The triumphant return of the Sunday Screening

Ha ha! You thought I'd given up, didn't you? Just because the last Sunday Screening was all the way back in November -- well, seven thousand pages of academic writing later, I'm back and ready again to subject you all to mind-numbingly obscure bits of YouTube irrelevancy. Like the above -- do you realize what an enormous selection of TV signon/signoff clips YouTube has? Unbelievable. Every era, every location. I considered devoting an entire post to them, but then I decided I should at least make an effort to retain my tiny, precious audience... if you're interested, though, start at these nuggets of pure gold and work your way out from there. Nothing captures the aesthetic of a given time and place quite so perfectly, I contend, as its incidental TV graphics.

But what I've been fixated on lately is this fascinating footage of Mitt Romney arguing with a reporter. Look:

Now, leaving aside the factual content here (and the press secretary's incredibly douchey reprimand at the end), my question is: WHY would Romney's people put him in front of a rack of office supplies? My God are they trying to make him look like a bland corporate automaton? BALLPOINT PENS, for crying out loud. Not even an aisle of cool office supplies, like printers. No. PENS. You could not ask for anything more banal. The obvious allegory here is The Office--

--which perfectly captures just those mindless, soulless Ward-Cleaver-with-a-low-IQ tendencies that Romney's working so hard to hide. (I wish there was video somewhere of the scene from Season 3 where Michael confronts Dwight in an actual Staples; the aesthetic is just perfect.)

Speaking of The Office, I want to promote this video made last year by the Harvard undergrad Government Department. I'm late to this party (h/t: Dani Rodrik back in December), but it's well worth your time; who knew that Gov had so much deeply rooted anxiety?

...Really that's what The Office, and its derivatives, are about: anxiety. These are programs about people who are unsure of their places in the world, lacking confidence in the structures that are supposed to support them. In the Scranton, Pa., that The Office shows us, life is basically meaningless; Jim Halpert, the "beta male" hero, always gives that Kafkaesque look to the camera that asks -- both hilariously and heartbreakingly -- "What am I doing here?" We haven't seen this kind of ennui creeping into the popular culture since the paranoia films of the 1970s. It's an indicator of a nation, and particularly an economy, in serious trouble.

Mitt Romney's campaign, it seems, does not recognize this. They certainly are not playing the symbological game very well (as vs., for instance, Obama); he's running a nice conventional GOP campaign that will win him a nice conventional 40%. And meanwhile they've got Mike Huckabee, who I'll leave you with, nipping at their heels making just this argument -- don't let anybody tell you America's not a class-conscious society...