Is Trudeau the ultimate performance artist?
JUSTIN TRUDEAU IS THE ULTIMATE PERFORMANCE ARTIST, A PLAYER OF ROLES SINCE BIRTH. BUT THAT PUBLIC GAZE HAS HAD ITS EFFECT ON HIM; IT’S ONLY NOW THAT CANADIANS ARE REALIZING HOW MUCH.
The slur has always been that Justin Trudeau is a drama teacher.
Unfair though it may be to actual drama teachers, the implication is that he is frivolous, juvenile, emotional, more appearance than substance, and no more a real leader than the kid up on stage in tights and a tunic is really Peter Pan.
In short, the predominant political insult against Trudeau is that he is an actor. The events of this week have put that image under a revealing spotlight and summoned some ugly shadows.
As a result, the 2019 ballot question may have just changed, thanks to an American magazine’s digging up an old photo. It might not be the familiar worry about health care or economics. Now the prime minister’s character is in question precisely because of the characters and caricatures he has gleefully portrayed, from Aladdin to Harry Belafonte and whatever the most recent blackface image to emerge was supposed to be, which he says was taken on a dress-up day at the white water rafting outfitter where he worked, emphasis on the white.
Rather than policy or partisanship, the vote might come down to whether Canadians believe Trudeau’s claim that he is a changed and contrite man, an authentic ally of those whose skin colour he put on for jokes, or whether they think his apology is part of the ongoing performance, a slyly calculated breaking of the fourth wall in the tradition of Ferris Bueller or Woody Allen.
If a high school throws a fancy dress party, the drama teacher might be expected to take it especially seriously. (Trudeau also taught French and math.) But the photos in the old West Point Grey Academy yearbook show that Trudeau was the one who took it the furthest.
He is in his element as the centre of attention. He can convey empathy convincingly on a wide range of topics, especially when delivering apologies for historical crimes for which he bears no personal responsibility. He can summon a singsong voice for pleasant words and a more grave timbre for unpleasant ones.
“He’s very emotive. He is trying to adhere to a personal connection …
“It’s almost like he’s trying to be soothing in a way,” said Lucas Meyer, a reporter and anchor with Newstalk 1010 whose impressions of Canadian politicians went viral and led to him voicing Trudeau in an episode of The Simpsons.
“The eyebrows are incredibly critical,” Meyer said. So is the tempo and softness of his voice. The trademark “ums” only come out in his answers to questions as he casts about for the right answer. With prepared remarks, he is aware of what to say and how to say it, and seems to think he can make an emotional connection with anyone.
“Those two Justins are very different,” Meyer said.
Neither is subtle. Before he got into politics, Trudeau described his charisma as both a gift and a burden. He seems to have shrugged off the burden.
In his 2014 autobiography Common Ground, Trudeau wrote about struggling to find his place at high school and pursuing “a passion for nerdy showmanship, sometimes bringing in juggling balls, a magic kit, or even my unicycle to put on shows for my friends.”
“At that time, I thought this was all pretty cool,” he wrote. “In retrospect, not so much.”
He likes costumes. Socks have been the most common, easily incorporated into his business attire, and sure to be seen, given his comfort in crossing his legs, even while sitting next to splay-legged Donald Trump in his baggy suit and crotchlength tie, as at the recent G7 meetings in France.
In 2015, his bhangra dancing at a party for the India-Canada Association of Montreal induced a few cringes, but it showed him following the lead of his female dance partner, with unusual physical enthusiasm for a Canadian prime minister, except for perhaps his pirouetting father. All politicians do this in various ways, eating unfamiliar foods, saying unfamiliar prayers, wearing unfamiliar headdress or even costume, all as a matter of grace to one’s various hosts.
Trudeau’s omnishambles of a trip to India in 2018, however, took this over the edge. By the time he danced out of the High Commission in New Delhi, bouncing to the beat, he was courting international embarrassment.
As the journalist Barkha Dutt wrote in the Washington Post, the whole episode turned her off as a former “Trudeau fan-girl.”
“His orchestrated dance moves and multiple costume changes in heavily embroidered kurtas and sherwanis make him look more like an actor on a movie set or a guest at a wedding than a politician who is here to talk business,” she wrote.
The problem was not so much that he did it. The problem was he seemed to like it too much, the dressing up, the dancing, the crowd’s recognition and acceptance of him as someone no one had yet imagined him to be, something other than the powerful and privileged white man he is.
In moments like these, he is not so much Aladdin as the Genie, a wondrous, wish-granting shape-shifter. This is where the element of condescension seems to slip in uninvited.
Jason Kenney, for example, probably wore Sikh headwear in public more often than Trudeau has, as Stephen Harper’s point man on outreach to minority communities such as Indo-Canadians, but he never seemed to thrill to it quite as much. He was always clearly still a white guy in a suit. Trudeau transforms. He inhabits roles. By necessity, his 2015 election campaign was an exercise in political method acting. He had to overcome the widespread disbelief that someone so young and untested could really assume the mantle of leadership. His success was in playing the part so naturally, in putting the lie to the insults and smears thrown at him, that he was a bubble-headed ski bum, a handsome, spoiled frat boy.
In his new political biography of Trudeau, John Ivison quotes a friend Marc Miller who travelled with Trudeau through West Africa, where he was unknown, which he found liberating. “He’s a guy who, whether he likes it or not, was born with a camera in his face,” Miller said.
That gaze has done something to him. Canadians are only now realizing how much.
In one of the most controversial stories ever printed in the National Post, nearly 20 years ago, Peter Scowen savagely reviewed Trudeau’s eulogy for his father, describing it as a “treacly, over-acted embarrassment,” in which the future prime minister “put to use all the wisdom and experience that has made him what he is today: a junior-high drama teacher.”
He described how Trudeau mugged for the camera, and picked a little girl from the crowd to give her a rose. He was acting. “The whole performance was far too calculated to be trustworthy,” Scowen wrote, justifying his scorn by pointing out how many people saw this as the dawn of a Trudeau dynasty.
In hindsight, it was. And it showed that he had misread much of his audience.
THE WHOLE PERFORMANCE WAS FAR TOO CALCULATED.