strung out on carrots

A quick round-up of gross TV ads I've seen this week:

1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
   Three new ads, literalizing common weight loss verbs like shedding and dropping, envision a public landscape littered by dieters' fat droppings, loosened from their bodies by diets and shed during the course of excercise. Increasingly unsurprised passers-by discover the droppings, sacked like saline implants, shaped like love handles, double chins, and bellies, and, depending on the shape, thick and limp like uncooked steak or pliant like a mass of play-doh. In the most disturbing ad, two boys playing on the beach approach a shored object: "Check it out, man!" "What is that?" "Looks like someone's belly." The belly, kidney-shaped and unnaturally pink, is half buried in the sand (not attached to a dead owner, presumably); the boys prod it with s stick, puckering and quivering the skin, and growing bored, leave it behind to continue playing.

2. 1 800 CALL ATT
   About a year ago, some friends and I were discussing the rationale for involuntary sterilization: Carrot Top. We'd noticed that, in recent ATT ads, the Carrot was looking increasingly, intimidatingly muscular, like a clown that could rape you.
   Others might think the Carrot's comic impotency makes him pitiable, harmless, and sexless, but the ATT ads have always had one clear message: American men, Carrot Top wants your women. And, on the tenure track to ATT spokesman, the Carrot's finally getting them. In the most recent ad, he tricks a beach stud into taking a fake call from a pay-phone; as the stud takes the call, the Carrot takes his girlfriend. The ad ends with the girl and Carrot Top flirting in the background; the cuckolded boyfriend frowns into the phone's reciever, and the Carrot's hand moves towards the girlfriend's hair. The gesture, cut in mid-action, creates an after-image of the Carrot Cock approaching, the threat of contact imminent and continuing.
   According to a FAQ page for 1 800 CALL ATT, Carrot Top "attended Florida Atlantic U. in Boca Raton, where he says he 'majored in skirt chasing.'" I'll be wearing pants until he's fired.

3. Sprint PCS Video Mail
   If there's any commonality to bad commercials, it might be this: they aim for humor, but imply violence. The detached chins and bellies recall leprosy instead of Gogol, and Carrot Top is too physically aggressive to be funny. A more obvious example of humor gone awry arrived earlier this month, just in time for Mother's Day; in the Sprint commercial "Sharing," a Sprint customer sends his mother a deeply passive-aggressive video message, an accusation in the guise of gratitude. Here's the transcript:

   "Sharing"
   a :15 film by Mark Sweeney

   Mark: Hey, mom. You've told me many times how painful my birth was 30 years ago, so, to sort of share in your experience, I'm going to take my hand and put it on this hot stove."

   He sets his hand down on the stove and screams.

   Voice Over: Introducing Sprint PCS VideoMail. Shoot it and send it instantly.

   Mark (waving burnt hand): Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

4. Dominos and Mountain Dew
   Recently, Dominos launched a series of ads (see one here) depicting men's Pavlovian reaction to doorbells. In one spot, a man teases his dog with a dinner bell -- stupid dog, running on command, he says to his friends -- before a doorbell rings and he and his friends, expecting Dominos, clamber to the door on all fours.
   Mountain Dew, in a new TV spot called "Dog Sled Men" (available here), plays with a similar idea. A pack of men, tied to a sled and running with their hands and legs, move across a snowy field. Dangling just beyond the men's reach is a Mountain Dew, tied to a stick held by the sled's driver, a self-satisfied white dog. A man watching them pass by grumbles, "They win every year."
   The point is, Mountain Dew is tasty enough to deserve such effort, and we should take advantage of our comparatively easy access to it. But both the Mountain Dew and Dominos ads portray the men who want their product as slaves to it, rendered dumb and too easily manipulated by their desire for it.
   Commercials often encourage the idea of rebellion: a new freedom from societal restraints via a new purchase. You're not supposed to laugh at the idea of a rebellious consumerism, or view the commercials as hypocrisy. But the Mountain Dew and Dominos ads depict desire as domestication (humans turned into dogs) or enslavement (to habit or a sled); the difference is, while the first type of ad encourages consumerism with a critique of societal restraints (most likely brought on by consumerism), the second type is a critique of consumerism made more obvious by the total absence of intended critique.