The Mass Media Advertising Hydra

since i left home for college nine years ago, i pretty much dropped out of the pop culture grind. i stopped watching television regularly. i stopped listening to commercial radio. i stopped reading fluff entertainment mags, and i mostly stopped going to throwaway hollywood cash cow movies. in fact, i rarely went to the theater at all because renting movies was cheaper. this had nothing to do with a principled rejection of the gross commercialism in american culture. it simply was a matter of having limited dollars to spend.

as per my usual holiday routine here in oak ridge, i have become a couch potato. there really isn't anything to do here other than watch tv, eat out, go to movies, or shop at walmart. being short on funds, i have limited myself to obsessive channel surfing. suffice to say, i'm glad i dropped out of the advertisement-soaked, virtually talentless world of mass media.

there are exceptions of course -- the law and order television franchise, the lord of the rings trilogy, and so on. i do not live under a rock *all* the time. it's true that i can't name the hottest new sensations in teen rock pap, much less individual band members, but there are some things that penetrate my warm and fuzzy isolation from mass media's more idiotic creations.

i mostly object to the pervasive influence of advertising. this lucrative and effective industry has made popular entertainment a veritable wasteland. half of the movies and television shows coming out these days are franchise vehicles. lord of the rings is not an exception to this rule. my sister owns a gold-plated replica of the precious as well as a replica of aragorn's pendant.

i perused an entire catalogue of LOTR-related merchandise yesterday. you can buy life-size replicas of the various swords in the movies, or if you are timid about having medieval weapons in your house, you can buy letter openers that are replicas of the swords. you can also become the proud owner of a five hundred dollar chess set based on the movies.

but, i digress.

i went to see The Return of the King yesterday. before the movie ran, the audience was subjected to an advertisement in which some hunky, dusty shirtless cowboy ropes a car driving down the street in a old west ghost town. as the car drags the man through the dirt, a warning flashes across the screen to remind the kind of dumb fucks who die or horribly burn themselves imitating Jackass stunts that this should not be tried at home. the warning reminds those who were too dumb to notice this particular commercial fantasy takes place in a *ghost town* that the stunt was performed in an empty street.

so, the car drags the guy to an empty rodeo arena, where he jumps on top of the car and finally tames the wild beast. the camera zooms in on his dusty ass so that you can see the logo for his jeans before he opens the door and jumps into the driver's seat and drives off. there is no one else in the car.

what is the implicit message? that you can't drive unless you buy the jeans? or that if you buy jeans, your vehicle will come to life as a charging bucking car-beast that you will have to rope like a wild bull, taking the risk that you will be dragged through the street by a deranged version of kit from nightrider?

nah. the whole point of the exercise was to state that the jeans could withstand some 'real tough action.' of course, i've never feared that my car would come to life and drive off by itself. neither would i even think of roping it and taming it if it did. i don't even own any rope.

not to mention that the ad specifically orders the audience not to try this at home. so, why the hell would we need to buy the jeans then?

i've seen a lot of low budget As-Seen-On-TV ads lately. one of them is for a pair of electric scissors specially designed for the holiday season. it shows a woman ripping the shit out of some wrapping paper with a normal pair of scissors followed quickly by someone cutting gliding through the same wrapping paper as if it were butter with the electric scissors. "you will never waste expensive wrapping paper ever again!" the ad proclaims.

first, the wrapping paper in the ad is the kind you can buy at walmart for a couple of bucks. second, if you can't cut wrapping paper with a normal pair of scissors you're a dumbass. the only people who have a good excuse for not being able to perform this very simple task are people who suffer from arthritis, deformaties of the hand, or those who don't have hands at all. even so, most of those people could learn to do it with their toes. i've seen documentaries about people who learned to play simple tunes on the piano with their toes after losing their hands.

i also gather that the economy is still in the shitter. a few years ago, there was a low budget ad that ran non-stop when i visited for the holidays. it depicted a black woman assuring her viewers that even those with horrible credit histories could qualify for loans they needed for vital renovations on their homes. even having declared bankruptcy was no problem. the ad ended with the woman splashing around in a new pool with her family, a truly necessary addition to any home.

however, i haven't seen that ad once since i got here a few days ago, and if you haven't guessed already, i've watched a *lot* of tv. now, there are scores of ads for debt-counseling. some of the manipulative, exploitive companies who run these ads have gotten a lot a bad pr lately. now there is an ad that assures viewers that the service being advertised is different from those bad, evil people who took advantage of people's desperation and charged them thousands of dollars in hidden fees. you're just supposed to take their word for it.

i can't wait to get home. i'm sick of television. it really does rot your brain.