Here’s another photograph from the cover of Time: Donald Trump hunched forward in a Louis XV lounge chair, moth-eaten, worn, half in shadow. His characteristic scowl, navy suit, and ostentatious tie complement the backdrop’s gradient of midnight and slate, its mood, and Time’s shade of tarnished red. It’s December of 2016 and Trump, the headline announces, is “Person of the Year”—the understatement of the decade. Despite this picture’s similarities—the chair, the shadows, the scowl, the combovers—to the same magazine’s portrait of Adolf Hitler in April 1941, what I’d really like to discuss is its frame.
All frames contextualize what they hold: oil paintings, vacation photos, pornography, advertisements, diplomas. A frame cleaves something from the rest of the world and says, Contemplate this. The frame of the image above—an American media institution that seems aware of the president-elect’s cruelty, yet vulnerable to his celebrity—is an admission: this is the next president, and we must look at him. And a confession: we want to look at him. Indeed, for several years, it’s felt as if he is all we can see.
Sometimes, frames take precedence. What media refer to as “content” is not only contextualized but determined by its frame. Content connotes a void in need of filling, the frame seeking an excuse to exist. Magazines, for example, that openly seek content (as opposed to essays, articles, stories, etc.) tell us as much about their own emptiness as they do about their perception of the culture at large. In a perverse poetics, a great majority of contemporary publishing creates a dynamic where the content of essays and articles is often borne of form—individual frames of links, banners, or advertisements. Online, where many of these ads blink, shift, or otherwise animate themselves, it’s even clearer what it is we’re actually supposed to contemplate.
Despite the internet, this is not a new development. As soon as newspapers began to augment subscription revenues with advertising, and thus seduce subscribers with lower prices, the frame of “newsworthy” began to shape what was considered news. This model is now standard, and even more effective when it comes to editorial content; hence the neoliberal, profit-driven ideology that most major media organizations tend to reflect. What this image + frame dyad did not anticipate, however—although it should have, given television’s hypertrophic mutation and acceleration of advertising—was the dynamic of social media.
Nearly two years after the Time cover, the president himself posted a similar photograph: the same suit and tie, the same scowl, even the same background colors. This, however, was captioned “Sanctions are coming”—ostensibly in reference to the administration’s foreign policy, but simultaneously a nod to Game of Thrones, a television series populated with political leaders who assassinate, torture, rape, castrate, imprison, mutilate, and humiliate their opponents—all to great fanfare. The stunt itself generated tens of thousands of words of reactionary content, be it praise, condemnation, or confusion, all of which brought users to familiar interfaces: blocks of text surrounded by advertisements, as well as an implicit invitation to comment on these texts, in case you’d like to return to the article later and see new advertisements.
A 2018 marketing email from Twitter, Inc., offered advice on engaging an audience: “Nothing moves faster than Twitter and it can be hard to come up with enough content ideas to keep up. But not every Tweet needs to be a masterpiece. In fact, it’s much better to break dense pieces of content up into threads, sneak peaks [sic], and cross-promotions to stretch your updates over longer periods of time and have something to say each day.” Twitter then suggests different ways of photographing your product, if applicable; ideas for public polls that invite agreement or disagreement with your opinions, should you have any; and tips for spreading awareness of your brand, whatever it may be.
Unlike a magazine or newspaper, Twitter doesn’t care what your product or brand or worldview is. Users and advertisers are paired not by editorial design but by algorithmic calculation. Exempt from editorial responsibility, Twitter echoes the downfall of television and cable networks, pursuing inexpensive content—such as reality TV or nonstop political punditry—with maximum exposure. With more than 85 percent of the company’s revenue (a little over $2.5 billion total in 2016) coming from advertising, it’s easy to see how its mission—to “Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers”—is subverted by the same “freedom” that preys on democracy itself: to maximize profit.
The pursuit of profit is always a race to the bottom. Despite 11 percent growth of “daily active usage” in 2016, Twitter became decreasingly attractive to advertisers. This shift began in the last quarter of that year, when @realDonaldTrump went from sensational curiosity to president-elect. A company executive defended its increasingly politicized traffic: “Having the political leaders of the world as well as news agencies participating on Twitter is an important part of reinforcing [engagement].” According to Twitter’s terms of use, @realDonaldTrump should have been suspended years ago for his repeated incitements of violence and abuse of other users (rather than as late as 2021, when the insurrection at the Capitol removed any plausible deniability, and Twitter finally removed his account). But a corporation is free to follow its internal guidelines only when advantageous to do so, and to delete the president’s account would have eliminated millions of “daily impressions”—the primary metric by which Twitter prices its ad space.
