by Tom Maxwell

Ads are getting harder to swallow.

I belong to Generation X, the slightly maligned, breeding residue of the Baby Boomers. Back when I was getting old enough to buy a car, ad agencies still wanted to butter me up.

Cue Donald Sutherland’s trembling, reverent voice-over, as we see a silvery car glide through the misty landscape:

"Can a car have a soul?"

For Donald, this was a rhetorical question. Hell, it was comforting. Instead of the plastic prison we had cast ourselves into because of our covetousness, here was a companion. A buyable soulmate. Once this tenuous point had been established, it got easier. We and our soulmates could drive around "saving" things. Remember the model couple in their improbably big, plush SUV "saving" the sea turtle? See them now: the angular, willowy wife, her mouth set tight with piety as she sits inside the cavernous cabin. There’s her rugged husband braving the driving rain to do the right thing: move the dignified CG turtle to the side of the road.

If you took the time to consider the message, of course, it was nonsensical. Owning a behemoth status symbol and caring for the environment are mutually exclusive. Nature is not bad, even if it rains on you and strands dignified CG sea turtles in the middle of the road, to possibly get run over by a Hyundai.

The real message had been transmitted long before it could be thought about. I could be that man. I could marry that woman. I could purchase that dignity and poise. I mean, this is advertising 101. Disconnect the brain -- it’s desire that rules the wallet. Give ‘em a non-cognitive lozenge! A spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down! Any passing mention of the product’s merit was only a remnant of a bygone era. The vestigial hand inside the whale.

But let us leave these nostalgic tableaus, with their old-fashioned attempts at inducement. With their obsolete mannerisms, they might as well be DW Griffith shorts. Sure, it’s heretical to think so much plastic is animate. But Spielberg had already done it, replacing God’s finger with ET’s in his Sistine-Chapel-rip-off movie poster. That’s so 1982. Up, up the ladder of progress!

Alas, my time has passed. The Phantom Menace made that all too plain. There’s a new generation, one that intuitively accepts the non-cognitive approach. They don’t want to own. They want to be owned. Let’s consider an early example.

Hot cheerleader girl dumps clueless boyfriend outside of the convenience store then goes in. The lighting casts a pall of diarrheic green. She opens the refrigerated soft drink display door. A Mello Yello can shoots forward and speaks in a leering croak. "Did you do it?" She affirms. Girl and can are now united.

It’s gone way beyond some New Age postulate of spiritual Volvos: that soft drink is dating your girlfriend!

From dumping boyfriends we quickly go to betraying friends to death by bear to possess the product. You remember. It’s not enough to love the product. We have to kill our friends to have it. Plus, we get to hang out with babes while our friend is being eaten.

That was good for a year or so, but it’s not enough now. Consumers gladly swallowed these jagged little pills. Time to go one step further.

We must eat shit to prove ourselves worthy.

Me and my soulmate. "Owning a behemoth status symbol and caring for the environment are mutually exclusive. Nature is not bad, even if it rains on you and strands dignified CG sea turtles in the middle of the road, to possibly get run over by a Hyundai."

A darkened movie theater filled with teenage couples. One boy tries the old-fashioned approach, putting his arm around his girl. Another, oblivious to his babe companion, opens the wrapper of his erect Butterfinger. Unable to control her desire, the girl falls upon the candy bar. A few moments of the hard sell, then the money shot: the girl, slack-jawed, sated and vacant, her open mouth smeared with…chocolate?

Or shit? It sure looks like shit. What the hell’s going on? Oh right -- I’m not supposed to understand.

Consider the new Hardee’s Chili Burger ads. Hip youngsters, with the requisite heroin-chic hairdos (thanks Anne Heche), tucking into what looks for all the world like shit burgers. As they devour it, globs of brown splat onto pants or the floor, to be eaten with fingers or saved in the box for later consumption. Look at it. You tell me what it looks like.

I wish I knew what the hook was, but I don’t. And that’s what defines both the New Cool and my imminent dotage.

04 February 03

Tom Maxwell helped lead the gifted Squirrel Nut Zippers into neo-Swing infamy -- via "Hell", of course -- before embarking on a solo career, fatherhood, and a quest to completely own his artistic output. So far, it's going great (fatherhood, that is).

GET	MORE	MAXWELL
Blinking Towers and Barren Landscapes You may have never heard of Johnny Ace, but his creepy backlog -- twenty-one songs altogether -- sticks out like a sore thumb. Because, like Kurt Cobain and Robert Johnson, he was doomed from day one . . . MORE	In The Afterlife The Squirrel Nut Zippers were supposed to be one tonic that could solve a bland musical landscape's various ills, but they were headed for the serious strife sooner than they thought. Ex-Zipper Tom Maxwell dishes the dirt on what came next . . . MORE	Officer Down! Now that the country is in a law enforcement frame of mind, it might be a good time to analyze some of the more compelling narratives about cops and robbers. Which means checking out out the sublimely strange story of that scruffy loser, T.J. Hooker, starring the ShatMan himself. Can someone pass the jelly rolls? . . . MORE