Saturday, January 26, 2013

Deconstructing and Reconstructing
The First Lady of Power


In my last couple of posts (here and here), I wrote about the militaristic appearance of Michelle Obama in one of the events for her husband's inauguration. The first post was her entering Capitol Hill for the swearing-in ceremony wearing a Thom Browne coat.

A reader, who saw my post at The Thinking Housewife, emailed me to say she looked like something from Star Wars.

I put the Capitol Hill entry photo together with Darth Vader's in a following post, to the approval of the Star Wars afficionada: "Oh my the visual is absolutely perfect!!"

At The Thinking Housewife, Perfesser Plum writes:
I’ve detected a typo in your heading [Michelle Obama: Militant and Girlish]. I’m sure you meant to type,

“Michelle Obama: Militant and Goulish.”

She looks like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, only more masculine.
Well, above is Michelle with the great company of Darth Vader and Neo.

The Neo reference might be the most pertinent.
MORPHEUS: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?[Source]
We could ask the First Lady the same question, who could pass it on to the President.

It is odd that it is so easy to find other "personas" for Michelle Obama. As I wrote in my previous post on her: "We would never have imagined Jill Biden, Laura Bush, Jackie Kennedy, or even the formidable Barbara Bush as Darth Vader or Boris Karloff."

I wonder why that is? All I can conclude is that she is in a place and role so alien to her, that she has to keep reinventing herself to fit the role she thinks she should have. She seems to narrow it down to an ultra-feminine, girlish appearance, or an over-charged militaristic one. Perhaps her real persona is the aggressive militaristic, black power one, where she is following her smart husband's intentions, which he is reticent to disclose to us.