Despite the similarity to the Time cover, the frame of the president’s tweet not only overshadows but eclipses what it holds. Each of the president’s tweets is, in fact, all frame. To be looked at, this frame must constantly seek new content—relevance, accuracy, and consequences be damned. The contemporary ur-content, Trump’s tweets are meaningless. They’re not here for us to read, interpret, or understand. They exist to propagate the president himself, the reach of his personality. And of course they serve Twitter, Inc., the sole purpose of which is to generate profit for its shareholders. The president’s Twitter account, before its deletion, was a totalitarian synergism, propagating a harmful, terrorizing personality for the sake of a corporation’s profit, neither of which—the personality nor the profit—could afford stagnation.
Like all content for content’s sake, Donald Trump’s is an aesthetic of noise. Meaningless by itself, noise needs context, or a frame, to become obfuscation, confusion, protest, agitation, terror, even torture (such as the CIA’s weaponization of noise at Guantánamo Bay). The difference between the president and every other racist, misogynistic, tacky, ignorant, noisy, and mediocre bigot is his power. His influence over the law, the military, the courts, and a cult of unconditionally supportive, violent extremists is the context that transforms his adolescent thrashing into an optics of terror. The temptation, for our enjoyment, is to satirize Trump as a toddler who’s found the family gun, unaware of its consequences, or to caricature him as a baby wiping his shit all over the American flag. This absolves him not only of responsibility but the guilt of taking pleasure in watching America grit its teeth as it waits for the bang. He knows that noise creates confusion and fear, and he knows that fear gets him what he wants. As a corporate entity, Donald Trump understands above all how to sell himself.
As loud as he is, the president can’t make all this noise alone. Most of it comes from journalists, pundits, senators, representatives, and American citizens of every kind—rich and poor, educated and not, liberal and conservative, optimistically socialist and cynically fascist. Trump’s tweets are analyzed (even for grammar and spelling), dissected, mocked, turned into memes, and quoted in both editorial pieces and reporting. Add this to Saturday Night Live, to casual conversation, to a glimpse of a TV at a bar, to Halloween costumes, and to every encounter with a social media platform of any kind, and it’s clear that Trump content is everywhere. No other human being on earth has ever been this hideously omnipresent.
But despite all this content, few knew what the president was actually doing, and even fewer, what he planned to do. His administration�
��s deployment of noise—as well as its amplification by supporters and critics alike—reduced our country to confusion and terror. In a democratic republic, a terrified and uninformed populace is robbed of the ability to govern itself.
Unfortunately, this dictatorship was the greatest single source of entertainment our nation has ever seen. We’ve long loved, it turns out, to be afraid.
On April 20, 1999, high school students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed what was at that time an unimaginable act of terror. In a premeditated attack, the boys murdered twelve students and one teacher, injured twenty-four more, and killed themselves before police were able to enter the building. If you wish to be kind to yourself, you will not read about the details of their attack—what they said to students as they opened fire, what injuries those who survived have sustained, nor their demeanor as they walked from the school’s cafeteria to the library to the science wing—nor will you read their journals, where they describe their ambition to rival the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, both in scale and in terror. In scale, at least, the boys did not succeed.
While “Columbine” has entered the American vernacular—another atrocity-image hung on the walls of history—its unique, unprecedented horror is long forgotten. Equally forgotten is the media frenzy that followed, delving into the personalities, writings, friendships, and childhoods of Harris and Klebold. Ultimately, the boys became yet another cover image for Time. “The Monsters Next Door,” reads the headline: “What Made Them Do It?”
Monsters are imaginary beings created out of fear. They are places, not people, and in them we relocate everything we and our society do not like. Another thing that’s easy to forget, all these years later, is the monster this country chose to blame for Columbine, even though the killers did not like or listen to the band’s music.
A year later, Marilyn Manson published an op-ed in Rolling Stone defending his choice to abstain from interviews about the shooting. Unfamiliar with KMFDM, a band the killers did praise, media networks focused on a highly visible and, at that time, incredibly controversial mainstream figure. By then, Manson himself had received several death threats, and had canceled the remainder of the band’s tour to promote their 1998 album, Mechanical Animals. “I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take on,” he wrote, “so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or yours truly. This kind of controversy does not help me sell records or tickets, and I wouldn’t want it to.” Instead, Manson suggested, “media commentators [should] ask themselves [who is responsible], because their coverage of the event was some of the most gruesome entertainment any of us have seen.” Despite the fury over the event, Manson lamented that “when these tragedies happen, most people don’t really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, televising the funerals.” In a later interview, he reprised this indictment: “If you die and enough people are watching, then you become a martyr, you become a hero, you become well known. So when you have things like Columbine and you have these kids that are angry and they have something to say and no one’s listening, the media sends a message that if you do something loud enough and it gets our attention, then you will be famous for it.” In this, unfortunately, the boys did succeed.
