Last Days of O. - Serial, Soth, and Looking Back at an Era

History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead. George W. Bush, when asked how history might judge his time in office.

After nearly a full year of silence, the immensely popular Serial podcast blipped into our inboxes and podcast apps this morning. The podcast, hosted by Sarah Koenig, became a cultural phenomenon last year with its week-by-week examination of the case against Adnan Syed for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999. Instead of a shadowy murder mystery unfolding weekly, this season of serial instead focuses on the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the American who walked off of his Army base in Afghanistan in 2009 and was subsequently held captive by the Taliban for nearly five years.

The political implications of telling this story, one that begins in June 2009 but has earlier, deeper roots, seem to be as much about reflection on the Obama era and its position in the cultural past as we churn toward its end. Bergdahl’s story is largely that of the previous six years: war, terrorism, rebellion, surveillance, and our collective dissonance from fighting for security through an unpopular, disorganized, frightfully expensive war that seems to have only made the fragile political map of the Middle East even more chaotic. By choosing this topic for season two, Serial is beginning to contextualize the Obama years through a most appropriate medium: a mass-disseminated, socially-buzzy digital conversation.

The gesture of reflecting on an era and on a national mood is the same at the core of Alec Soth’s 2008 The Last Days of W., a self-published, tabloid size newspaper featuring images taken during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Soth presents a portrait of American malaise, uncertainty, and exhaustion. “During these last days of the administration, what is the point of protest, satire, or any other sort of rabble-rousing?” he writes in the introduction to the series. “Like the mother in Nebraska and just about every other American, mostly I feel worn out. So in assembling this collection of pictures, I suppose I’m not really trying to accomplish much at all. Rather, as President Bush himself once said, ‘One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.’“ The book opens with images of a decaying, institutional-looking staircase and a stark interior with a wall-mounted TV broadcasting then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to no one in particular. Some images would be funny if the visual jokes weren’t so bleak: a young soldier, head shaved, stares at the camera with a half-assembled PBJ in his lap; a mounted deer skull is adorned with colorful Mardi Gras beads and fuzzy dice. Throughout Last Days, Soth’s photographs document a worn-out, run-down America full of anxiety and ambivalence toward the future.

Bergdahl, of course, is positioned within the defining issue of Bush’s administration and a major (if not the major) bridge between his occupation of the White House and Obama’s. In a New Yorker article on the new season, screenwriter, producer (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), and central character of the podcast’s narrative, Mark Boal, suggests that Bergdahl and his story embody something fundamental about the past American decade. “I kind of felt that Bowe represented something about the war,” he said. “In talking about him, you talk about the war itself.”

What’s interesting about Boal’s point is the focus on talking about the war, rather than looking at it visually. Perhaps this is obvious and superficial to a conversation about a long form audio podcast, but at a time when the visual culture is at its most saturated, the fact that his story is being told primarily through audio, rather than images, seems very significant. In the same article, Boal suggests a disconnect between the public and the battlefield: “[many Americans are] largely bereft of even a basic sense of what life was like for the soldiers there. If you compare that to Vietnam, when we were steeped every night in imagery—the vast majority of the population is just completely disconnected from it.”

Boal is wrong about society being less “steeped” in images of the war—if anything there are more images disseminated more widely. His point that the American public is severed from the reality of the war stands, however. In a 2011 editorial, Professor David Campbell suggests that the visual culture of the War on Terror is shaped and “can be understood as both beginning and ending with absence.” The political narrative of the war, he argues, was framed from the oust as a fight against an elusive enemy. The challenge of visualization, then, arises from the war’s “enactment to something real yet virtual,” a shadow event that exists on the ground but not necessarily in the minds of the public. Perhaps this gap between what Americans know is occurring half a world away and how they visualize it contributed to the angst felt at the end of Bush’s final term.

So far, the only piece of visual material created for this season of Serial emphasizes the virtual relationship the public had/has with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and largely to the Syrian Civil War and the surrounding conflict. The podcast’s new digital editor, Whitney Dangerfield, created a flyover map video that uses digital satellite imagery to orient the viewer with Bergdahl’s intended route when he first walked off his Army base in 2009. The 51-second video is striking—chains of mountains hang in the misty distance while the camera zooms over the rugged Afghan terrain. Immediately, the work recalls Mishka Henner’s 51 U.S. Military Outposts, in which the artist catalogs American military installations throughout the world using Google Earth.

Henner’s work represents a visual shift that is related to a similar shift that took place upon Obama’s inauguration. With the proliferation of digital imaging strategies in the past six years, no longer is it possible to idle while an “elusive enemy” is pursued across an anonymous desert. Technology has become democratized. Obama’s era is that of Wikileaks, of Edward Snowden, of tracking down Bin Laden, of ISIS on Twitter, of Bowe Bergdahl. When artists like Henner use these newly accessible technologies to highlight American actions in the Middle East, they are rejecting a passive visual culture that simply ingests official abstractions of conflict; instead they are interrogating images that Campbell calls “confined” and a “limited challenge to established positions.” It is a visual strategy based on presence, of illumination, of making obvious, rather than absence. The following weeks will reveal how Serial chose to tell Bergdahl’s story, but by choosing this specific narrative to interrogate and re-introduce to the public, it seems Koenig and company are already engaging in the same strategy, one that is appropriate to its time both in terms of technology and medium, but also in conceptual integrity toward discussing the Obama era.