Vanity Fair Confuses Satire and Caricature
July 23rd, 2008 Posted in PoliticsYou would think Vanity Fair, of all magazines, would have staff that understand the difference between satirizing paranoia about a politician and caricturing that politician.
I was going to write about that fact, but Daniel Larison did it for me:
There is essentially nothing in this image that is not an exaggeration, or just a representation, of things that are true about John McCain: he is old, his wife once had a problem with prescription drugs, he is closely aligned with George Bush and he does support policies that violate the Constitution. As a caricature, it works quite well. As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails, because the point of the New Yorker image is supposed to be that everything in it is ludicrous and false and obviously so and, more to the point, it is supposed to be exaggerating the absurd claims to their most extreme form. (The problem with the original image, as I’ve said before, is that it did not exaggerate the claims, but simply repeated them.)
….
To do a proper McCain adaptation of the image, you would need to draw an image that combined all of the false smears that have ever been circulated about him by George Bush’s campaign and others, which would mean creating a cartoon so distasteful that no one in his right mind would ever publish it.
It’s really embarrassing to think that no one at Vanity Fair thought to say, “hey, wait a minute, this misses the point entirely ….” It’s not a parody, it’s a self-parody.