In 2000, Manson’s Holy Wood explored the celebrity achieved through martyrdom and death, including a quatrain about Columbine on “The Nobodies”: “Some children died the other day / We fed machines and then we prayed / Puked up and down in morbid faith / You should’ve seen the ratings that day.” Ironically, when the music video aired on MTV, the word “ratings” was censored.
In putting them on the cover of Time, said Manson, “The media gave them exactly what they wanted.” There was never a question, not sincerely, of “What made them do it?” so much as an opportunity to invent some way that Harris and Klebold could be excluded from the human; and this makes them fascinating. Monsters are entrancing because there’s always something we can’t see, a darkness we can never access. Without monsters, we’d have to understand and empathize with how those we know and love—since no one we love could ever be a monster—might be capable of such terrible, unimaginable cruelties. Including, it must be said, the rock stars we used to see as heroes.
The American monster inherits his otherness from Christianity. In the earliest centuries of the Church, as it distinguished itself from paganism by adapting Judaism’s concept of idolatry, and later gained political favor by organizing and unifying its various sects, its theology began to shift from the societal to the individual. With Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, the prominence of the will—of the individual’s determination over their own salvation—is almost modern: “And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.” It is a choice, Augustine says, to look to and accept Christ as the Word made flesh; and this choice he recounts personally: “Only I had learnt out of what is delivered to us in writing of Him that He did eat, and drink, sleep, walk, rejoiced in spirit, was sorrowful, discoursed; that flesh did not cleave by itself unto Thy Word but with the human soul and mind.” These pages, after all, are Augustine’s confessions. Not only does he confess his rejoicing in the pleasures of the flesh, but so too his long, difficult, and solitary journey to renounce these pleasures.
Especially remarkable is the sensuality with which Augustine imagines his reception of this Word: “Thou calledst and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and pant for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace.”
From here, the development of Western philosophy throughout the centuries—Catholic, Protestant, and modern—adheres largely to the individual’s place within and relationship to the greater world; the individual is the locus of philosophical engagement. One can trace, as Bertrand Russell does in his History of Western Philosophy, “the separation of clergy and laity” in the earliest centuries of Christianity to the modern-day remoteness of the intellectual or academic from “the average person,” whoever that is; and it is this average person’s task to decide for himself whether to follow the teachings of this clergy or these intellectuals, or to reject them. In addition, Russell argues, “modern philosophy, even when it is far from orthodox, is largely concerned with problems, especially in ethics and political theory, which are derived from Christian views of the moral law and from Catholic doctrines as to the relations of Church and State.” At the same time, the Church concentrated more and more of its propaganda within the visual realm—an obvious choice with illiterate congregations. It is, ultimately, Christianity’s iconographic aesthetic of martyrdom that creates the modern celebrity—the person so beloved and so remote that they elicit screams, hysteria, sobbing, and other sublime or ecstatic emotions in those who witness or experience them.
Where celebrity takes its monstrous turn is Romanticism, which took hold of the imagination just prior to the rise of the first democratic republics. As Russell describes it:
Cultivated people in eighteenth-century France greatly admired what they called la sensibilité, which meant a proneness to emotion, and more particularly to the emotion of sympathy. To be thoroughly satisfactory, the emotion must be direct and violent and quite uninformed by thought. The man of sensibility would be moved to tears by the sight of a single destitute peasant family, but would be cold to well-thought-out schemes for ameliorating the lot of peasants as a class. The poor were supposed to possess more virtue than the rich; the sage was thought of as a man who retires from the corruption of the courts to enjoy the peaceful pleasures of an unambitious rural existence.
With Romanticism, the imposition of the image upon the human is more obvious than ever, along with its politic
al advantage for those in power. Obviously, if a man is supposed to be moved to tears by the sight of the poor, but too emotional to solve or address poverty, the poor become a useful gallery of morally charged images, especially for society’s wealthiest and most powerful class. Aesthetics begins to subvert or obscure politics—all for the benefit of the few.
At the same time, Russell writes, the Romantics were obsessed with the strange: “ghosts, ancient decayed castles, the last melancholy descendants of once-great families, practitioners of mesmerism and the occult sciences, falling tyrants and levantine pirates.” These are loners, outsiders. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the urtext of Romanticism, the first monster made by man. Whether by choice or by fate, “self-development was proclaimed as the fundamental principle of ethics.” The hero is someone outside society—the prototype for the rock star, the rebel, the writer who shuns the industry, the actor who insults his colleagues, the men (they are always men) who behave badly because someone, somewhere, called them geniuses. Eventually, the hero’s renunciation of social bonds becomes something to emulate; it is soon unromantic, and one day uncool, to care about societal structures, the needs of others, important causes. To be a hero is to be a monster. The 1990s, the last decade of the real rock stars—America’s (and Britain’s) monster-of-choice—was rife with this nihilism: no one, the story went, could ever make a difference, and the only way to protest the injustices of the world was to disengage—even, and often, to the point of suicide.
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