The long, lingering ending was a good idea, I think, suffering from poor execution. My problem is that there is too long of a lag between the climax (the problem) and the frame (the solution)--there is too much time spent thinking "What is this trying to tell me?" before the tag line comes. If they had put the tagline below almost right after the explosion while allowing the scene to continue, that might have worked better.
I think you're likely right about the time lapse between the tagline and the climax, but I wasn't bothered by this because I felt that the intent of the commercial was obvious from the moment that the landmine blew up. In retrospect, the commercial's meaning could be lost on some people, perhaps a good number of people, because of that time lapse.
And then there is the problem of the intro. Sure, they're trying to establish a scene of domestic tranquility, all well and good, but people watching commercials are already bored and relaxed. You don't give them a reason to change the channel, you interest them enough to keep watching. They could have baited the trap, so to speak, in six seconds instead of twenty: people know what life insurance commercials look like. They could have made that work for them instead of against them.
Again, I think that it was meant to be boring and I believe that this was used to good effect. Perhaps I'm an abnormal TV viewer, but I, and most of the people I know, usually don't channel-surf during commercials if we're watching a program we are interested in (for fear of missing something) and so instead zone-out or go to the bathroom or whatever during commercials.
With this in mind, the commercial creates a sense of security, a need to not watch the television, that is disrupted by the landmine in much the same way that the scene would unfold in reality. I imagine that the effect would be: Oh, soccer. Car commercial? Dinner. Eating soup. An explosion. What the hell? Screaming. What the hell? Oh my god. Landmines.
I suppose the ad's efficacy depends largely on its audience, as all ads do, but it seems to me that most of the people watching CNN are people who zone out during commercials instead of compulsively channel-switching.
Also, once again, I suspect that the minute-long version of the ad, with the protracted introduction, would not be run for long. It would run long enough to catch some people, generate buzz, get people gabbing and blogging, and then be replaced with a more obvious, snappier version. The main idea, I think, is to grab those people who aren't compulsive channel-changers, shock the hell out of them, and make them tell their friends.
While I doubt it's the reason they won't show it, it is, critically speaking, a terrible ad. If I were their employer and they offered me this ad, I would fire them. It's a minute long. It spends a lot of time (and attention span) on unnecessary exposition. Then, even after the point has been made, it lingers and lingers. Compare this to a typical ad spot of 15 seconds. It could the same thing better in a quarter of the time.
And it has a terrible tag line.
The tagline, alas, isn't what it could be, I'll grant you that.
However, I'll have to respectfully disagree with your other criticisms. With regard to length, this is most likely the long version of a commercial; it's not uncommon for there to be a longer version of a commercial that runs for a few weeks before it's replaced by a parred down version once the message has gotten out. Think, for example, of the Volkswagen ad for the New Beetle convertible (the one with the man with the interchangable day-parts); a minute-long version of the ad played in movie theatres and on television for about a month before a cut version (I think it was 20 seconds) replaced it. By the time the short version came around, it was meant to do little more than remind you of what you had already seen.
That's how most ads work: they remind you of a product you've already seen. You don't need more than fifteen seconds of Coke because you already have a familiarity with Coke. When introducing a new product, ad agencies often have longer commercials that are meant to imprint their brand or product on your mind so that shorter commercials can be used later.
Artistically speaking, the ad's long, slow beginning is meant, I think, to lull you into a sense of security. The camera work and sound design suggests, say, a life insurance or car commercial so that you're that much more shocked when a bomb quite literally goes off in the middle of everything. It's not needless exposition so much as it is misdirection, a narrative bait-and-switch.
The ending, meanwhile, lingers in order to give a sense of aftermath and devestation. The idea is not to convey how excruciatingly awful it would be to be blown up by a landmine, but how torturous it would be to witness something like that happening to your sibling, child, or friend. The ending lingers in the hope of making the message likewise linger. I can't speak for others, but the parts of the ad that I will best remember are the images from the denouement: the screaming mother, the sister by the crater, the soccer player rubbing blood on her sock.
