I’m flying, but all I want to do is write. That’s kind of messed up.
I have the window seat. I always do. I’m traveling from West Palm Beach to Charlotte as fast as any human being on earth ever has. The wing is getting in my way, but I can see out the corners of the window that the clouds of our earth are an eternal range spread out below me; infinitely far below me. I have cruising altitude. The continent that I live on, and birds and traffic lights and Olive Gardens, and everything I know and hate and have never thought about, is a blurry glass surface far far away.
And all I want is for the captain to approve the use of my electronic devices, so I can take out my laptop and start writing a story about a teenage ghost that I probably won’t finish.
And a glass of water. A glass of water would be nice. But the beverage cart is still five rows away.
Since I’m a week late to this Superbowl party, so I’ll just drop off my gift and be on my way. Here it is:
The buzzalicious two-minute Weiden mini-epic for Chrysler, ‘Halftime in America’, is not good advertising. It certainly looks like it is. And it is certainly an original and terrific effort. But it isn’t good.
The reason you might mistake ‘Halftime in America’ for good advertising is the apparent quality of the writing and the defiant, uplifiting effect of the message. Both are oversold. The writing – while I wholeheartedly approve of its Riney-esque ambition to do literary storytelling in prime time – is a lot weaker than it looks. And the message is sentimental obfuscation: It milks the company’s troubles but leaves out the obvious and much less sympathetic bits, hoping that talking about Detroit in a gravelly voice will make the audience forget that the company took an awful lot of money it didn’t earn. And it may well work. The ad is shot beautifully and the story, misdirection though it is, is nicely human. But a sweet spot isn’t an honest one.
Here are my problems with:
The Writing
The Metaphor is incomplete to begin with – It’s halftime in America. So America is in the middle of a football game. Mssr. Eastwood* reminds us clearly of the competition this entails. The second thing we hear from him is that “Both teams are in the locker room, figuring out how to win this game in the second half.” America, it seems, is one of the teams in a great economic competition. Who then are we playing? We’re left dangling. China? Probably not kosher for this ad. Hopelessness? That certainly could have worked. But it wasn’t tried. Incomplete.
Then they break the metaphor – As the spot comes to its end, and we expect some sort of summation, Clint tells us “This country can’t be knocked out with one punch” and that’s the end of it. So, apparently, its halftime in a boxing match. Sure, sports metaphors are always kind of cheesy, but commit: America is going for the fourth down. America’s at third and goal, whatever, just stick with it.
* – and Clint Eastwood was too much. He’s got a great tough-sounding voice. But so does the guy who usually does Chrysler’s voiceovers. The whole time you’re watching, you’re wondering whether it actually is Clint, and then, how cool he is. It’s borrowing interest in a much more obvious, and less legit, than the way they handled last year’s celebrity cameo, when Eminem appeared at the culmination of their Superbowl spot.
The Message
Yeah, it’s pretty political – Come on, “It’s halftime in America”?
The fact that you’re going to turn off 40% or so of your audience could be something of a problem. I don’t mind that so much, because it makes a statement that people can also really identify with, so it can come out even or better. What bugs me about this particular spot is that it’s more political than it need be to have that effect. From last year on, the messages have been about Detroit: The city’s spirit, pride and determination. And for as unpopular as the bailouts may have been, it’s hard to dislike an underdog.
But with “Halftime in America” we start talking about America, which is a much bigger and more complicated fish. By linking America’s troubles to Chrysler, Weiden’s is opening the door to a lot of other, non-auto related issues that people associate with the late recession. That’s a gamble I don’t think paid off. By explicity talking about “the fog of division, dischord and blame”, and showing the Fox News and protest clips, you’re trying to get people to transcend all the negative feelings they’ve had and buy into a heartwarming “we’re coming back” vibe, but those cues also invite viewers to think about their opinions on a bunch of controversial stuff, real and important opinions. And though it could just be that I’m a bitter, anti-bailout dead ender, the way the spot does it, it seems like its dividing the audience by trying to unite them.
And also, finally, on the message: There’s an awful lot of “we” in it. “We’re going to come back”, “we’re going to find out way”. Political campaigns have been doing that so much over the last couple year – talking upliftingly about “we” and “all Americans” as a way of suggesting that no reasonable person disagrees with what the speaking politician is saying – that I kind of think the public sees through it by now. It just feels more manipulative than it might have years ago.
I know, I know, flash mobs are a joke now. But hear me out: Whenever it is that the people of North Korea get access to cell phones, Twitter or independent thought – I think they’re going to take flash mobs to a dizzying new level.
So, inspired by a friend of mine who singlehandedly invented Moustair and was internet-famous for two days last month, I decided to create a meme to my portfolio. Something serially hip. Some video or photo or cultural burp wrapped in eight layers of cross-grain irony. Something funny, but not laugh out loud funny, that you’d share on Facebook and the immediately wonder why you’d shared it. I thought it would add a little more tongue and cheek to my repetoire. Plus, I wanted to be internet-famous too.
