A Tale of Two Stupid Commercials

I watch some of the fine programming content Comedy Central makes available through their web page, which unfortunately means I see the same small set of commercials over and over again, ad nauseum (see what I did there?).

There's the regular stuff, happy pastel singing laundry detergent, horrible snide neighbors lording their smart phones over people, a kid who loves bacon so much he marries it (which ends with "you may now eat the bride" and a sickening wet chomp that is the stuff of nightmares). But there was one in particular that bothered me.

The ad follows a handsome, scruffy young man on the prowl for fresh lady-meat, but every time he comes close to one of his victims, flakes of head skin swarm from his rakishly unkempt mop like a swarm of cylon fighters, and the girl's face slow-motion freezes in a look of unnameable, lovecraftian horror before she vaporizes in a puff of cgi dust, leaving her discarded clothes. The young man looks sad to have missed an opportunity for sex, but doesn't seem particularly weighed down by the guilt of constantly annihilating strangers with the mere presence of his weaponized dandruff. He then goes home and shampoos with the advertised brand, and, miraculously three different girls appear (I think they're implied to be the same girls, but I don't think they are) without those pesky clothes that were left behind. They proceed to paw insatiably at his head, with that vacant, slightly bite-y look models wear on the covers of both Cosmo and GQ. "Don't lose girls to dandruff" the sophisticatedly accented lady announcer reminds you, in case you missed the message.

I know, intellectually, that the intended message of this commercial is "buy our dandruff shampoo!" and not "women who do not want to sleep with you functionally may as well not exist." But I went out of my way to be somewhere else when the unskippable ad came on. This one commercial is probably responsible for more clean dishes in my apartment than any two other factors combined.

So then a new ad came into rotation. "Don't you wish you could just make some things disappear?" a young woman in club wear asks, as a rat-like man with an open-to-the-sternum disco shirt seems to sniff at her from behind. She flashes him a disgusted look and he pops in a familiar cgi dust effect that sets her hair swishing playfully at the camera. She then walks toward us with swinging hips as she enumerates the virtues of the particular tampon she's trying to sell us. Across the room, a nonthreatiningly normal looking boy is being chatted up by two women you don't really see well before our off-screen heroine presumably splatters them out of existence with the sheer, horrible force of the obliteration power this new tampon has granted her. She then skips up and begins a happy conversation we can only assume he's smiling and nodding along to out of fear for not only his life, but his very physical existence.

This ad is also stupid, but it doesn't bother me.

And I got to wondering if that makes me a hypocrite. I mean, I like to think I'd also be bothered if the god-murderess of the second commercial were going up to dudes and trying to engage them in tampon conversation, only to vaporize them horribly when they told her they just wanted to be friends. Tampon girl is malicious in a way dandruff boy isn't. Sure, her first murder could be argued to be defensive, or at least provoked, but all those girls were doing was standing next to a boy whose attention she wanted. They didn't deserve to die. Dandruff boy just wanders through a hellscape of unintended casualties (though he's either incredibly callous or really bad at pattern recognition to keep at it). Maybe I'd be upset if the dudes in the second commercial were as objectified as the ladies in the first. Dandruff boy's new shampoo lands him a silent, lustful harem and the implied promise of sex with at least two more women than we assume he has penises; while all tampon girl seems to want is a chance to talk to her boy of choice. These dudes don't have time for much development, but they do at least get "creepy potential date rapist" and "cute but normal boy", while the lady's characters are "sexy, horrified club girl", "sexy, horrified librarian", and "sexy, horrified gym girl", all of which dissolve away into "indistinct, hair-crazed sex-vixen". But those two other girls in the tampon commercial get about the same, and the second ad gives no indication that they will ever be rescued from the icy void of non-existence, not even for group sex with a previously unacceptable stranger.

I don't think I'm having this reaction because deep down I think it's more okay for girls to vaporize boys (and other girls) than for boys to vaporize girls.

But I do have to admit a large part of it probably has to do with the fact that the first ad is, to a certain extent, about me but not for me (girls will totally sex up a guy with a non-flakey head!), while the second ad is, to about the same extent, both about and for me (girls, tampons will make all your life's travails conveniently vanish!). I wonder if there are gentlemen out there, similarly given to pointless analysis, who rankle at the idea of a tampon-powered psychic serial killer cornering them after she brutally dispatches all the other perfectly nice girls. The boy in the commercial doesn't seem to mind, but then again, neither do the bitey towel girls in the shower-seraglio foursome.

I can't get over the feeling that the disparate responses I have to these two ads are meaningful. Telling. It's possible I think this because it's very late at night, I admit, but still.

It probably doesn't bear thinking about.

But I'm going to anyway. 

Anecdote III

This one's about language and how it can kind of trip you up.

I was in an introduction to psychology course, and it was our lecture on language and psychology, and the whole Sapir-Whorf concept that the language in which you think necessarily constrains the concepts you are able to articulate and conceive. (The example you will have heard is Eskimos having 52 words for snow, and to a lesser extent, Germans having their own broad clutch of beer words). I believe the book took the stance that language reinforces culture which then turns around and reinforces language.

One of the examples in the book was how the Japanese are a conformist culture, where the same word means both "to be different" and "to be wrong".

My professor knew I was taking Japanese classes as well, so he turned to me and said "you're studying this, is that true?" And I said, "well, yes, the word they're talking about is 'chigau'." But it kept niggling at me. The thing is, chigau isn't a word that carries a lot of moral weight. It absolutely means "to be wrong" but it means it in the sense of getting a question wrong, or having your facts incorrect- literally different from the truth. If you tried to use it to say "that's so wrong" or "what you did was horribly wrong" it would sound weird. In that case you'd want a word like warui or yabai.

