Mac and PC: Opinion piece from The Guardian.
From today’s Guardian:
Worse than not-funny
Beautiful celebrities can make ads, but we feel too close to comedians for them to get away with it.
Zoe Williams Wednesday January 31, 2007 The Guardian
David Mitchell and Robert Webb are appearing in adverts for Apple. In the ads – a copy of a similar series that appeared in the US last year – Mitchell reprises his Peep Show role, “sensible office manager”, only without any bite or dark heart; Webb parries with his “comfy-casual weekend chap”, only without the fizzing idiocy and beautifully sketched self-love. It’s as if an adman took the disabled chappie and his carer out of Little Britain – made Matt Lucas say “I want that one”, but now he isn’t disabled (too much potential offence); and David Walliams still says “OK then”, but now he’s a kind, long-suffering carer.
It’s worse than not-funny. It’s like taking every time you’ve laughed at the original sketch and chucking it back in your face, saying: “This was worth something to you, was it? Well it’s worth sod all to me.”
The concept of selling-out has changed so much since the 60s – the split between high and low culture, marketing and entertainment, authentic creativity and its agency-conjured simulacrum. Back then, if you took money from The Man, you were a sell-out. Giving yourself up to an advert is no longer the end of anyone’s pretensions to creativity. Sixty per cent of advertising is more creative, and wittier, than 90% of mainstream situation comedy (I am, of course, making these figures up). And that’s before you even mention the postmodern drive against posturing generally, which holds any ideology beyond “whatever it takes for an easy life” to be openly ridiculous.
Samuel L Jackson can walk around on behalf of Barclay’s, investing incomprehensible text with sonorous mystery. It hasn’t dented regard for him as an actor. So long as you choose carefully, you can take the corporate dollar without paying a terrible price from your bank of credibility. Decisions that were once about integrity are now about class (in the “she’s a classy broad” sense, not the George Orwell sense). Jennifer Aniston or Eva Longoria can take a contract from L’Oréal but not from Mabyelline – it sounds like a trivial distinction, but it’s a telling one. Stars once felt bound to present themselves as gilded and quasi-divine – above money and commerce, marriage and children, or anything that could be filed under “the nitty-gritty of life”.
Requirements now are more vulgar but, as a corollary to that, more human – we want them in the marketplace, but at its most unattainable apex. We’re still chasing a dream, but we want it to be a wonderland whose distance we can count in units. It’s the same relationship between celebrities and their public, just a more prosaic rendering of it.
There are some cases where it is still too much. The most obvious would be the Carol Vorderman number, where you take a skill for which you are renowned (say, doing sums) and you advertise a service that anyone who really was good at sums should know to be for many people dangerously ill-advised (say, debt consolidation). She gets the odd kicking for it, but I can’t fathom why she isn’t pelted with tomatoes wherever she goes.
With comedy it’s more complicated – there is no reason why a comedian endorsing a computer should be any different from an actress endorsing a mascara, but it is, because the initial contract is different: in almost all other cases, the advertising muscle comes from the celebrity’s beauty. Physical perfection is distancing. Comedy is intimate; it turns on qualities we share, not those we can only admire. It is a statement of mutual understanding, a Kantian contract of proximity and universality, not a Nietzschean one of supremacy. Since the whole point of it is its generosity, to use it for corporate ends is an act of grave betrayal. Mitchell and Webb threw away more than student cred when they flogged themselves off.
mszoewilliams@ntlworld.com
Here’s one of the original American ads, if you;re interested:
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