I kicked around a couple ideas, but after a chance reference to ’80s TGIF tentpole Perfect Strangers yesterday, it came to me cold. My meme would be Bronson Pinchot Porn.
Not porn in its literal meaning. What I’d do is take old footage of semi-comedian Bronson Pinchot looking and acting like Bronson Pinchot and then I’d iMovie it together into a two minute video. Then I’d get some stock audio of a ribald’70s bassline, the kind that sounds like shag carpeting and chest hair, and I’d layer that on top and call the whole dumb thing Bronson Pinchot Porn. And I’d put it on YouTube and then you’d forward it onto all your friends, because once you find out there’s something called Bronson Pinchot Porn, you can’t just not do anything about that fact.
So I started searching YouTube for Balki clips. I thought I’d find five or ten old Perfect clips. There were tens of thousands. (None from after 1996, apparently Bronson bought a small town in Pennyslvania and is in semi-retirement now, but from ’87 to ’93 the man would talk to anyone with a TV camera.) And among the horde was this video, which broke my heart in two and licked my brain:
Bronson Pinchot Porn is so May 28, 2010, apparently. I mean, they doused it with Lady Gaga instead of bowm-chicka-bowm-bowm, so I suppose there’s still room for artistic growth here. But somehow the possibility of merely exploring the new musical possibilities of an ironic Bronson Pinchot non-tribute just doesn’t give me that pioneer frisson.
Extra devastating is the fact that the author of this video apologizes for the poor quality, as this is his “first Bronson video”. Which means there must be more. Which means this must be an established genre. Which means the coming up with the idea for Bronson Pinchot Porn no longer qualifies one as an original thinker. Which means I am out of words, and tears.
I am sure that you would want to know that all things are very very happy here in the Motherland generally, and in Boksigorsk in particular. As they should be.
The political education committee at our new aluminum plant threw a party for the whole town last week. I could not go. I was tired. But I overheard a miner talking about it on the street. He was talking to a city woman who stung me with her eyes even though I was only passing. The man said that at the party they all ate smoked sausages as wide as his wrist. (Though his wrist was small and dirty. I saw the artery in his wrist, like a greasy little chicken bone unguarded under his soft skin.) Anyway, I bet you wish you were back in Boksigorsk for that celebration!
Forgive me Uncle, but I don’t think you are enjoying England.
We only met one time before you left and that I was only eight.
But I know you Uncle. I know that wherever you work – maybe it is in a regional sub-department of the Ministry of Agriculture, in a rural English village where everyone else is standard – I know that you sometimes lock yourself in the paper and pencil closet and cry an hour. You make a meal for yourself maybe once every two days. But then you mostly just mush your dumplings into paste with your fork. And when you put your fork down, it feels as if you have been lifting tractors with it all day. It takes you months only to try and write a letter.
It could be that you have a quiet disease in your body: Maybe a bad cell that is eating you from the inside out, pausing only to vomit your own frantic memories back into your otherwise empty skull. If you are sick, surely you will go soon, and there is no need to inconvenience good doctors. If you are not sick, then this possibility is just one of many you use to try, in vain, to get yourself worked up. The shame, Uncle.
What would you say to yourself if you were in my position? How would you comfort yourself?
Your darkness is caused by the capitalists, most probably. But that is all academic for you. Because in the world of inside-your-head, the capitalists do not see you. On their sidewalks and in their commissaries, you are not even a curb or a table. Sometimes you think you could waltz into the queen’s very room as she took tea, strip yourself naked and run screaming in circles until you tripped and plummeted out the window, and not even her dog would bark at you.
Your life seems very hard Uncle. I don’t know how it will go for you. But here in Boksigorsk it is paradise.
When I finally woke up, around three in the afternoon, the light that stooped under the shades and into the bedroom was unconvincing. But there wasn’t any more sleep to be had. The only thing to do was go out to the bodega and get a soda.
Inside the bodega, the lights had all been turned out. The owner, apparently his name is Mr. Lee, was crouched behind the register. The top of his head was just peeping over the top of the counter-line, as bald and as quiet as an awkwardly placed cardboard box.
He was definitely alive because, without getting up, he spoke.
Even from an arm’s-length away, Mr. Lee’s breath was cloudy with Cool Ranch Dorito dust. He was double-fisting chips back there: Absolute gobbling. But every muscle in the visible portion of his head remained still, and somehow he spoke straight through the crunching
“Thank the God you’re here,” is how he started.
As Mr. Lee explained it, a seven-foot man who he had never seen before had come into to the store just before noon, and purchased a can of V-8. Mr. Lee said very carefully that the man was an African-American gentleman.
The man paid for his soda meticulously, one dime and nickel placed one on top of another. Then the man broke the top of the soda open and finished it in one gulp. As the African-American man patted his mouth with a napkin, he said that he was going to destroy all the things that Mr. Lee had gained for himself since he had left Korea. The man listed those things in alphabetical order:
Conquered fears. Primarily those of large cockroaches, getting lost on a rural highway late at night, having to ask the wrong white person for directions, and snakes.
Mr. Lee’s eligibility for social security payments, scheduled to arrive in three years and four days.
