BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: The doghouse and avoiding it...
Monday, December 08, 2008
The doghouse and avoiding it...
I saw a condemning link to this from a fairly strident feminist blog (that I regularly read), and sure enough, it's hilarious. Yes, if promotes stupidly wasteful spending on worthless diamonds, and it perpetuates stupid stereotypes (of men and women). But so does most humor, has a great set, good acting, good direction and editing, and it's imaginative and creative. I laughed my ass off.
A couple of years ago I blogged about the similarly-funny Miller (?) beer commercials with their "Man Laws" and thanks to someone posting a link to me somewhere, I got absolutely deluged by angry feminist commenters. If you read that post you'll see what I mean, and might wonder that I didn't return fire. Trust me, I wanted to. Malaya asked me to let it go through, and so I did. And no, I wasn't threatened with the doghouse.
I found those Man Law beer commercials funny for their overall presentation. They were very creative; their fantasy concept, with the little The Onion-like vignettes of everyday life examined and faux-serioused by a mysterious high council of Man Law-makers. It was the little touches that made them enjoyable; the replays on the stadium-like overhead scoreboard, the ancient scribe handwriting the consensus-determined laws, the half-star cast of men arguing the points, etc.
Similar attention to detail is what makes this new diamond commercial funny. The concept; woman throws man into the doghouse for buying her overly-practical gift, isn't funny or original enough for a Seinfeld routine. What makes the commercial work is the overall quality and all of the little touches. The set design (I love the parole board room, with the lights and the replay projected neck-craningly overhead), the variety of regular guy-type men wearily resigned to endlessly folding (women's) laundry, the quick cuts between the flashback parole hearing and the currently (un)folding events, the softly-spoken propaganda continually blaring overhead "Apologize without caveats," the happy look on the wife's face after she kicks him down the hole, the doghouse standing alone in the grassy field, the (relative) subtlety of the diamond propaganda from the hidden, secret our-last-hope photo. The only misstep, I thought, was the meal. Real men not eating quiche is such an old and (by now) tired joke that I just sort of sighed at it, though I did enjoy the one crazy unshaven guy in the tux having his last little freak out. (Incidentally, by a lovely twist of fate I actually own that exact model of vacuum cleaner, and the whole reason I got it was that it's got dual suction, and no bags.)
The fact that feminist bloggers are railing against this one is funny, but I'll give the angry ones credit; at least they're consistent. They railed against the beer commercials that created a fantasy world with men as the powerful high commission of rules and law, and they're against this one that does the same thing for women. The common thread is that both commercials perpetuate age-old stereotypes and gender roles; the fact that they do it in such an amusing and fresh fashion is probably worse for them (in terms of outraging the easily-outraged) since it gets noticed (and blogged about *cough*) in a way that more hamfisted efforts do not.
The interesting thing, to me, is that I largely agree with the feminists who are complaining about these commercials. On larger issues, at least. I just think they undo themselves by being so condemning and holier-than-thou in their attitudes about silly and generally amusing things like these commercials. Protest Andrew Dice Clay style vulgarity and misogyny, or anti-birth control politics, or anti-choice laws. Don't get your proverbial knickers in a twist over fairly neutral, no-worse-than-dumb TV spots. It alienates the neutral majority by making you look humorless and monomaniacal.
The protesting ones would (I suspect) grant that there are plenty of worse examples of sexism and barbarism, and more important things to fight against, but that's the whole point. Now that we've had our consciousness raised about these issues, most people can see the problem with overt sexism and discrimination. So for the activist types, the battle must be shifted to the marginal issues, which makes commercials like these ground zero, since they subtly and cleverly reinforce outmoded gender roles and assumptions, and thus strengthen them far more effectively than some Cartman-like, ranting sexist right wing talk radio show host ordering women to get back into the kitchen and bake them a pie. I understand and even empathize... I just think it's bad strategy. And a bit humorless. Give people more credit; they can laugh at something even as they deplore the stereotypical, self-defeating reasoning behind it.
