August 2007 Archives
I've been watching a lot of late night TV recently - specifically G4's Ninja Warrior, which is an awesome show. The ads during this timeslot, however, seriously make me wonder about my fellow demographees. They range from phone sex lines to Valtrex (the genital herpes drug). One common ad is for Enzyte - "The once-daily tablet for natural male enhancement." There are many subtle - and not-so-subtle - cues about what the manufacturer of Enzyte wants us to think will happen if we take their product. Despite the private nature of the product's effect - or perhaps because of it - I think there's a lot of very interesting messages that are being projected from this ad. I think that the ad is also a classic example of one that has been designed to be interpreted how a person wants to interpret it - that is to say, conformant towards any given man's insecurities. This is good advertising.
- 0:00 - The music is reminiscent of the opening credits of Leave It To Beaver mixed with The Andy Griffith Show, but slightly offkey, giving it a hint of satanic - but harmless, maybe even wholesome - mischieveousness. The whistling is not solo, but soli. The message: many regular folks are experiencing the benefits from using Enzyte.
- 0:01 - Smiling Bob (that's his official name, by the way) suddenly stands erect from a downward-bent position. He, of course, is smiling - in fact, Smiling Bob never stops smiling - indicating his ceaseless happiness with the results of popping Enzytes. Bob is bowling - a regular-guy activity, providing further evidence that, in fact, regular guys take Enzyte (not just perverts, rapists, and pedophiles, for example). Bowling also evokes blue-collar values - but in this case, with flesh-colored clothes. Colors play a big part here: Bob's ball is blue; the color of Enzyte tablets is also blue.
- 0:02 - Smiling Bob bowls his ball. Bowling pins are all erect and, hence, evocative of phalli. The ball reinforces this image. Possibly suggestive color of the bowling ball - is it the Enzyte pill, or does the ball represent what Enzyte will cure instead? Bob gets a strike - perhaps signifying "perfection" in the bedroom?
- 0:06 - Narrator: "Bob continues to enjoy the big lift he gets from Enzyte." Six seconds in, and it still hasn't been explained to us what Enzyte exactly does.
- 0:08 - A chart with an upward-going arrow marked with the words "GAIN." What is being gained has been suggested but not yet explicitly stated. Suggestive placement of the hand behind the arrow. In concert, looks vaguely phallic.
- 0:10 - Smiling Bob's peer has to unnaturally crane and strain upwards to match Bob's manly stature. The message: you'll be the envy of every man. The word FORECAST figures prominently on the chart. Is that some sort of psychonym for some other word?
- 0:11 - Narrator: "Enzyte is firmly the number-one selling..." I fail to understand the barber imagery, though. Perhaps someone can explain it to me?
- 0:13 - Nothing subtle here. The commercial cuts to a television showing another commercial (how meta) with a brawny man, wearing a golden crown. The product or good being meta-advertised is also unclear, but it looks to me to be something like a Home Depot, a muscle car or truck dealership, or some other store that is traditionally perceived to exude masculinity. The words "Big Is Good" figure prominently in the foreground. The man is wearing a blue T-shirt articulated with a single letter: B. The base color scheme of the commercial is red, white, and blue. What could be more American than enjoying natural male enhancement?
- 0:14 - Pay attention to the man's hand gesture.
- 0:15 - The unsubtlety continues. Five men, making "big fish" gestures with their hands, are now standing on the word BIG. Flesh-colored packages (?!) in the background, in an inverted V. The whole scene reminds me of a person's groin. Sparkler sparkes emanate from behind and shower down. Wait, I thought this product enhanced penis size? Maybe it's all about - ick - volume?
- 0:17 - Three hands pointing to three instances of the same material: wood - a synonym for an erect penis.
- 0:26 - Smiling Bob is holding a golf club. Of course, it's a wood.
- 0:27 - Narrator: "Enjoy the full, robust confidence that only Enzyte can provide!" Still unclear what their product claims to do. Except provide confidence.
- 0:33 - A bunch of men that traditionally might be regarded as perhaps, well, somewhat less than attractive raise their hands, indicating their interest in learning what Enzyte can do for them. I love the male insecurities the commercial capitalizes upon: baldness, overweightedness, underweightedness, poor eyesight. I like the third guy from the right. He just looks down, concealing his crotch with a bucket of paint. He must really have something to feel ashamed about! Observe that the men are in a home-improvement store, reinforcing the brawny image.
- 0:37 - Look how far he shot that thing! Smiling Bob's companions look at other, making whistling noises. Also, the men are playing golf, indicating that Enzyte is appropriate for those who aspire to the upper middle class - not just the lower middle class, NASCAR crowd.
- 0:39 - Smiling Bob is racing a car, proving that Enzyte is appropriate even for hard-working, middle class Americans (and tough-guys) - not just the country club crowd.
