megacreepazoid (one)
13 June 2005, 6:59 pmBut we’ve now entered the post Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me! world. The fast food companies have to retain markets that are increasingly aware they provide virtually nothing of value. (They used to offer convenience, but the microwave oven effectively removed that differentiator.)
In the new age, apparently, anything goes.
“Soylent Pink” has an innocuous surface veneer that steals equally from the Wizard of Oz and H.R. Puff’n'Stuff. It’s rich with visual allusions, especially to “Oz,” with yellow “bricks” of cheese and (in the 60-second version) a black & white “prologue.” But it’s also a full-on cannibal sex orgy that doesn’t shy away from any aspect of the “women = chicken,” “chicken = food,” “women = food” triangle.
For a 60-second spot, the sheer quantity of double-entendres and troublesome images is perversely impressive. Withdrawal symptoms kick the song off — the vocalist is “jonesin’” for “breasts [that] grow on trees,” and “streams of. . .dressing.” It goes on to imply that the product user will encounter a “train” full of women, that the consumer’s “wildest fantasies” will be realized, including depilation at the hands of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, a lottery payout, a life of perpetual indolence (”you get to veg all day”) and a wholesale suspension of societal contracts (”never get in trouble [or] need an excuse. . .no one tells you to behave”).
(I’d like to point out right here that the succesful practice of cannibalism does require wholesale suspension of societal contracts.)
Meanwhile, the viewer is hammered by a line-by-line visual presentation of the lyric.The word “breasts” is synchronized with a woman moving a sandwich on a path from the tree where it’s grew, past her mouth, and toward her own overinflated bosom. A pair of women made up to look like twins dip their hands between their legs (into buckets, but still) and then lick their fingers, all the while spattering the landscape with white goo. More women kneel submissively, pump a large phallic object, and gyrate suggestively. The women are all young, leggy, chesty, and none of them are wearing much.
Since it’s the 21st century, fried potato sticks also grow phallically (”like weeds,”) as two young men lean into one another. That supplies a homoerotic undercurrent. And cheerleaders menace another lad with a straight razor to add a bit of, er, edginess.
Still, there’s no mistaking overriding message of this spot: fuck/eat the food/women.
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.