The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Twisted sacrifices

I just saw the most macabre food-related commercial I've seen in a while.

Food ads are rife with animated versions of the product with a perverse desire to be eaten. (Yeah, yeah, spare us the adolescent jokes.) The variety of being eaten where there's nothing left as a sort of drive to ritual self-sacrifice -- throwing one's self into the volcano or lying down on an altar to have one's heart cut out -- isn't something I would think we'd want to be encouraging.

This approach has baffled me since childhood, when Charlie the tuna (who I just discovered came on the scene the same year I did) was coming up with new self-promotions in order to get StarKist to select him. At least in Charlie's case it was easy to accept that, despite the Phil Silvers vibe we got from him, Charlie was confused or misinformed and thought of StarKist as an exclusive club. He was so interested in demonstrating his good taste in arts and music so that he'd be selected that he didn't stop to ask what the members of the StarKist society do. Forty four years later and Charlie still has no idea how fortunate he is that he's still being rejected. Should we suggest he try dressing up as a dolphin?

Another apparently more dim-witted food item would be Mayor McCheese, who along with other animated foodstuffs came along in the 1970s to confuse a new generation with anthropomorphosed consumables. Maybe the message was ultimately to bring a modern generation more in touch with the source of their food than the previous one or two had been? After all, except for those living in more rural areas, especially on farms, most people are emotionally unassociated with the cows, pigs and chickens that are slaughtered, sliced, diced and/or otherwise processed to produce what makes its way to their dinner tables. While I suppose McDonalds could have dressed up farm animals and dubbed their voices as happy, masochistically eager spokesbeings, what's a cow, pig or chicken to the average american anyway? No, animating the food the kids recognize - imbuing the processed dead with new, higher-functioning life - that was they way they decided to go. A whole new generation could come to know their food personally before chowing down, though unlike the farm kids this process is apparently bloodless. Counting on most children's tendencies to not wonder what they did with the mayor's hat, body (they're really just eating the head, after all) , nose and eyes was a sensible enough risk. Indeed, we could credit McDonalds with a valuable life lesson. Mayor McCheese is a politician, after all, and it doesn't matter how many of them are beheaded and placed like a pharoah in his Happy Meal crypt -- there will always be more to replace them and for the most part you won't be able to tell them apart.

The macabre array of sentient foodstuff is more than I want to attempt to cover in depth, though I do want to quickly add the disturbing mixed message we get from the living products in the M&Ms commercials of recent years. Those guys don't want to be eaten - look for the panic in their faces each time one finds himself "chosen" - but they're trying to make their way in a world where they're ultimately snacks. Maybe it's meant to resonate with LA culture for all those would-be actors and screenwriters?

As to this morning's commercial -- something I believe I caught while stopping by MTV -- it was one for Pepsi. One would think a soft drink would be innocent enough in this arena, considering that we're not likely to find any kinship with any of its ingredients, and one would be right. However, in this commercial a young, bespectacled black man walks into an asian store (a deli-like market), gets a 2 liter of Pepsi and looks in one of the glass cases at two, roasted chickens. Nicely browned and approximately the same size, selecting dinner might take a moment. As he peers through the glass, the bottle of Pepsi turned towards the chickens and us as innocently as a tv spot by Governor Schwarzenegger, the chickens take notice. Being washed down with Pepsi is something they appear to prize. Perhaps its a religious observance, like having one's body washed in the River Ganges?

When the proprietor asks "which one?" sumo diapers appear on each of the crispy-skinned, headless, plucked creatures as they sit up, and they begin to face off. They grapple - a little color commentary coming from the proprietor - until one is victorious, having hurled his opponent out the back of the case. The winner is selected. The last image we have is the winning meal sharing center stage with the bottle of Pepsi, one pointed wing circling and gently patting the side of the bottle so we can see how important this is to him. If you're interested, you can see the commercial here.

Some part of me wants to see this commercial and many others of its ilk recorded on a disc and launched into space like the disc sent out on the Voyager probe. The more sensible side shudders at what message that would send and what we'd get back.