I imagine that the shorter version of the ad will lop the beginning and ending off wholesale. The commercial will likely begin in the middle of the soccer game and go to black after the explosion. If it doesn't go to black, the (bad) tagline will likely appear over one of two images: the little girl standing next to the shredded earth, or the mother being held back as she screams.
(A good introduction to the good ad/bad ad, long ad/short ad idea can be found in this Slate article.)
"P. D. Poppies, my apologies in turn for being testy."
No problem; I understand.
Nothing ticks me off more than someone deliberately misrepresenting what I've said in the course of a discussion, thus why I'm so chagrined at having done it. Apologies again.
You ever have a week that you'd just like to write off and never remember again?
"With all due respect to PinkDreamPoppies
"Only context saves this from spit-take LOL type funnyness. Stuff. You know."
It is pretty funny that someone's saying something so formal and respectful with a patentedly absurd name in it. I hope I'm not missing something...
It really isn't a good idea, I don't think, to read a comment on a blog while trying to get information about a computer from a seventh grader. Patrick's perfectly reasonable comment became something like this:
"With all due respect to PinkDreamPoppies, I think some of this speculation is based more in latter-day legendmaking than in biographical reality. [Mr. Teter--- Mr. Teter--- I, um, I, um, I need some help with, um, with] Up until Lennon's connection with Yoko Ono, the band member who persistently displayed the liveliest interest in experimentalism and the avant-garde was Paul. Keep in mind that while the other three all settled down in big suburban mansions as soon as they were millionaires, it was McCartney who moved into central London and immersed himself in the hipster nightlife of the mid-1960s. [And the screen it's like--the screen it's like black and stuff and--It's broken.] Revolver and Sgt Peppers didn't happen because John Lennon was zoning out on drugs in Kenwood, they happened because Paul was spending his nights at Stockhausen concerts and gallery openings and poetry happenings.
"An excellent book about all of this is Barry Miles' copiously-researched McCartney biography Many Years from Now, which unlike most other Beatles books thoroughly embeds the band's history in the context of the pop-culture and London art-world scenes of the time."
Holy crap. I thought that Patrick was being a bit short and it turns out that I'm a total ass. Mea culpa. Mea big culpa.
That isn't at all what you wrote, and I apologize for mischaracterizing your statement.
Perhaps it's extreme to say that Paul wouldn't have ever evolved past the happy-clappy pop confections of the early Beatles, but I don't think you can honestly say that John was not the more daringly experimental of the two and that he was the first of the Beatles to begin to experiment.
Paul may have immersed himself in the London scene, but John seemed to have taken the experimentalism further than Paul. While Paul wrote "Magical Mystery Tour," John wrote "I Am the Walrus." While Paul wrote "Yellow Submarine," John wrote "Tomorrow Never Knows."
It seems to me that when people say that Paul authored some of the Beatles' weirder songs, this is a reflection on subject matter more than on composition or sonic experimentation. "Yellow Submarine" or "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" have strange lyrics, but they aren't sonically experimental in the way that "Strawberry Fields" or "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" are.
On "Revolver," the songs that stand out as being the most progressive are John's compositions (particularly "Norwegian Wood") and this is pattern that continues. Whatever experimental direction the band went in, John seems to have done it first. This isn't perfectly true in all cases, but it's also not accurate to suggest that John was laying about strung out on drugs while Paul did all the hard work and came up with all of the good ideas.
I've thought for awhile now that John was an indie-type musician who lucked out by ending up with a band who did a lot to curb his experimentalist bent. If he had been on his own, he would have ended up recording, say, two hours of static and screeching and backward tape loops. He would also have released albums with tracks of unmitigated brilliance, but I suspect that they would have been lost in the static.
Paul, though, I don't think would have evolved much past his early work with the Beatles without someone(s) to grapple with and to push him to be better than "Elvis Beatle." He's an extremely talented musician who has written some brilliant songs, but from all of the accounts and interviews I've read, it doesn't seem that something like "Hey Jude" would ever have been written if he had not been playing with and off of the other Beatles and George Martin.
