and the same semiotic palette was utilized in order to secure their second term in office; the focus, however, shifted. While women allied with a centrist ideology were the predominant target audience for the commercials analysed above, the 1999 Tory election commercials were specifically aimed at centerist men and those firmly allied with the right. It is my opinion that the failure of the 1996 commercials to draw greater support among women voters lead the Ontario PC strategists more or less to abandon the effort in favour of shoring up the male vote both internal and external to the party.
A distinctly male voice-over replaced the female, extolling Harris' overall leadership qualities, in particular his ability to make the "tough decisions." Rapid editing akin more to the contemporary music video supplanted the measured medium and close-up shots of the kinder, gentler, Premier Harris, whose calm demeanour and open gestures contrasted with the incumbent Harris, on the move, smart and tough as nails but always ready with a manly handshake and wide smile. Semiotically, strategists sutured his two central images into one: one shot of Harris in a classroom filled with children was not meant to impart the same message as in the two commercials previously discussed. He is not only the suit-clad Common Sense revolutionary, but also the genial-but-firm sweater-clad Common Sense instructor whose charge it is to ensure bright careers in business and technology for Ontario's middle and upper class progeny. And it is this combination of Harris-the-Suit and the kinder, gentler Harris which made these commercials the most effective of his career.
The return of Harris himself is arguably the most significant aspect of the recent campaign. His absence, for the reasons I have outlined above, was strategic. His return to the small screen is not only part and parcel of the traditional election commercial--it is an apology to those who voted for him in 1995, and a dismissal of those who contest him. It is, it seems, a man's world once more in the Common Sense Revolution. Significantly, however, he still remained more or less silent. It seemed as if the combination of his face and voice might hurt his chances (as if the public ultimately preferred his face to his voice) and it was up to the male voice-over--perhaps acting as the voice of his supporters--to speak for the party. Nevertheless, for this new "new breed" of Republican-ized, Reform-ed Tory, Mike was, is and on June 3, 1999 remained, the message.
NOTES
1 From Down Rodeo,
track seven, from the 1996 album Evil Empire by Rage Against
The Machine (Epic-EK57523).
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2 The revolutionaries'
first principles were as follows: "[W]e will build a safe and prosperous
Ontario by: adhering to the shared values based on individual rights and
responsibilities, fairness and equality of opportunity . . . [and by] governing
with responsive, competent and principled leadership [by] implementing
consistent, innovative and responsible policies." (qtd. in Blizzard 11)
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3 This article will not venture
into the complex and contentious field of audience reception. In this context
I am not interested so much in the myriad ways in which viewers decoded
the performances in question, but the encoding of these performances, and
what the encoders may have anticipated in terms of audience reaction in
these performances. In addition, it is not my intention to suggest that
Harris is doing anything politically innovative, and that my research breaks
any new theoretical ground; my interest is in analysing particular media
performances using existing ideas, and in so doing perhaps exploring a
strategy of propaganda in a new way.
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4 A clear example of sustaining
"difference and cohesion" by way of situating "individual differences with
communal allegiances" was found in a commercial aired by the Harris Tories
during the 1999 election campaign. In it, a man costumed in the semiotically
rich apparel of the 'working man' openly questioned the 'union bosses'
who opposed Harris' agenda, and claims that his life has improved since
1995. The commercial attempts to ally unionized workers, one of the most
antagonistic groups towards the Tories, with middle and upper class property
owners, one of their staunchest supporters, under the communal wish for
further tax cuts.
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5 In present-day corporate culture,
of course, women also wear suits--the performances of present Harris Tory
Health Minister Elizabeth Whitmer would prove to be an equally interesting
subject. The primary reason for my focus on the male suit is the very
male subject under consideration.
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6 This argument is based solely
on the analysis I carry out below on the commercials, my viewing of subsequent
commercials, and a degree of unscholarly intuition. I have had no access
to demographic reports or poll results. It
is interesting to note that on election night in June 1999, Harris Tory
strategist Leslie Noble, when asked by a CTV reporter about the historical
"gender gap" between Ontario Conservatives and women voters, stated that
she rejected "the premise" of the question, and that the so-called gap
"existed every other day than election day."
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7 The globe itself is an interesting
addition to this total semiotic package, in that it subtly informs the
viewer of the present, and especially the future right-wing "reality" of
economic globalization. It also informs us that somehow, the "high quality
education" that "we all want for our kids" that the Harris Tories will
establish, will prepare them for just such a future.
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8 A government-produced commercial
broadcast in late 1998, which symbolized this need as a young boy--urged
on by his mother--quickly removing a band-aid, was arguably more effective
in getting this particular message across.
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9 By business culture I mean
not only those institutions which are commonly associated with the term
business (financial, commodity, legal, etc ...) but those which, for better
or for worse, have been or have become associated with corporations: educational,
medical, entertainment.
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10 There are,
of course, less conservative versions of the suit. The current Ontario
NDP leader Howard Hampton wears suits of various shades of brown and ties
of lighter hues. This scheme seems to fall more in line, semiotically,
with his centre-left platform. As well, someone can enact a semiotic wink:
wearing a Bugs Bunny or Star Trek tie, for example, tells people that although
you wear a suit, you are not a 'Suit.'
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11 Of course,
all negotiated readings are, according to Stuart Hall, riddled with contradictions;
someone might reconcile the arguably diametric elements of Harris' performance
and his presence in myriad ways and for as many reasons. This would explain
the more or less unvarying approval ratings for the Harris Tories. It is
my opinion, however--as events occurring following the broadcast of these
commercials and the continuing attempts in preceeding commercials to woo
the female vote--that the analyzed variables did indeed fail to achieve
the party's desired objectives.
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WORKS CITED
Blizzard, Christian. Right Turn: How the Tories Took Ontario. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989.
Hodge, Robert and Gunther R. Kres. Social Semiotics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Ibbitson, John. Promised Land: Inside the Mike Harris Revolution. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1997.
Nelson, Richard. A Culture of Confidence: Politics, Performance and the Idea of America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Ruimy, Joel. "Unbowed, Harris Vows to Forge on." Toronto Star 8 June 1998.
This Hour has 22 Minutes: Smash Bits '97. Producer: Salter Street Films and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Videocassette. Video Service Corp, 1997.