La représentation de l’espace américain dans The West Wing

Abstract

Series of hallways and wanderings, The West Wing uses long, flat sequences among desks to promote the immersion of the audience in a singular universe and to account for the preoccupying character of the space and the work that is done there. Given the predominance of this representation of space, we can wonder: is there an “elsewhere” of the White House in The West Wing? The question of what we see of the United States merits being asked of a political series, and one that has often been praised for its pedagogical nature, meaning its ability to portray the complex problems of American society and international affairs. Yet, if the series succeeds in showing the ins and the outs of the issues that American citizens face, what representation does it give of these issues themselves? What happens when the principal figures of The West Wing abandon for a moment all of the statistics, the discursive clichés, and televised images to enter in to contact directly with the country they run? For the characters, as for the main designers of the series, this meeting with America is a perilous exercise in which fiction, the image of the country constructed in general conversations around the Oval Office, runs up against something that necessarily resists and far from reducible.

Keywords

• West Wing (The)
• sequence shot