Essays

Dushko Petrovich Córdova

Have you ever really looked at Trump’s hands?

Blue Wall

Some images register so perfectly in your brain that it feels like they were already there. Most pictures jumble around a bit, stay unsettled, give us too much information; but certain rare ones arrive in just the right shape to plug a specific mental hole, and then finally stop the leak. A hush comes over us when they land. Until recently, I had experienced such pictures only in a personal way: photographs of friends, for example, that appear on the screen and align precisely with who I know them to be. Or sometimes, most powerfully, my phone will display pictures of my daughter taken in a previous era (six months ago) that make me well up. Not all pictures of her do this to me. Just the rare one that seems somehow to match the gap in my memory. These are the moments when photography can seem more real than reality. They say that photographs stop time, but these special ones seem, instead, to repair it, to click into the empty place time had left.

A few months ago the news-viewing public had this kind of ecstatic experience with a decidedly impersonal photo when the New YorkTimes printed an image of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, standing in the Oval Office and blocking her face with blue folders. A friend sent it to me, and I didn’t initially have any context. I knew where the photo was taken because I recognized the mantel. I didn’t know who the person was, but I felt like I did, like it was on the tip of my tongue. Still, it was as if I were looking at a memory I didn’t know I had. This was the Democrats hiding, Democrats in disarray, Democrats collapsing in pure, ideographic form. It hit like a drug.

The blue folders, which astonishingly matched Whitmer’s blue double-breasted jacket, also matched the brand: Democrat. This was the Blue Wall now, this sheepish group of people who occasionally have to come to the White House but find themselves outmaneuvered there, flummoxed and paralyzed and embarrassed to show their faces.

Looking at the folders I thought of Mitt Romney’s goofy comment during a 2012 presidential debate about “binders full of women” and about the many memes it spawned at the time. Then I thought: Things have changed since then. Here was a new kind of image that arrived preformed, almost pre-memed. Always already viral.

No, wait. I had seen this kind of image once before. Do you remember the image of Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg luxuriating on the green leather seats of Parliament during a discussion about Brexit? He was leaning back decadently, aristocratically, in a way that only an out-of-touch Tory could, and in 2019 this photograph spawned a thousand memes. His reclining form was photoshopped onto a graph of dramatically diminishing Tory election results, or onto similar downward jags indicating various post-Brexit economic stats, or onto the couch in the Simpsons universe, where Homer might have been taking a nap. I remember thinking at the time: Some images should not be memed. The photo already said it all, and you are gilding the goddamned Tory with all these riffs and variations, thereby diluting our sense of his entitled idiocy. I didn’t say it then, but maybe I can say it now, scream into the void: Don’t touch this photo, it is fucking perfect.

What kind of perfect? I had to think about it for a few years.