On a related topic, as much as a John Lennon halftime show might have been interesting, I'm willing to sacrifice that in exchange for never ever having to see the pathetic spectacle of "The Beatles Reunion Tour." There's something about the thought of the Beatles, aged and wrecked, banging through their hits in some made-for-TV spectacle. Paul, I think, would be his usual charismatic self; Ringo, workmanlike; John and George, though, I don't think would have looked like they were enjoying themselves too much.
I should have been somewhat more specific: I don't think that torture has been mainstreamed in a way that it never has before, but that it has enjoyed a reemergence into the popular culture and that it is stronger than it was previously. If you consider the vigilante flicks of the late seventies and early eighties ("Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" come to mind) there is a palpable difference between those movies and the more recent revenge fantasies clogging the box office. In "Dirty Harry" there is a sense that the movie's world is, as another commentator said, "morally gray." Clint Eastwood's titular character is portrayed as being unpleasant and, most importantly, other characters in the movie comment on his methods with disapproval. He is, yes, right in the end and it was, yes, necessary to violate or transcend the law in order to properly met out justice, but his morals and methods were questioned by a stock character from 80's revenge flicks: the police chief. This dissenting voice, no matter how shrill, balding, and worthless, at least provided a counterpoint to the movie's vigilante/revenge themes.
In counterpoint, "Man on Fire" has Denzel Washington's character torturing kidnappers but there is no suggestion at any point that what he is doing is not ethical. There is no chief of police to question his methods or to ask "when does it stop?" There is not that requisite scene from 80's movies wherein the cop is asked for his badge. In fact, the movie goes out of its way to make it clear that had his rampage never occured justice would not have been served. More egregiously, and more subtley, the movie creates an association between Denzel Washington's character and Christianity---making it plain in a few key scenes that he has been put in that situation through divine intervention and that his vigilante rampage is being guided by the hand of God.
During the 90's---the Clinton Era, if you must---there seemed to be fewer vigilante/revenge movies and more effort put into the question of whether or not and in what situations torture is acceptable. The aforementioned plot twist in "Sum of All Fears" is a good example; another examples is from, curiously, another Denzel Washington movie, "The Siege." The hook is that New York City is under attack from fundamentalism Muslims who have been bombing various places to the point that the Army has taken control of the city and anyone with even a passing resemblance to an Arab has been locked up. At one point the Army captures a man they believe may have knowledge about the terrorist attacks and they torture him for information. I think that they end up getting some valuable information from him, but the relevant scenes were staged in such a way as to suggest that what the Army was doing was wrong regardless of potential benefit.
Perhaps the rise, fall, and reemergence of the vigilante/revenge motif in popular culture can be traced to two things: the relative popularity of conservative ideals, and the threat of sudden attack, first from the Soviets during the Cold War and now from terrorists. As someone else mentioned, the conservativism on display in the works mentioned has its basis in the idea that government is, by its nature, incapable of reacting to threats and delivering justice and that it is necessary for private citizens to rebel against government in order to restore goodness and justice to the world. This idea becomes more popular, I think, when people feel threatened, powerless, and as though their government has not done enough to protect them and/or get revenge. Additionally, the "ticking time bomb" scenario becomes much more black-and-white when it's emotionally resonant with the current situation; it's easier to say that torturing someone to prevent a bomb from going off in twenty minutes is wrong when you don't believe that a bomb very well could go off in twenty minutes that will kill you and your entire family.
I guess what bothers me about Digby's argument is that it seems to be untrue, at least in recent years. Yes, "cruel and unusual" has been written into our constitution, but popular culture seems to be trending toward a more accepting view of torture in "extreme circumstances" and a narrower view of what constitutes the "cruel and unusual."
Vigilante movies have been increasingly popular since 2001, the most egregious example of which I can think of being "Man on Fire," that charming motion picture in which Denzel Washington tortures and kills dozens of people in order to avenge the death of a little girl at the hands of evil kidnapping. The last season of "24" had the heroes torturing suspects to avert a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, reality television has reintroduced the geek show but has also normalized things that would usually be viewed as cruel and unusual.
