Code and Punctum

If you’re very bored one evening, why not try and produce a (semi-humorous) semiotic analysis of George Bush’s head. Matt, at Pas Au-Dela provides us with some of the basic morphemes (above). Let’s number them 1-6, starting top left and moving left to right.

1. Alludes to thinking, to the head as the locus of presidential decisions. The hand indicates the point where the buck stops – the head of the President, now superimposed on his own. Implicit contrast between the fallible human clay of the individual and the burden of Presidential thoughts. A certain pathos thereby produced.

2. A look of resigned acceptance. ‘I guess that’s the way things are,’ or, I guess we’re gonna have to live with that’. Signifies pragmatic realism, a certain worldly knowledge..

3. Wide eyed, open-mouthed candour, a look appropriate to expressions of principle. Defies the audience to disbelieve him – he is opening his face, baring all.

4. ‘Your guess is as good as mine/ ‘look, I can’t tell you’, sets up a kind of ‘regular guy’ parity between him and his audience. Behind the President is someone like you with incomplete knowledge etc.

5. Dispelling some false imputation, the effect is of offended dignity, head retracts into neck as if preparing for a pre-emptive strike.

6. Triumphant, gleeful, almost childlike (a child who has wrested a prized object from his sibling’s grasp). This is the only look not part of the semiotic code. The ‘punctum’ of the series. A flash of the 'gremlin soul', winking obscenely at the audience from behind the semiotic polish of ‘Presidential expression.’

Now, my guess is that, despite everything, it is number 6 which really either attracts or repels people, this look of child-like triumph, the sudden ripple of an infant sadism. This is the trait – in a place where it shouldn’t be - that fascinates.