megacreepazoid (one)
13 June 2005, 6:59 pmTV commercials have probably been creepy since the exact moment the first one was aired, but I feel like the ante has been raised lately. The disturbing subtexts are getting ever closer to the surface. And as they get creepier, some ads get more truthful.
I guess the logical extreme of post-modernism and marketing to the hyper-aware, super-jaded consumer really would be truth in advertising. “This product is of poor quality, and it will harm you.” Or maybe, “If you loved Toy Story and The Incredibles, you probably won’t like Recycloplot in Animland, but we hope you take your kids to see it anyway.”
Over the next few days, I’ll be discussing a few commercials that have really bugged me recently.
Let’s start with “The Dirty, Dirty Chicken Sandwich”, shall we? Or as I’ve come to call it, “Soylent Pink.”
I find meat product commercials disturbing in general, but I realize that’s a minority view. So I checked with my band members — my main barometer for normal guy responses — and was relieved to learn to learn that they thought “Soylent Pink” was memborably creepy too.
I don’t want to name the the vendor, the product, the popular jammy alternative singer of the annoying jingle, the half-clad b-list celebs, or the name of the scary adult film actress who some allege is featured in it. I’ve acquired the web-diarist’s tedious habit of reviewing the search-engine tags that lead people here, and I just don’t want to see certain keywords popping up in my logs.
Instead I want to dive right into exactly why it pegs my creep-o-meter:
And I realize (because I did research, like a diligent pseudo-journo type) that the blogosphere at large discussed this in March and moved on. But I think the extant writing about the commercial lacks a certain essential viciousness. Which is ironic, given its subject and its subtext — this is one time to really go for the jugular.
Combing the use of words like “chicks” or “birds” to refer to women with mention of chicken breasts and thighs has been a popular source of double-entendres for years. But fast food chains have usually stayed away from this area. I think there were good reasons for that.
For one thing, the fast food chains have a longstanding tradition of positioning themselves as promoting “wholesome” values. This is partly because kids are a core market for this slimeballs. I think it’s also a smokescreen tactic that helps divert attention from the fact that the food itself is rarely, if ever, wholesome.
But the other big problem is where the metaphor logically leads. Let’s be clear: the way chicken restaurants want you to “eat” those breasts and thighs does not lead to erotic gratification for the chickens in question. One of the fast food companies’ great triumphs is the degree to which they divorce their products from anything resembling actual animal flesh. (The “nugget” is obviously the jewel in this crown.) But using a “chick”’s breasts and thighs to sell chick(en) breasts and thighs re-establishes the connection to something that once had feathers and squawked. Something that could even conceivably (at least in the movie Chicken Run) be considered “cute.”
Worse, if you follow the chick-chicken metaphor in the other direction, it acquires a decidedly cannibalistic aspect. You could certainly argue that the public ultimately chews up and spits out most celebrities. But this is pretty dark territory for an outfit that basically wants to sell you a meal that is “happy” or “fun.”
continued. . .
Speaking of cannibalism, chicken, and fast food, today I saw a link on Boing Boing recalling a Saturday Night Live skit from 1992 that at the time almost (just almost) made me go vegetarian, the “Clucky Chicken” fake commercial. Transcript & screenshots here: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/92/92gchicken.phtml
It’s about a thousand times more biting subversive and “culture jamming” than anything those choir preachers at Adbusters ever managed, and it was on network TV.
See, this is why I don’t watch ads on TV (I either ffwd through them or mute them, in real time, since I’m not in TiVo World yet). Anyway: I think it’s less “cannibalism” per se than the notion that women are (merely) sources of pleasure, just as chicken and food generally is. As someone who was a teen in the ’70s and attended college at Ann Arbor and Madison in the early ’80s, it’s amazing and appalling to me just how far the backlash against anti-sexism has come. It’s one thing to argue (as about every woman I actually know does) that the Dworkinite version of feminism that dominated media accounts in the early ’70s was fucked-up because it dis-owned women from all but a few, carefully approved versions of their own sexuality…but no one seems to care in the least what the result of the endless, cumulative presentation of women in the most absurd, unrealistically sexual situations (and note that a non-sexy woman - conventionally defined - is all but worthless in these media creations). The young women I teach are conflicted, and sometimes pissed-off, at this, even if they can’t always express it: they feel forced to conform to a media-defined version of “sexy” (if only because the clothes they can buy are either that, or “I drive a minivan”…) but they’re pissed when men assume they therefore *are* those women in the ads, in the movies, on the web… (”Hey you! Rant on yr own blog, eh?”)
Ezra –
Thanks! I hadn’t seen that before. Reminds me a bit of the talking meat in the original Restaurant at the End of the Universe radio broadcasts. Brr.
2fs –
or, in other words, there to be consumed. You say “tomato,” I said “fierce red globular deadly nightshade cousin. Of Dooooom!”
Someone should write a book! Susan Faludi, maybe? But yeah, totally. When I talk to men younger than me — the men I once assumed would have been raised with fewer sexist attitudes and practices than I was — I see a depressing wholesale unironic embrace of objectification (hullo, FHM, Maxim, et al). Worse, I see guys talking as if concern about women’s rights is a sign of weakness. It’s not even “feminism = femininity” because, “feminist,” to a great many young people, evokes some violent lesbian cartoon loosely based (apparently) on the extremes of MacKinnon and Dworkin.
Maybe at least some of these guys will grow up and come to their senses as puberty recedes.
“Third base!” Nah, rant wherever you like.
Wow, you spent way more time watching this commercial than I ever did (I always just kind of ignored it, even to the point of hopefully not allowing it to seep into my subconscious). I feel for you, man.
Actually, I saw it only once or twice on broadcast TV, and then 3 times on June 13th (as a movie clip) just to make sure I remembered everything correctly. I admit I did notice (and include in the essay) a few things I didn’t specifically recall from the broadcast, like the tumescing french fries.