The English language, which dwelled in Mr. Lee like an old but obedient dog.
Helen Lee, Mr. Lee’s wife.
Honey Nut Cheerios, the best part of a complete, balanced breakfast.
Kenya Lee, his 28 year-old daughter who had never dated anyone, so far as Mr. Lee knew, and lived in a city Mr. Kim might not be able to identify on a map.
Sandra Martinez, Mr. Lee’s girlfriend.
The red flannel shirt Mr. Lee had worn once a week, usually Thursdays, for 15 years; and the way the time-worn collar felt on the back of his neck.
Mr. Lee demanded, or tried to demand, that the man tell him why this was happening.
But before the man could begin, Mr. Lee thought he knew the answer, and tried very hard, so hard that his nose sweated and his English died, to assure the man that he, Mr. Lee, always treasured African American people and did not think they talked too loud on buses.
The man patted Mr. Lee on the shoulder. He did not say why he would do these things. But he did say how he would do them: Slowly.
All the things Mr. Lee had would go on continuing to exist. But slowly, the man would remove their weight, their delighting textures, and the saltiness of their being.
Someday soon all of these things would become fruit offered to and consumed by the spirits of the ancestors. Of course, in this world, one could still eat the fruit after it had been waved before the ancestors. But it would taste like the air in a locked closet, and it couldn’t keep you from starving.
Mr. Lee laughed when the African-American man used the word “ancestors”. And then the African-American man smiled and left, Mr. Lee laughed again.
The day was abruptly lighter. He had thought he was going to be robbed. Mr. Lee swept up and re-ordered ramen noodles from his distributor.
He felt like celebrating. He thought he might bring his wife a rose. But he didn’t particularly feel like that. He could also go see a movie by himself. He didn’t really feel like that either.
From what I understand, that’s when Mr. Lee began to panic.
I like Mitt Romney, enough to visit his web site once, a few weeks ago. Which I assume is why this ad found me, and started rubbing itself against my eyeballs as I was on Thesaurus.com yesterday.
oooh, or maybe we could get potato skins?
Like I said, I like Mitt Romney. He seems like a smart, reasonable guy who has a better sense of the economy and our entitlements crisis than Obama. And he doesn’t seem to have popped out of the same Fox News clown car as Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich.
That said, sharing an everything bagel with the man is a shockingly awkward proposition. I’m sure we could find something to talk about, but I would definitely bring my phone so I could set my DVR during our long, chewing pauses.
This whole My Brunch With Willard contest (I can’t be sure that’s what it really is; I didn’t have the heart to click on the ad and find out) is a self-deprecating joke that doesn’t know that’s what it is. But oddly, I think Mitt’s anti-charisma is probably one of the more satisfying reasons to vote for him.
Ever since Reagan, or Kennedy maybe, or who knows – maybe it was Warren Harding – there’s been this electoral expectation that the President should be someone you want to have a beer with. Every cycle, every candidate trips all over themselves to be just folks. And to some it comes naturally: Bill Clinton projected his nice-neighbor-in-chief persona quite well. Hillary Clinton, not so much. But every cycle, the impulse for the president to make himself someone you want to know on a personal level gets stronger. And over the last four years, Barack Obama has taken it to ludicrous new levels.
Obama’s personal charm is central to his presidency. In lieu of any pre-presidential accomplishments, his argument for being elected was that he was cool guy with a semi-inspiring story about his past. His logo was his name. He was more than a hip dude, he was the first president to be a brand. And while he doesn’t do the personal connection quite as well as Clinton, but he does celebrity a lot better, and the sheer volume of times he pops up on talk shows as if he were plugging a movie, and the number of attempts he’s made to settle a political problem by giving a prime-time speech that does very little but remind you that Barack Obama is still Barack Obama testifies, I think, to the fact that he’s convinced his charming Barack Obamaness is a really important part of his presidency.
I think a lot of people in media have bought into it. When was the last time you heard anyone on CNN mention Obama’s poor approval ratings without mentioning in the next breath that he remains “personally popular”? As if his personal likability were equal in importance to his job performance. Why not make a point of saying that though people think he’s doing a terrible job as president, most people do like his taste in ties? It’s nearly the same thing.
There has always been, and I think still is, a sense that Obama is coasting on his personality and hipness. That he’s in over his head, and all he can do to get out of it is smile and talk about hope. Recall that the two semi-successful anti-Obama ads of 2008 were Hillary’s “3 a.m. phonecall” ad, and McCain’s “celebrity” ad. These both worked because they hit his weak spot: That Obama was more a smiler and a celebrity than a doer.
If the economy is still stuck next summer, then this critique will still be lingering.
Which is Romney’s opportunity. If Obama was the guy we’d all like to have a beer with who couldn’t get the job done, Mitt can turn his awkwardness into an argument. He can sell himself, by contrast, as the guy we don’t really like all that much who can get it done. He can be the refreshingly boring, non-inspiring executive who you won’t see hamming it up on George Lopez or acting like America’s cool uncle because he’s busy turning the economy around.
Vote for Mitt Romney, because it’s not about Mitt Romney.
