megacreepazoid (one)
13 June 2005, 6:59 pmIf you haven’t stopped reading in disgust by now, you may be wondering when (or if) you’re going to get to the payoff. Am I joking? I must be joking. I don’t really mean to suggest that a major fast food chain is promoting cannabilism?
Well, no. I think the chain wants people to eat their sandwich, period. But at the same time, I’m not joking either. I don’t think I’m reading much (if anything) into the ad that the responsible ad agency didn’t put there. After all, they wrote the blatantly porn-y lyric and filmed it line-by-line in a way that heightened its “fuck your food”/”eat your fuck” implications. They quite deliberately took inspiration from The Wizard of Oz (which these days, anyway, is a high watermark of wholesome family entertainment) and its positive associations, and spun it in an very sick direction.
And I certainly do assert that executives at the fast food company at signed off on the entirety of the implicit message. I bet they had meetings to discuss whether they’d gone too far, or hadn’t gone far enough. It can’t have been cheap to make. A lot of time and money went into presenting the message exactly the way the ad agency intended, and the client approved.
In fact, I think that was the whole point of the campaign. First, stop the channel zappers with arresting imagery (and sexist eye candy), then evoke revulsion strong enough to embed the product identity in the viewer’s memory. Sex to make you watch, cannibalism to make you remember. Because really, there’s absolutely nothing memorable or noteworthy about the using scantily clad women to hype products — that’s de rigeur. It was blurring the line between sex and food in a direct and uncomfortable way that garnered this commercial so much attention.
(There was another deliberate provocation of a negative reaction — the outrage generated by a popular performer “selling out” — that I’m not going to discuss, except to say that I think it was just as deliberate an element of the campaign as anything else.)
The spot was a raging success on at least one level (I have no idea how well the sandwich did, or does). Dozens of people wrote about it online, and talked about it in real life — it was a shortlived, but potent meme. And although many of the people were disparaging or critical, most of those people circulated the name of the product.
N.B.
One thing that may disturb me even more than the commercial iteself are the fan sites devoted to it. This first link will play the video on entry if your browser is configured to allow such things; it’s also got numerous screencaptures and a blow-by-blow that’s I think is about as scary, in its way, as mine is. Click, if you dare: Still, my Mom’s the only other woman I know that can take a sandwich like that.
Here’s a source for the lyrics that’s a little saner, and rich-media free. Just in case you wanted to check up on me to see if I was making any of this up.
And here’s an insiderish take from the self-professed tradepress.
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.