This series will process a small number of photos from the White House's official photostream. The series is called Myth Today because it borrows many of its critical tools from the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980), who famously decoded newspaper and magazine pictures in his book Mythologies (1953). But whereas Barthes' decoding of the deep structure of images tended to expose how they were constituted by old (or ancient) ideas and forms of power, my decoding of the images of our president at work will hopefully reveal the constitution of a new configuration of power. My first image:

Our first reading of the image: The pharaoh returns. Indeed, Obama even sees himself on one of the tomb's walls. This coding has its core in afrocentricism, a movement/moment that happened in the early 90s and saturated the popular imagination of black America. But something else is at work in this image. It has less to do with afrocentrism and more to do with Indiana Jones. Though real, the tomb looks like a set. For a moment we are baffled. Cinema and the real fuse and confuse. But more and more, we come to see that this is not about a pharaoh but about Harrison Ford. And not only Harrison Ford as the archeologist he plays on the screen (Dr. Henry Walton Jones) but also his real life as a Hollywood star.

The form of power that constitutes this image, what makes it meaningful, then, is the Hollywood spectacle. The power of this type of spectacle is generated by the narrative of heroic struggle: one man (an ordinary man, a man like you and me) beating the odds, or closer yet, beating history itself. Here we enter the American idea that one can break with or beat the past (or even closer yet: beat the given and the forces that maintain the given). In Gattaca, for example, the hero with a bad heart becomes an astronaut (the worst occupation for someone with a bad heart) and escapes all of human history (the story of our genes—the ultimate given). What matters most to the American imagination is that the hero has done the impossible. The Hollywood narrative of heroic struggle structures the depths of this image of Obama (the most amazing thing: a black president) entering the tomb/set.