- 0:41 - On the right is a big white circle. Is that meant to represent a human egg? Is this a fertility product?
- 0:45 - Narrator: "With an offer this big..."
- 0:49 - Smiling Bob and his female companion. Could pass for his wife. They look vaguely New Hampshire or Stepford Wives, with her 50s-era hairdo. Though the woman has a big smile on her face, the scene has a dose or two of puritanism. I see, Enzyte is really about [Christian] family values! The black and white photograph (and the stock footage of a war-era ticker-tape parade) reinforces the image that Enzyte users are, what? War heroes? Bonafide? People towards whom our parents and grandparents would be proud? Notice the absence of kids, too. Throughout the whole commercial.
- 0:55 - Narrator: "Enzyte: The once-daily tablet for natural male enhancement." The whole commercial has gone by and we still don't know exactly what the product does. The narration has been carefully worded, of course - no mention of words like "medicine" or "drug" surface during the commercials, despite a mediciny-sounding product name and a mediciny shape. In fact Enzyte is, as Wikipedia puts it, "a compound of herbs, minerals, and vitamins."
That's not the only Enzyte ad; there's a whole canon. There's another one continuing with the bowling theme. Smiling Bob mistakenly grabs another person's shoes. The shoes, or course, are huge. Notice the race of the man from whom he took the shoes. "This is the kind of improvement you can expect to experience!"
There's another one featuring race. I'll post it here without comment.
And others...
I was able to solve it in 12 16 moves.
SlateV's Emily Bazelon did an interesting segment about Farfour, a Mickey Mouse-looking character developed for a Palestinian children's program that was sponsored by Hamas. Under pressure from the Israeli government, Hamas arranged for the character to be dropped from the program. Farfour's exit manifested itself by the character being killed off by an Israeli interrogator. The whole segment can be viewed below.
I don't know if I would have gone for this when I was a kid. The production values are pretty poor compared to Sesame Street's, and I think I would have detected this. But it's fun to find such transparent instances where the state is trying to win the hearts and minds of the citizenry.
I've just started this book Roll The Bones. It's a history of gambling. I'm not sure how far I'll actually get in the book, but there was an interesting passage in the prologue:
Leaders from Julius Caesar to Franklin Roosevelt (who offered Americans a "New Deal") have used gambling metaphors to speak to the people.
It had never occurred to me that the New Deal was a poker metaphor. I always thought of New Deal as being a kind of new agreement, or contract, between the administration and the electorate. Very similar to Newt Gingrich et al's Contract with America.
Perhaps it's more complex. Maybe the name New Deal was a perception-management master stroke, designed for both pro-gambling and anti-gambling constituent audiences alike, and the interpretation was largely a function of perspective. Consider the following passage:
Young Dwight D. Eisenhower courted Mamie Doud with his poker winnings.... His vice president, Richard Nixon, had won enough playing five-card stud in the navy to finance his first congressional campaign. Atop the Republican ticket, however, both men downplayed their poker credentials, fearing they would alienate voters.
When I really look at American culture, it's pretty incredible the degree to which I discover gambling - particularly poker - has permeated our national identity and language.
John Nathan's Japan Unbound is one of the most fascinating books I've read recently. I've been celebrating a lot of books lately, but this one deserves special attention.
Drawing on his personal interviews with such gigantic artistic and political influencers such as Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, Shintaro Ishihara, Yasuo Tanaka, Yoshinori Kobayashi and others, the book is kind of both a history and an anthropological analysis of Japanese identity politics. There are many times, reading the book, when I felt maybe slightly personally offended by the interviewees' viewpoints. But that's a healthy thing - these kinds of experiences help jar a person out of one's notions of, well, how to live.
Shintaro Ishihara - the governor of Tokyo since 1999 - for example, is a figure that is largely reviled in the foreigner community. Naturally I picked up on this while living there, and, by a psychological osmosis, adopted similar attitudes to the governor. Maybe I'm naturally impressionable, but I think that this phenomenon is widespread.
In any event, Ishihara has made some pretty controversial, rather far-right statements, often about the foreign community. The following is taken from the Wikipedia:
On April 9, 2000, in a speech before a Self-Defense Forces group, Ishihara publicly stated that atrocious crimes have been committed again and again by illegally entered sangokujin (Japanese: 三国人 (third country national); a term commonly viewed as derogatory) and foreigners, and speculated that in the event a natural disaster struck the Tokyo area, they would be likely to cause civil disorder. His comment invoked calls for his resignation, demands for an apology and fears among residents of Korean descent in Japan.
There's been more than one time where I've talked to a Japanese who believed that nearly all crime was committed by Chinese or Korean nationals, so it seems that this unsubstantiated fact has been well-establied in the public consciousness.
