"Gay on Overexposure": What do election clips say
Dmitry Kurkin
Pop-up election advertising - c "gay on overexposure", "hysterical in a taxi" and "sex and elections" - once again confirmed what everyone already knows for a long time: in Russian political agitation there is no such bottom that could not be broken through. If you really want to experience a burning sense of shame, you just need to watch videos shot for the elections. It will be a shame both for the authors of the video and for customers, who seem to continue to believe that the electorate should be treated like an unreasonable child.
And it would be okay to talk about television agitation - it has not changed since 1996, turning into either a time capsule, or a museum exhibition, which every four or six years is taken from the vaults to remind: there is such an amazing social genre advertising, where clumsy primitiveness is an essential element of style, and the dumber the better. This can be treated with understanding, especially since there “on bezrybe”, despite scant imagination, occasionally are born capacious punchlines like “Stop tolerating it” or the recent “Candidate from the people!”.
It is worse when the cave rhetoric, to which even the most notorious populists rarely descend into the Web in the non-election time, seeps into the Net and pretends to be witty. And it's not just that bad guerilla marketing is visible to the naked eye: it didn't take long to identify the authors of the supposedly viral movie about “gays for overexposure” - they were not the latest people from video production working with TNT, STS and TV3 . The main problem is that the methods of agitators have not fundamentally changed since the mid-90s. The only motivator able to convince Russians to participate in political life, in their opinion, remains animal fear. He cannot come to the elections on his own will - only to run up in horror, waking from a nightmare. “Vote or die”, as Diddy said in the South Park series.
In 1996, the newspaper "God forbid!" frightened compatriots "red plague". In 2018, to the place of the main narrow-minded horrors, judging by the current sparkling creativity, much more abstract scarecrows took over: vague “Geyropa”, monetary requisitions (no matter which ones), and for some reason raising the draft age. But the recipe remains the same: take a phobia, screw it up to the point of complete absurdity and serve as a joke - and if someone does not laugh, he simply does not have a sense of humor.
According to agitators, the only motivator capable of convincing a Russian to participate in political life is animal fear.
It is not that Russian know-how is to treat a potential voter as a person, to put it mildly, not too distant. From fresh examples come to mind the election of the mayor of London with an epic video in support of conservative candidate Zach Goldsmith. Trying to knock the ground out from under the feet of his opponent Sadiq Khan, a British Laborite with Indo-Pakistani roots, Goldsmith supporters recorded an incredible jumble in five languages that seemed to be addressed to all Asian communities in the city at once (spend four minutes of your life on this amazing piece, it's worth it ).
However, the authors of the song even understood why the elections are needed - they did not pretend that the people they were referring to did not understand this. What can be said about the fresh creative, dumped on the social network over the weekend. As if only an offensive fantasy, equalizing LGBT with domestic animals, was not enough (homophobia back in 2000 turned out to be an effective tool for compromising and defamation - see the “gay for Yavlinsky” black PR campaign) , hopes to convince the audience that on March 18 the country chooses the one who solves all domestic issues. Including the question of school fees from parents of students - which, in general, has always been a private initiative of the schools themselves. To hell with the details - let's do something about gays, utilities and the army. Or about the fact that those who do not vote will not have sex.
As Ivan Davydov, an expert of the Foundation for Effective Politics, rightly points out, “the conflict has to be invented, and it turns out rather clumsily: , and wild capitalism badly disguised as a scoop (a pioneer who asks a dad for four million in a video clip — either “for protection”, or “for the temple”) ”.
If this unintelligible agitation vinaigrette and can convince someone of something, then only that people who are assigned to drive at least some electoral minimum to the polling stations still poorly understand who they are addressing. The slogan "You can not even imagine us", which appeared on the wave of protests of 2011-2012, does not lose its relevance. The current videos directly declare: "Yes, we don’t represent - and we don’t need to." And this should be alarming: no one really likes being treated like a fool.
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