The Thinker

From the first kiss to breakup, Almy and Hammer record their relationship on a reel-to-reel ¾” tape recorder and microphone.

Produced to coincide with the 1984 Presidential Campaign, Perfect Leader is a cautionary tale that brings to life a prototypical politician, as packaged by Madison Avenue. With a driving soundtrack and bold visuals, Almy satirically presents this dynamic simulation of media politics as a fast-paced music clip. The narrator is a disembodied Big Brother, an Orwellian computer program who creates candidate images—dictator, evangelist, moderate—as models for a mass-marketed leader. The image of the potential president is overlaid with graphic symbols of multinational power: technology; economics; warfare. As a woman hysterically intones, "We've got to have a perfect leader," the bland, telegenic candidate is brought into two dimensions on the TV screen. Concise as a commercial, insistent as a pop song, Perfect Leader is Almy's most effective use of television techniques to critique the impact of the media on contemporary life.

A video by Max Almy

In these five "modern narratives" of desire in contemporary consumer culture, Almy constructs an ironic social critique. Each segment focuses on a single concept that is visualized with a simple formal device. With an economy of visual and verbal means, Almy merges voiceovers and images to achieve abbreviated narratives of alienated modern lives. In the first segment, photographic slide projections of individuals and household objects are each labeled "nice." In another, a woman describes a man with an associative series of adjectives progressing from the positive to the pejorative, from "perfect, absolutely perfect," to "boring, absolutely boring." Throughout, Almy presents a picture of personal and social stasis, the commodification of everyday life.

"Leaving the 20th Century is a compelling science fiction narrative of televisual time-travel via the electronic circuit and computer chip. Almy dramatizes a three-part transition—countdown, departure, arrival—to a technological future, foreclosed and dehumanized. The stylized visuals and ironic humor ("She left because there was nothing good on television...") belie the poignancy of Almy's vision. Applying computer graphics and digital effects to critique the manipulative, mediating effects of technology, Almy simulates the hyper-reality of a futuristic "landscape with no detail or points of reference," a space without perspective or point of view. No longer seduced by television or spectacle, the subjects depart and are transported as objects, arriving at a place where human relations and communication fail, transmission is terminated, the message is not received." - eai.org