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This is the second in an intermittent series of screeds about creepy TV commercials. This one is milder (and shorter) than the first one.

One of the hallmarks of the new creepiness is the suggestion that the advertised products may actually make your life worse. The first instance of this I remember was several years ago, and it involved a guy who (perhaps) was dismissed by the obligatory sex-objects because his pants looked too good for him to be straight. A variation on the theme frequently pops up in car commercials: the vehicle that leads you into a supernaturally hostile environment. (The parking garage that turned into Hell as the drivers descended, or the more recent example in which an SUV is attacked by an irate forest.)

But there’s considerable ambiguity in these cases — is the SUV bad because it angers the forest god and leads you to Hell, or good because it protects you from Hell if you happen to wind up there?

A pair of new commercials clears up this grey area, and portrays the advertised products as unambiguously harmful. I think of them jointly as “I am become diminished and plasticized.”

I become diminished

In this ad, a wireless communication provider is hawking phones on which you can watch TV. More than one vendor has hit on the “Big Brother Knows Best” approach for selling cell phones: 2- or 3-person mini-plays in which dark-suited, G-mannish fellows make their customers look stupid. The apparent success of these campaigns has baffled me for a while (although it may help explain public apathy about the threats to our liberty posed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Trusted Computing, and, (oh, yeah, that) the PATRIOT Act).

But most of these spots just insult the consumers; they don’t actually suggest that cell phone use will reduce the consumers’ quality of life.

This ad crosses that line. When the consumer receives the TV-equipped cell phone, he immediately turns away from the quasi-Fed. The posture he assumes suggests complete disengagement from his surroundings. His shoulders hunch as his face dips to study the screen. Not only does he lose metaporical stature, he almost seems to shrink several inches in height. If he were a video game foe, you’d know he’d been effectively neutralized. Even the camera seems to become less interested in him.

Meanwhile, the agent character wraps up with a pseudo-platitude that’s memorable for its utter lack of meaning. “A guy on television, watching television. Now that’s good television.” But it’s delivered in the same clipped affectless voice of authority that these phone(y) FBI types favor. And who are we citizens to question that voice?
continued. . .

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