Shillin'
I usually try not to praise ads for actual companies but I find Wes Anderson's American Express commercial genuinely charming. I like that it has his directorial thumbprint on it (self-consciously tidy-yet-busy compositions; a character driving earnestly, if naively, toward some quixotic goal) and I think it's clever how it sits somewhere between gentle self-parody and a Wes-Anderson-style romanticization of Wes Anderson's own creative process. Maybe his unalloyed quirkiness is just easier to take in a thirty-second burst than in a dose the size of, say, "The Life Aquatic". At any rate, I'm ready to believe that this country's sprawling debt industry is in fact lovably eccentric on the inside...
2 Comments:
I like vanity advertisements. It's like having little cultural hors d'oeuvres sponsored by the corporations in charge of things, kind of like the church used to sponsor music and architecture, but on a smaller scale.
Like that Honda commercial with the chorus.
I dislike vanity ads. The transparency of sponorship does nothing to subvert the commodity process. The most optimistic reading I can come up with at the moment would be an application of Marcuse's "Dialectic of Civilization," (first expounded in Eros and Civilization, I believe) wherein it is recognized that the generally malicious Industry responsible for keeping the middle class repressed actually generates "good" things in order to do it. In America, things like balsamic vinegar, craft beer, and Wes Anderson are good examples of products existing within (through, by) the Dialectic of Civilization.
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