Oh no.
Oh no.
I still can’t watch the end of this ad. As soon as I saw the logo on the cap, I clicked out of the window and threw my computer into the ocean and contemplated throwing myself in as well, thinking, I cannot do this, I simply cannot exist in the same world as a Subway ad masquerading as a Richard Linklater movie.
Coming on the heels of this toothless Vulture History of Brand Twitter, the reveal of the Subway-Boyhood Abomination sent me spiraling into despair.
The Vulture piece, incidentally, is its own grotesque. It was written, as the author cutely “full disclosure”s somewhere very far down, by someone who runs a Brand Twitter Account. But it is also, apparently, a piece of Branded Content, judging by this little thing off to the side which I honestly did not notice until I looked the story up again to link to it here.
This explains the absolute toothlessness of the piece and why Vulture didn’t pay someone to take a truly critical eye to the entire practice of companies appropriating the human experience and instead got the SteakUmm’s dude to wax rhapsodic about how great the Denny’s social media team is for hiding extremely small text in syrup.
(Look. I make most of my money shilling for companies these days so I’m not necessarily going to dunk on people just trying to make a living, but for me personally every day I can feel part of my soul shake itself loose and dissipate into the ether and I wonder what will happen when all of the pieces are gone but hopefully my ship will come in before that happens.)
But all right so why. Why, in a world in which children are being held in concentration camps and people are dying from insulin rationing and mass shootings are a near-daily occurrence, does an three-year-old advertisement send me reeling?
Because theoretically there are things one could do to try and stop these things: badgering elected officials, throwing one’s body on the line for others. The efforts may be futile, but they can be made. You can try.
But you can’t stop a company from using the terrible beauty of the human experience for its own gain.
As friend Mike Cavalier pointed out on Twitter, the level of cynicism it takes to produce and disseminate* an ad like this for fucking sandwiches is simply breathtaking. He smartly calls it “accidental avant garde art.” This ad gave me prions, so I don’t have too much to add.
There is no part of your life that will not be sponsored, that will not be used to sell you something. I used to roll my eyes at old-school hippies who harped on the evils of consumerism, and I think now it’s because the complaints I was presented with just weren’t articulate enough about what art in service of advertising does to one’s spirit. (Probably intentionally so.)
The Vulture piece being an advertorial and the Not Boyhood short being a Subway ad are bad in a way David Foster Wallace described so well that I’m not even going to bother doing anything other than just quoting him, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
“An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”
Eat fresh,
Oriana
*In Brazil, apparently, which is why it took so long for Americans to see it.