I wanted to introduce this feature with some original thinking, but that doesn't mean the thinking must be mine. In a letter to Mars Inc., Return of the Reluctant's Ed details the new M&M commercials' many crimes against his aesthetic sensibility:
Unlike Ed, I don't find this commercial more offensive than most. What distinguishes it is its explicit violation of art's sanctity, its unashamed admission that ads' relation to culture is cannibalistic. But these things don't creep me out, and my main problem with contemporary TV ads is how fucking creepy they've become. When it comes to the anthropomorphic M&M ads, I'm most disturbed by the sly implication that we want literal cannibalism, and that the world is not only composed of objects, but sentient subjects, created for our consumption. Anthropomorphized foods are made our equals only so that they can be our willing stomach-servants. And when they're not willing, as in the case of M&Ms, it's meant to be that much funnier. But I've discussed all this before.
M&M/MARS
Attn.: Consumer Affairs
800 High Street
Hackettstown, NJ 07840Re: Why I Will Never Buy A Package of M&Ms Again
To Whom It May Concern:Last night, while watching the Oscars, I experienced one of the most disrespectful and horrid television commercials of my life. The commercial was put out by your company and featured animated versions of your product entering a tableau from The Wizard of Oz – specifically, during the famous closing scene in which Judy Garland is waking up from her trip to Oz, only to realize that her family was representatives in her dream, and that, in fact, there was no place like home.
But instead of seeing her family, Judy Garland now wakes up to talking versions of your candies, and she reacts with delight. That you have violated the awe and wonder of the original scene, failing to respect its wonderful riffs on home and family, transforming it into a shameful sell for your product, and that you have seen fit to air this during a time block that is supposed to celebrate movies, demonstrates to me that not only is your company rapacious and shameless in its self-promotion, but that it has become a company I will now boycott with disgust.
Since you have seen fit to defecate upon a work of art, you have lost my business for life in the same manner that Hoover did years ago when they created a commercial in which Fred Astaire danced with a vacuum cleaner. I will avoid M&Ms, Mars bars, Milky Way bars, Snickers bars, Twix bars. If I ever own a pet, I will likewise eschew Pedigree, Cesar, Whiskas, Sheba, Kitekat, Trill, Aquarian and Winergy. No Uncle Ben’s rice for me. No Dolmio or Suzi-Wan, not that I would ever eat that crap anyway. And certainly no Klix or Flavia to drink.
Since your company cannot respect one of the most popular movies in the most popular medium of our time, I will neither respect nor endorse any of your products. I will encourage all of my friends to do likewise (at least three of them have agreed to boycott your company upon learning about the commercial this afternoon). I will also post this letter publicly on my website, so that others can recognize your company’s evils and refuse to give your company so much as a dime.
It’s probably a wise choice anyway, seeing as how your company hasn’t created a single good thing for the human body. But, oh, how you could have profited from my silly midnight munchies, or even the Halloween candy I buy for the kids each year, if only you had actually thought before destroying the poignancy of a really kickass movie.
Very truly yours,
Edward Champion
Good points, Chicha. I should note that watching the Oscars was, discounting DVD, probably the first time I had watched television in about three months. So I don't think I'm as inured to the appalling developments in ad culture as much as others. But commercials, as a whole, disgust me. Particularly when they contaminate the joys and imagery of good cultural things that I remember growing up. It's almost as if Mars is one-upping the Lucas "Star Wars" revisions, a current condition in which it is now impossible to find the original versions I remember seeing as a boy.
Except that the M&M commercials are being far more explicit in destroying these memories. Because they are not only adding the cannibalism that you describe (which puts a completely DIFFERENT spin on the home metaphor that Mars is bastardizing), but carving up recall and associating it with commercialism. It's not just an evil contextual thing, like putting the Beatles' "Revolution" to a Nike commercial. The revision here is, quite literally, wreaking havoc with a very important contextual process. It is not mere parody, which I could handle and dismiss. Nor is it art along the lines of sampling. It is erecting a Coca-Cola billboard in the middle of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" window. And I cannot abide by that.
What's really offensive is that Frank L. Baum was digustingly in favor of Native American genocide and felt Wounded Knee was necessary, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past."
So M&Ms, commercials and "classic" films are all irrelevant when you think of what this man actually stood for and believed. It is for this reason that my child will never read any of his work or see "The Wizard of Oz."
Whoa, did this thead get jacked, or what? =) Anyway, I just wanted to chime in with some words of agreement w/r/t the creepyness of modern commercials. More specifically, some friends and I were watching late-nite TV the other day, and yeah okay, we may not have been stone-cold sober =), but anyway what we noticed was: The overarching theme of about 1/3 of all commercials is, literally, hallucination! We have each continued to note this and it appears not to have been a figment of our collective imagination. People in commericals are constantly being transported to another land by eating/using/etc. the product, or the entire scenario takes place in an impossible environment. People fly, change form, and even blink in and out of existence. So anyway, check it out and see if what I'm saying makes any sense. I could be wrong.
Posted by: Eric on March 2, 2004 11:37 AMAnd Lewis Caroll was a pederast. And C.S. Lewis was a Christian proselytizer. And the many people masquerading as Carolyn Keene poisoned their pets. (Okay, maybe not the last one.)
Knut Hamsun was a Nazi. Fyodor Doestoevsky cheated his friends. Evelyn Waugh was antisemitic. John O'Hara was a bore.
Yada yada yada. There's a fundamental difference between the work and the person behind the work.
Or as Bill Clinton once said, "It's the art, stupid."
Posted by: Ed on March 2, 2004 12:05 PMNot a bore, but a boor!
Posted by: Ed on March 2, 2004 12:05 PMIt's candy and a movie -- THAT is not a big deal and that is what I am saying. There are bigger issues than candy and a movie.
And maybe John O'Hara was a boar.
Posted by: Alejandra on March 2, 2004 01:02 PMOK, what if the book is ostensibly about the empowerment of women, but is written by a woman that happens to be married to a man who has perpetrated countless crimes (directly or otherwise) against women:
Is that evil, funny, or just sad? I'm leaning towards #2 =)
Posted by: Eric on March 2, 2004 02:32 PMEd: I agree with your point about judging the art, not the artist. However, my inner anal-rententive geek would like point out that Lewis Carroll was NOT a pederast. He was neurotic, childish, and eccentric, but there's absolutley no reason to believe that he ever tried to or wanted to molest a child. Victorian thinking wasn't colored by the suspicion that dogs us post-Freudians, and they saw nothing particularly unusual in idealizing children - including nude children - and depicting them as emblems of innocence and beauty. Carroll's attitude toward children may have been somewhat sketchy by today's standards, but calling him a pederast is uninformed slander, pure and simple.
Okay, getting off my soapbox now. Sorry to hijack the thread.
Posted by: Michelle on March 2, 2004 09:06 PMEw, I hate typos. That should be "absolutely" in the third sentence. (See, I'm not kidding about being anal retentive.)
Posted by: Michelle on March 2, 2004 09:10 PMIn Baum's defense, I have read that he meant that article in the same vein as A Modest Proposal. Literalists... they shall be the death of us all.
Posted by: crip on March 3, 2004 07:56 AMMichelle: I couldn't agree with you more. Which was why I took the ad hominen low road in that last comment. Thanks for clarifying. In fact, here's a good Guardian article on the subject:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,582828,00.html
Posted by: Ed on March 3, 2004 08:00 AMWelcome to Milliways! And thanks for anthropomorphagic. (How long before we have a candy bar with the slogan "Bite me"? Or did I miss it?)
Posted by: nnyhav on March 3, 2004 08:15 AM