Contrast

Take a cut shot from the dour face of Senator Joseph McCarthy and move to an extended shot of a man driving a tractor on a farm in the daylight with fresh air in his lungs. A voiceover is telling viewers various details in an upbeat and genial tone. The contrast is what gives one the feeling of release, release from an oppressive glare, from dark eyes hooded by darker, lush eyebrows, the ten or so strands of hair once seen dangling like a noodle onto his forehead now combed and pressed back with cream you can almost smell from here. The imagination works on what fresh air feels like in the lungs. The moment with the farmer on the tractor, his belly still full of bacon and cathead biscuits, is somehow transformative as heaven. And heaven transcends the demagogue. And heaven will transcend the demagogues.