The ad, which was produced by the pro-Kasich super PAC New Day for America, is ostensibly about the fact that Ted Cruz is a liar and that he lies a lot about everything and that if Ted Cruz were Pinocchio his nose would grow to be so long that it would wrap around his neck and choke him. That is, of course, not how noses, which are made out of cartilage, work, but that’s beside the point. This ad is deeply unsettling, for a host of reasons. There’s the weird splotchy skin of the digital nose, which makes Cruz’s nose look like it belongs to Jabba the Hut’s pet, the bloodsucking Attark. There’s the fact that it keeps slithering around his neck. And then there are the phallic connotations of the nose itself, perhaps best laid out in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the first installment of which was published in 1759. In Shandy, noses and penises are practically interchangeable, and the size of one’s nose affects one’s marriage, one’s fortune—it’s a practically Trump-ian stand-in for one’s manhood.
This ad was produced by the same mad genius behind Carly Fiorina’s epic “demon sheep” ad and the pro-Kasich “mud” ad, which featured my favorite character of this election season, muddy Little Marco.