I think that right now a lot of people are sympathetic to the idea that torturing in the name of "preventing another 9/11," and I think that popular entertainment, a reflection of the populace, supports that feeling. While I am, admittedly, buried in a pretty red area of the country, it wasn't uncommon to hear people say that what went on in Abu Ghraib wasn't torture but merely "intimidation" and/or was acceptable in order to protect "our troops" who were, in turn, protecting us from terrorists and "another 9/11."
I guess I can't bring myself to have as much hope as Digby does that people are opposed to cruelty. They may be opposed to cruelty when it's them or a proxy for them (e.g., a U.S. soldier) but I have seen little to disuade me from the impression that people in this country are very sympathetic to the idea that it's okay to torture "bad guys" and terrorists.
I've commented at length about this in other places at other times, but I've never been able to read anything by Neal Stephenson because I was so let down by Snow Crash. That, and I don't usually like sci-fi and, frankly, think that the man comes across as something of a jerk in both his stories (the aforementioned "masculine" writing) and in interviews. That normally wouldn't bother me (I don't believe in judging a book by its author) but for Snow Crash.
PinkDreamPoppies: Welcome to the waiting place.
As a fantasy geek, I'm pretty used to the waiting place. I've found that the trick is to temporarily forget that the series in question ever existed in the first place. The only problem with this is that, occaisionally, you'll genuinely forget that the series exists and/or will have time to evaluate what you don't like about it. This happened with to me with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time; at one time I was obsessed, but now I find the books to be virtually unreadable. At some point in time while waiting for book nine---Was it nine? Was Winter's Heart volume nine?---I lost interest and never really got it back.
But, yes, the Land of Wait for Honey isn't a fun place to be, is it?
Currently on the nightstand:
- Faust, Parts One and Two by Goethe, Trans. Walter Kaufmann
- LB Brief by Jane E. Aaron
In queue:
- Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker. The first was so beautiful that I'm not entirely certain that I have the courage to read this one in case the world is ruined for me. I've not yet been able to forgive Philip Pullman for turning into a wanker in the third part of both His Dark Materials and Sally Lockheart; it's made me wary of series whose first books are adored.
- Kokin Wakashu: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry by Various Authors, Trans. Helen Craig McCoullough. I came across her translations of some of the poems in this volume (also known as the Kokinshu) in a Norton Anthology. They were, far and away, the most beautiful poems I have ever read.
- Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, Trans. Alexander Pope. I'm a Pope fan and felt that, having suffered through the Fitzgerald and Fagles translations, it was time to read Homer as rendered (however non-literally) by someone with a poetic ear as opposed to an academic one.
Just finished:
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. As with most other things by James Joyce, I was more impressed by his sentence-level technical abilities than by anything else. Perhaps I would have enjoyed the story more had Stephen Dedalus not been a worthless human being, but I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm too old for this one.
- The Stranger by Albert Camus. An interesting read that becomes a sermon in the last ten pages. I feel that most readers would have grasped Camus' existential angsting without having Meursault spell it out in excruciating detail. This is, however, possibly the best examination of a sociopath I've ever encountered, even if Camus didn't mean for the story to go that way.
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. This won the Pulitzer? "The Third Continent" was published in the New Yorker? While one or two of the stories were beautiful, the majority of the book was of the style and at the level one would expect from a particularly talented creative writing class.
- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides. I'm not sure I can summarize my thoughts about this one quite yet.
Waiting on...
- A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin. The first book was clunky, but enjoyable. The second one still stumbled, but A Storm of Swords was brilliant.
I find it interesting that I've been unimpressed and uninspired by much of the "literature" that I've read lately, but have found staggering amounts of brilliance in "pulp." I suppose that I'm simply more interested in narrative, story, and character than I am in theme, symbolism, and craft. [shrug]
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 11 |
| 2004 | 3 |
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