Hard Sell, or Just Hardhearted?

There are too many commercials on TV, as all the world is painfully aware, but there are also too many vicious commercials. It’s a fairly recent development in advertising: commercials that try to be so darkly funny that they’re sick, twisted and nasty.

It’s shocking to those of us who grew up with TV--and years of cute, lighthearted, feel-good commercials--to see ads on the air in which people actually die. Yes, die. They may not die on screen, but it’s clearly implied that they kick the proverbial bucket.

Commercials for video games are, of course, among the most violent and cruel on television, and they are virtually all aimed at children. One of the most mean-spirited at present is for a video game in which the participant runs around zapping bugs. Whatever it is, it’s stupid. But in the ad, additionally, a man is seen opening his door and finding a gigantic carnivorous centipede there, growling and ready to pounce.

It’s made crystal-clear that the centipede is going to eat him.

Also among the meanest spots around is a series of commercials for a soft drink. In these ads, men or women are depicted as much more devoted to the soft drink than to each other. One commercial shows a woman in a rowboat letting her boyfriend get eaten by an alligator rather than tear herself away from her precious soda pop.

In fact, when he dies, she seems delighted that she gets to drink his can of soda as well. Traditionally in such ads there would be a final shot of the man bobbing to the surface, safe and sound. Not anymore. He’s a goner.

A commercial for canned iced tea features a Claymation martial arts fest with caricatures of Bruce Lee and Pat Morita (who appeared in those “Karate Kid” movies). There’s much bashing, crashing, kicking and stomping. It would be disingenuous for the advertiser to say this is all in fun and all an animated fantasy. The fact is, the ad endorses brutality as well as endorsing iced tea.

For months, a certain car company ran a commercial keyed to the theme “wider is better.” A young man who was part of a famous (fictional) tightrope-walking family bemoaned the fact that his fellow family members didn’t use a wider wire when they walked across the Grand Canyon, or something. Such a pity, he says; they all died. He shrugs and says it proves that wider is better.

How callous can you get? Using this kind of callousness to sell cars suggests the sponsor is appealing to a similar callousness in the audience. Have we become so cynical that we think the idea of a family falling to its death is funny?

Another car company has been running an even meaner-minded campaign. In one of its ads, a wife is seen at the graveside of her late husband, weeping copiously. It turns out she’s not mourning her husband. She’s mourning the fact that he chose to be buried in his car, and how she loved that car! Here is materialism taken to a sickening extreme, but we’re supposed to find it funny, and it’s supposed to encourage us to buy this lousy car.

In the ‘50s, a candy bar called Three Musketeers made sharing a part of its sales pitch. The candy bar was divided into three parts so you could let friends enjoy it with you. Now it’s the nasty ‘90s, and things have changed. A different candy bar advertises itself with the slogan “Two [pieces] for me, none for you.” Kids and adults in these ads take pride in hogging the candy for themselves.

This is a fine message to send to kids: Think only of yourself, and the hell with the other guy.

Am I taking these ads too seriously? Maybe, but when sponsors think they can appeal to viewers with commercials that are cruel and vicious, what does that say about the American mind-set? Do the ads reflect that mind-set, or do they help shape it?

Much hullabaloo is being made now about violence in movies and TV programs. But we shouldn’t overlook the meanness, misanthropy and maliciousness in many current commercials. Every commercial is designed to deliver a message, but these ads are delivering more than one. What they’re saying to us, or about us, is not pretty.