Good Example Of Semiotic Image Analysis Question & Answer

The image that I selected is a still from an advertisement that one of the SuperPACs supporting Donald J. Trump’s candidacy for the presidency placed. This is an attack ad against the current front-runner in the Democratic race, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The ad features Secretary Clinton at the right, her face set in an earnest expression, as though she is in the middle of a serious conversation. At left is a picture of her husband, former President Bill Clinton. His hands are pressed together, and he is leaning slightly to his left and looking at his wife, but his figure is greyed out. While she is wearing a professional suit, he is wearing what appears to be a golf shirt, dressed much more casually. His expression is that of a knowing grin. In between them, in a black all-caps font, are the words, “The Clinton effort used words like “floozy,” “bimbo,” and “stalker,” New York Times January 20, 2016. The context of this still is the way in which, according to this advertisement, the Clintons worked to dirty the reputations of the legion of women who accused the former president of everything from sexual harassment to adultery to sexual assault. The idea is that if they were able to sully the reputations of the women involved, then that would somehow exonerate Mr. Clinton in the court of public opinion.
I selected this ad because we are still in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, just a short time ahead of the Republican and Democratic conventions. Secretary Clinton is still in the midst of a controversy involving her decision to conduct her government business not on a government email server but instead on a private one stored inside the basement of her home, and using a personal email address instead of what with a “state.gov” ending that would have gone through a more secure system. Even though she was recently cleared of criminal charges in this matter, the State Department is still considering administrative sanctions for this matter. If Secretary Clinton emerges as the nominee of the Democratic Party, Trump is likely to keep hammering away at her for the email issue as well as the way in which, in his view, the Clintons have preyed on women, in an effort to call Secretary Clinton’s character into question.
The implied narrative from this image is that Secretary Clinton dons her professional clothing and heads to work, but her primary mission is to pave the road for herself and her husband to power, no matter what obstacles remain in the way. For her, according to the narrative of the picture, her business is trampling the personal reputations of the women who have come forward to accuse her husband of one of a range of different offenses, whether civil or criminal. The shaded out picture of the former president indicates that he is behind the scenes, watching the work that his wife is doing; the knowing grin could be said to indicate that he is aware that he will get away with everything that he is done because his wife is willing to torch the reputations of his accusers, and when that happens, it is less likely that the alleged victims are going to be believed. The text in the center of the picture has the sobriquets for the women in the largest size letters, indicating that the focus of the effort is to strip those women of their actual names but instead to bestow those belittling names on them as their new identities – at least as far as the press and public society need to know. If they have their own names, then they will remain potential victims. But who feels sorry for a “floozy” or a “bimbo”? These two names indicate a lack of sexual discipline and intelligence on the parts of the women, suggesting that they instead drew the former president into sexual escapades for fun but really lacked the intellectual capacity to be taken seriously. The word “stalker” turns the tables on the alleged victims, suggesting instead that it is the former president who is the real victim, pursued by these awful women who are trying to besmirch his name for no real reason.
The implied audience here is the American public, who are being asked to believe the narrative that the Clintons are trotting out there for them to see, as Trump would suggest. His audience is those voters who are considering voting for Secretary Clinton, and his goal is to persuade them that to make that vote is to vote for someone who has taken it on, as part of her profession, to ruin the reputations of the many women who have accused her husband of all of these various outrages.
There are several potential signs to analyze in this advertisement. For the purposes of this paper, I will use the outfit that Secretary Clinton is wearing. She is wearing a black jacket (potentially of a professional suit), a necklace featuring several intertwined strands of pearls, and a gold brooch that appears to be of the American bald eagle, a sign of patriotism. This outfit signifies her professional approach to the conversation at hand. The signified is the intense effort that she and her husband have put forward to whitewash the reputation of the former president by the use of the terms that appear in the middle of the advertisement. The idea that she would take the sullying of women’s reputations so seriously is, for Mr. Trump, an outrage that should keep people from considering her seriously as a candidate for the American presidency.
Someone who lives in another country and sees this ad could see the implications of the words and perhaps understand the contrast between the philanderer at left and the defender at right. However, within the cultural context of American politics, this image does not really provide new information. The Clintons were the subject of investigation after investigation during the eight years that Bill Clinton was in the White House, and he became only the second President ever to be impeached by the House of Representatives because of the perjury that he committed during the investigation of his sexual escapades with the intern Monica Lewinsky. While the Senate did not remove him from office, he did have to surrender his law license because of the offense. Many of the investigations also centered on Hillary, such as land and cattle futures deals that turned out to be wildly lucrative. The ways in which the charitable foundation that the Clintons have established has taken in millions and millions of dollars in donations from countries who wanted to buy arms from American companies (transactions that, as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton would have to approve) have rankled the sensibilities of some of the American public, and so there are some to whom it appears that the Clintons do nothing but skirt ethical lines.
For people who believe this about the Clintons, the ad is yet another statement that everything that they think – that the couple is crooked through and through, bent on pursuing their own political and financial gain at all costs, no matter what sort of damage happens to those around them. However, there are also people who believe that the Clintons are no worse than so many of the other politicians who have come and gone in the American pantheon. There might be some gray ethical areas, but the people in this group believe that there is always going to be some gray matter when one deals in having to find compromises and get things done in the public sphere. For each of the many controversies that people on the other side of the argument bring up surrounding the Clintons, the people who support them will respond that nothing criminal happened and that other politicians have done similar things, if not worse things. So when the people in this group see the ad, they also will get angry, but not because of any lack of ethics on the part of the Clintons. Instead, they will become angry because they see the Clintons as the victims of a right-wing witch hunt and, more specifically, Hillary Clinton as the victim of a sexist double standard that is accusing her of things that male politicians would get away with. So in an American context, this ad is really another line in the sand that divides those who support the Clintons from those who do not. Given how much information is already out there in American popular culture about the legacy of the Clintons, there are few people left in the country who were already undecided about the Clintons when the campaign began. Advertisements like this one only serve to deepen the line dividing the two camps.