But I can no longer write off Ishihara, especially after Nathan's interview with him. And there's also the fact that Ishihara is an acclaimed and accomplished writer. He's a complex dude. I don't entirely agree with his politics, but many of it has merit, I think. I find the following passage both very moving and revelatory of both Ishihara's bombasticity and his political acumen.
There is nothing mysterious about Ishihara: he is outspoken about his positions however abrasive they are. I broached the sensitive issue of Nanking: did he truly believe that Japan had not committed atrocities in China? Ishihara looked at me reproachfully, as though I had disappointed him. "I said the Chinese have exaggerated the numbers. You can't kill three hundred thousand people in six weeks. Besides, the entire population of Nanking at the time was two hundred thousand. In the hysteria of war, our army did some terrible things. But the United States destroyed three hundred and fifty thousand people in Hiroshima in a single day."I was emboldened to ask whether it was true that he hated the United States? "I don't like America particularly," he replied, "but I don't exactly hate it, either." Then he told me a story: "I was in the seventh grade, and we were living in Zushi, on the coast. We were in the flight path of enemy aircraft heading out to sea. The warning bell would ring while we were in class, and we'd take off for home. The Americans could see that we were kids, but they'd strafe us anyway for fun. If you made it to the woods near the beach, you were safe, but one day I got caught short and had to throw myself into a barley field. As I lay there, the Grumman Hellcats and P-51s came roaring over me, flying low, and I could see that they had pictures of naked women and Mickey Mouse painted on the fuselage. I couldn't believe my eyes! I was scared to death, and I was angry. But at the same time I was thinking what a place America must be, what a culture, and how much freer than Japan. Then I heard other planes but no machine guns this time; they were Zeros in pursuit, and the Japanese flag was painted on their wings. I'll never forget the sight of that rising sun floating over me. I still love the flag."
A young woman came in with our lunches on lacquer trays, broiled eel on rice for me and a plain bowl of noodles for the governor, whose stomach was bothering him ("too little drinking," he grumbled). Leaning across the conference table, he tore open the packet of spices I was struggling with, sprinkled it on my food, and said, "I'm a patriot. But the Japanese word, aikokusha, has fascist overtones. When I meet the foreign press they always ask if I'm a nationalist, and I used to say, 'Of course I am!' Like De Gaulle, or Kennedy or any other government leader. Then an English friend warned me that nationalist in English has the same ugly resonance as aikokusha in Japanese. Now I use the English word patriot even when I'm speaking Japanese. The point is, politics and writing are both about words."
I think I've written before about how marketeers have managed to convince the Japanese (many, at least - I've been personally witness to this, at least in rural Japan) that the thing to do on Christmas Day was to order Kentucky Fried Chicken. There's a passage in the epilogue of Nathan's book that explains this phenomenon's history:
Until recently, the Japanese view of the United States as a paragon of culture has been colored by something close to reverence. I recall an example as telling as it is ludicrous, an advertising campaign for Kentucky Fried Chicken. When KFC arrived in Japan in 1979, there was a resistance to the product, which was perceived as greasy. In 1980, a television commercial created by McCann-Erickson Hakuhodo overcame consumer resistance and established the company as a fast-food market leader. The campaign positioned Kentucky Fried Chicken as the traditional food of America's southern aristocracy! The original sixty-second spot opened with Colonel Sanders as a boy of seven baking rye bread in the roomy kitchen of his "old Kentucky home." "A lifetime later," the narrator intoned, "this same tradition of excellence was transferred by the colonel to his fried chicken." American executives who saw the storyboards were appalled: how could the consumer be expected to make the connection between a loaf of rye bread and fried chicken? What they failed to perceive was the powerful appeal of the implied connection between KFC and a venerable tradition, aristocratic no less, of the American South. The campaign was a stunning success. The following year, the company launched another outlandish campaign designed to persuade housewives that American families "traditionally" enjoy a meal from KFC on Christmas Day. Reservation order forms were printed for a Christmas meal with all the fixings, including twelve fried chicken pieces, mashed potatoes, and gravy, and the Japanese company recorded the highest sales volume in KFC history that Christmas week.
Heh. Consumers are gullible, aren't they? Marketing is very much a battlefield of the emotions, isn't it? I tried to find the commercial on YouTube, but to no avail.
Anyway, good book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to reading more of Nathan's body of work.
I fixed the whole bit with not being able to properly view over IE. Hopefully the previous entry will be all right. I created another one this evening:
This time, I embedded the game in an HTML iframe. That seemed to do the trick nicely. Although the code isn't as clean as it should be...
I'm doing this primarily to get back up to speed with Javascript and AJAX. It's starting to come back to me now. In any case, if anyone has any suggestions about it, I would be happy to entertain them.
I don't know if this will work on your browser, but give it a shot.
I was able to solve it in 8 moves. Can you?
Rather better in Firefox. I haven't tested it with Safari or anything. IE sorta works.