That's the thing. There's probably something to the whole "different" = "incorrect" statement, but I can't help but think there's also something important to the idea that the concept "incorrect" in English uses the same word as "morally abhorrent".

We take some very strange things for granted.

Anecdote II

Barbara A Barnett's post about desperately trying to increase the audience for the opera company she works with, along with her link to Random Acts of Culture made me think of this story.

I used to work for [a large credit reporting agency], in their small business department, which they have since eliminated (I left some time earlier in a fit of moral pique over having my incentives tied to upselling and actively discouraging refunds in the "help" and cancellations department, as well as having to clean up some persistent dishonesty from the sales team, and frankly, walking away from that job was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life). One of the extra responsibilities I took on in order to have more things to do so I wasn't sitting around when no calls were coming in was a weekly mass-emailing of sales figures to everyone on my team.

Because I was bored, and because I thought to myself "well why the hell not?" at the end of the e-mail I attached a little poem. Ozymandias by Shelley. At the time, I thought nobody would even notice. The poem was bellow all the required information on the report, even under my signature. And even if they did notice it there, it was out of the way and it wouldn't be a bother.

To my surprise, I very quickly got back an e-mail thanking me for the poem, and letting me know it was also one of the recipient's favorites.

Every week I would put a new poem at the bottom of the e-mail. I know I put in Invictus, Still I Rise, Because I Could Not Stop For Death, Annabel Lee and a little bit of Fungi from Yuggoth for Halloween, To His Coy Mistress, a bit of Neruda, Frost, Coleridge, Lorca, Kipling, Hughes, and honestly I don't remember what all else. It came to be something I would really look forward to, and spend time researching to prepare for, and after I had sent my little poems off into the ether, I would get back e-mails or quick pats at the copy machine. Such and such poet was their favorite. Hey, that last poem was really cool. Thank you, I'd never heard that one before. One of my coworkers in particular got into long conversations with me about poems and books. Another found out I liked Spanish surrealism and produced and lent me a copy of Un Chien Andalou, which I had never seen before. I think I read more poetry at that job than I have at any time before or after, and looking back, even years later, the whole thing makes me smile.

One of my personal failings is that I tend to assume nobody else is interested in the things that I love, and I don't offer things up as often as I should, whether they're poems or stories or comic books or bits of trivia or anecdotes. So sometimes it's nice to think back on times when I've done it, and it's worked out beautifully. 

Anecdote

My apologies to the gentleman in question, but I love this story.

When I was first beginning to write seriously, I dated a fellow I quite liked, but who was not per se in love with me. We had a lot of fun and we're still good friends, but during that time, he knew I wrote but I did not show him what I considered not to be adequately finished products. In my defense here, I didn't really show them to anyone.

A bit after we broke up, I got my first story published. I was ecstatic, and because we were still friends I called up to tell him about it. He said he was definitely going to read it, and I told him that was very sweet. He said yes, he was going to read it, and this time I couldn't stop him.

We talked a bit about it, and he mentioned how it had always kind of hurt him that this was something that I obviously really loved, but didn't share with him while we were together. I apologized. I really hadn't ever meant to hurt his feelings, I was just really self conscious about what I was doing. I promised to send him a couple of things I had written if he liked.

He said he would, and then, magnanimously, that it didn't even have to be one of the ones about him.

To which I said... well... none of them are about you, actually.

And he said surely some are.

I asked him if he was aware I wrote stories about zombies and unicorns and whatnot?

In the ensuing conversation I spent twenty minutes desperately trying to convince him that at no point had I modeled any characters off him, or written out any of our conversations verbatim, or populated my stories with relationships that were his and mine- because that's what writers do! he insisted. Copy real life and make fiction of it.

In the end, I did not send him the stories, because I was terribly worried he'd look at my murderers and evil gods rising from the floor of the ocean, and all he'd see was me nagging him about the hair in the drain.

the End.

Private Person

I took a creative writing class back in college. All of us were assigned poems and all but four of us were assigned short stories. The remainder, which included me, were assigned "creative nonfiction"- that is to say a narrative presentation of something true from our own lives.

What I wrote was a rather loose narrative of sitting at my keyboard, having had an incident of genuine personal revelation that was truly important to me, and all of the reasons I had no intention of writing it for the class. It got a mixed reaction from the other students, but the teacher liked it, so I suppose that's alright.

I've been thinking about it for a number of reasons, though the immediate catalyst was reading other writers' blogs and watching them share things so heartbreakingly personal that I would hesitate to discuss them with the best of my friends. And here they were, flinging them out into the uncontrolled void, to land on who knows what sharp rocks, to be exposed to the unknown elements of other people's minds and hearts. I was jealous, mortified, exhilarated, and I think a little ashamed.

Part of the reason I think it's all knotted up in my mind is that that specific honest emotional component is something I had genuinely loved about those writers' stories, and I think it's something that's often missing from mine. And I don't think there's a good way to fake it, which means I would need to open myself up to the weird distant intimacy that comes when you really put yourself out into your fiction. I'm not really comfortable with that, except in very specific ways. I think the thing I'm least willing to share with people is joy, honestly, and I think it's fair to say that my writing comes out a little darker and more hopeless for it. Joy's a funny thing sometimes- light and delicate as a soap bubble, and while it's probably tougher than I usually give it credit for, I have a terrible tendency to hoard my little joys to myself, for fear that others, not understanding, will mishandle them or mock me about them. I'm generally quite a happy, upbeat person, but if I were a house, I would tend to entertain on my front porch, and most of my back rooms would be tightly locked.

In life and in writing, it's something I probably need to work on.