A faceful of hot, wet ugly
I know, I know — all the cool kids have blogged this PSA already.
It’s an eco fantasy snuff film, where true believers calmly murder those not willing to cut energy consumption by ten percent. And it’s an extraordinarily ugly piece of work. That’s my favorite bit up there — right at the end, when they blow up Gillian Anderson and her eyeballs slowly squee down the glass.
The blowback was instant and HUGE and not all from the right. They’ve pulled it down already. Repeatedly. As of now this copy is still working and, if all else fails, I’ve downloaded the .flv (drop me a line if you want it — my blog uploader choked on it).
I think I can explain where this thing comes from, though. I mean, besides scary evil eco-psychosis. Raw, ugly and in your face is a very common style of charity and public service advertising in the UK.
There was that anti-smoking TV ad I found so hard to watch; dragging a guy down the steps and out the building by a giant fish-hook stuck in his face (“hooked” on cigarettes, uh-huh uh-huh). Or the man slumped bleeding in the driver’s seat while his wife screams his name down the phone (cell phones distract drivers, see?).
Because of my IP, I even get British adverts while surfing my good old true-blue American web sites. Most common are the tragic children; the perennial starving African babies, the tight close-up of an Asian child with cleft palate, the little girl with the stumps for legs. Picture of sad-eyed child with horrible parental insults superimposed in text. Scared teenager on the streets with shadowy figures closing in. Oh, and the animal charities — ye gods! All those filthy one-eyed puppies and mangy bears.
I’m sure the advertising agencies would say that shocking imagery is real and we should be forced to confront it — and that awful images get the desired response. But there are two huge disadvantages to this approach.
The first is for me, a consumer of media. It makes my world a relentlessly horrible place; a place of perpetual emergencies and nagging ugliness. It is, in a word, a downer.
And the second flows from the first: I get jaded. To shock me, agencies have to up the ante continually. Dream up more and more horrible imagery. This isn’t the first time green campaigns have evoked jihadi/September 11 imagery to sell the urgency of their cause. To the people who made the “No Pressure” video, this seemed like a perfectly natural next-step progression in the ratcheting up of edginess.
But to all of you who aren’t exposed to this ugly shit all day, it was like, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THOSE PEOPLE?!
October 1, 2010 — 8:35 pm
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