McKay’s antagonist could be viewed as his opposition in the senatorial race. Don Porter plays Crocker Jarmon who is an older and more experienced candidate who seems to have the advantage. He manages to get the best of McKay at their first few meetings. However, it seems that the true antagonist is the political machine itself. It is seductive, manipulative, and hypnotic. Lucas can be seen as the personification of the machine, but it seems to go beyond even him. He is just a servant of the machine. The goal of the machine is to turn out a candidate that is sellable and marketable. The operators of the machine are portrayed as men who never revealed their ideals, but spoke of the McKay message objectively. After the debate, we see media man Howard Klein (Allen Garfield) become angry over McKay speaking his own mind. Klein is constantly telling him to dumb down his message so that people will respond positively to it. In response to his new canned and polished rhetoric, a news reporter accuses the machinists as “selling themselves like an underarm deodorant”. He points out the fallacy that the men working hard to get McKay elected are not in it to change the world. They are not a group of idealists and activists running the campaign like many American’s may believe. They are ad men. Well paid ad men at that. Many of the scenes when the media meetings take place are not unlike a scene from the television show Mad Men (AMC 2007). It involves a group of power and money hungry men who are paid to come up with the best way to get the people to like a product and invest in it. McKay is branded with a silly slogan, “For a better way, Bill McKay”. The job of the machine is to brand the candidate well, or at least better than the other guy. The loss of identity experienced by McKay unravels as the machine kicks in. We watch McKay unravel during a rough day on the campaign trail. He feels defeated along with being thirsty, hungry, and tired. After getting more upsetting news, he gets into a fight with a soda machine as he struggled to get a drink. A young man enters and asks if anyone wants a coke and McKay responds “NO!”. This is clearly a metaphor for McKay forgetting what he is fighting for in the first place. The more the machine does its job right, the less McKay recognizes himself. In the process he is left without integrity or identity.
Although the film was made nearly forty years ago, it is extremely relevant today. It is like watching the infancy of the era of sound-bite and image ran machine politics. The film was made when a movie star was the governor of California, which is not at all different from where we are today. There is a thin line separating McKay from the likes of Ronal Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The star of the show always wins in political theatre.
An obviously gifted performer is Sarah Palin. Palin was an excellent character and garnered much attention and a lot of votes for the McCain ticket. This is credited more to her folksy accent and big hair than her policy or intellect. Barak Obama also became a larger than life figure of hope and change, a deity that could be believed in and represented the people in need. Not only was he smart, but he had mojo much like McKay. He was seen first and heard second. Although he may have been more ambitious, his background was much like McKay’s. He was an attorney and a man of the people. Many of his early supporters saw him as a common man as well as a hero for getting things done in poor communities. But like McKay, he would soon subject himself to the political machine. In the current race for the republican presidential nomination we see the rejection of the machine by U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas). He runs strictly on his ideals, speaks his mind but will most likely never be elected. Even though a great deal of people identify with his message, he is just not pretty enough. He is seen as “crazy old Ron” because he was not branded properly. The Tea Party, which he practically started doesn’t even want him. They want the pretty lady that doesn’t oppose the war with all the foster kids and the anti-gay husband.
At the beginning of the film Lucas talks McKay into running by telling him that he can say anything he wants because he is just going to lose anyway. When we see McKay speaking to the press in his office about his policies and ideas, his eyes light up as the cameras turn on and people begin to respond with great interest while Lucas sits back and lets the ball roll. Lucas knows in that moment that once McKay gets a taste for the attention he won’t want to let it go. He is hooked. Progressively McKay makes concessions to his original “say anything” rule. He cuts his hair, dresses in a nice suit, and does whatever the minions tell him. He loses touch with the public. During a scene in a black neighborhood McKay approaches a basketball court followed by an entourage and video cameras to go shoot hoops with some kids. This wasn’t his idea, but he was told to do so for publicity and image. The kids ran in the other direction. This shows McKay going from a man with empathy and compassion to a man who politically capitalizes on playing with kids. He is becoming not unlike the smarmy Jarmon who we see kissing babies who he calls ugly and winking at the ladies.
Women in this film were often seen as a by-product of the men. McKay’s wife is instantly seduced by the superficial idea of being a senator’s wife. Once he gets a glimpse of her new love, the limelight, he is turned off by her and strays to the political groupies. The film shows women falling over themselves to have McKay sign their bra. I wish I could say that all women are smarter than that, but we are all human too. The only thing missing from the film is a role for a woman that saw through McKay and called him out on his moments of fallacy and arrogance. The only time we saw a glimpse of this was during a cutting and editing session for one of his commercials. McKay is shown talking at several women holding crying babies in an inner city clinic. They are clearly annoyed with his rhetoric and inability to empathize or offer any immediate help. McKay looks flustered and intimidated. The void could have been filled with the character of McKay’s mother. When McKay goes to visit his father, the tough and impermeable John J. Mckay asks about his ex-wife who is McKay’s mother. Governor McKay tells his son that she will “bury me yet”. I would love to have met her in this film.
The mise en scènce is carefully crafted through the use of camera angles, shapes, as well as the Academy Award nominated sounds. When McKay is shot from the back of the gym through all the empty chairs the sports banners hang behind him like giant red teeth eating him alive. This gives us an ominous feeling that he is in trouble. We are also subjected to mumbling throughout the movie. This is intentional. The machine operators were often engaging in shifty behavior that we are not supposed to understand. If we did, it would not feel as shifty.
The Candidate is not a film of ideology although Redford is quite the activist and integrated much of his own into the film’s dialogue. It is shot in the style of a documentary and could be referred to as a “mockumentary”. In this film we are shown the underbelly of machine politics and the costs of getting elected. The purpose of this film was to send a message to Americans that there is always another agenda at play. We cannot build our opinions through the fear, violence and sex of the propaganda and rhetoric we are exposed on a daily basis through the media. The film teaches us to think critically about candidates and the campaign process.
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