Watching the Super Bowl commercials this year, which by the way, cost an unprecedented $3 million per 30 seconds of airtime (even in this economy!), I was struck by how many of them were surreal. Exhibit A:
Strange days indeed. Just about every commercial featured a talking animal, some sort of outer space presence, or super adult babies. It’s par for the course that Super Bowl commercials, and commercials in general, push all my feminist buttons; do advertisers really think that women are obsessed with yogurt and cleaning products, and all men are titty-mesmerized automotons (see every ad every produced by Godaddy)? (Btw, Godaddy, go fuck yourselves).
But this was a new trend…Americans as only capable of liking absurdity. Is it a sign that in this downturn economy, we don’t want to be reminded of our real lives? Did all these companies do focus groups after getting their participants incredibly high? What am I to make of the turn toward the surreal? Anyone?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under General, Generation Overwhelmed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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I would liken it too our latest obsession with vampires (although a lot more going on there also) and magic (Harry Potter). We are compelled to the ‘unreal’ to get us away from the ‘real’. Fantasy is always (or is always spun as) better than real life – it is an escape – and so it seems that advertisers are capitalizing on this idea. Every fairytale has a happy ending right? (Which on a similar note was the theme of the first episode of the new Gray’s Anatomy, which also had moments of surrealism).