David Wahl 7 September 2009 Lies and Entertainment 904 views 4 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Last week, I was on a plane sitting across the aisle from a 7 or 8 year old girl whose parents were treating her as if she were the next messiah and seemed genuinely surprised that everyone around her wasn’t in awe of her the way they were. This caused her every utterance to take the tone of a profound statement.

“The stewardess said that we have to stay in our seats.”

“That is very observant,” her father said as he indicated with his eyes to her mother that their small wonder was being amazing again. They discussed a shopping trip to Aéropostale, a clothing store for older tween girls, that she was getting for good behavior while they were in Las Vegas. This is when they announced we were taking off.

“I am still allowed to draw, because it doesn’t use anything electronic.”

The mother touched her own chest and patted the father on his shoulder. Our daughter, she seemed to be thinking, took information and without prompting drew a conclusion that shows she understood that information! Also, “electronics” has four syllables which, I mean, how could she even know that word?

When she began drawing, her father nodded his approval and pointed to things he especially liked in her drawings. I couldn’t see what was on the sheet until I got up to use the bathroom. I expected horses, maybe a stick figure family where the parents were dwarfed in size by their daughter, but instead it was a series of McDonald’s logos repeated across the whole page, stacked on top of one another, with no variation at all. Logo, logo, logo, logo, splayed out all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy style.

It made my stomach hurt a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, I know that copying is the first step toward learning anything. As children we imitate before we can create. Comic book artists usually start tracing the characters from their favorite comic books and most writers lift a style before they develop their own. It’s part of growth.

But, what if what you’re copying isn’t an actual thing? What if it’s a symbol of a company that makes things? A bored, daydreaming child doodles an abstraction. She doesn’t covet a product, the marketing has imprinted a desire for a brand. She was making her own advertising.

I don’t blame the marketers, they’re only doing a job. To blame the marketers would be like blaming a chef for your own weight problems because the food he makes is too delicious. The marketing has become the product. Her thoughts weren’t occupied with Grimace and Mayor McCheese cavorting through a french fry forest. No, she was consumed with the mechanics of it; the logo.

This heightening of the symbol raises corporate branding to religious levels. As if the food and characters involved were too complex to describe all at once. As if the symbol were as loaded with meaning as a Star of David or a Christian Cross. McDonald’s is no longer a company that makes hamburgers, they are far more important than that.

You see, it fulfills an emotional and spiritual need within us. All that work by McDonald’s to make us hungry for their food has instead won over our inner-life.

Philip K. Dick wrote about companies being able to project advertisements into your dreams. But, why bother with a machine?

These companies have won, not by making a super-advanced machine that could telepathically project what they wanted onto your dreamscape, but by replacing the traditional symbols we use to populate our collective unconscious with their logo. All this marketing 2.0 talk about immersive worlds and customers that want to interact with products falls on deaf ears when it’s done for adults. John Deere has a discussion board for stories about its products and no one uses it. No, the message is not intended for them; it’s intended for the next generation. The true believers who don’t need to be convinced to let products into their most basic components. In fact, they’re already there.

Instead of an imagination populated with characters and stories, the kids growing up now have imaginations filled with corporate identity. What it is, is not as important as where it’s from.

No more totem animals or fairy tales to provide us guidelines for life or represent the unknown place of our subconscious mind. No, the soft curves of the “M” in McDonald’s are your mother’s breasts. None of her bad qualities you understand, but the loving, giving part of her that feeds children.

For a father figure we have the creepy, masked Burger King who seems to take great pleasure in watching people as they sleep and then buy their silence with food. It appeals to the dysfunctional family model more than McDonald’s. Between the two of them they batter us back and forth in an eternal war not for our stomachs, but for our souls.

These are our new gods, our collective base of symbols to draw stories and meaning into our lives. Eventually, I imagine that little girl describing a dream to her therapist, “First the McDonald’s logo rises up, but it starts to argue with a Nike swoosh and they are both obliterated by a rampaging Abercrombie and Fitch. What could it possibly mean?”

The therapist will pull out catalog pages from various trendy clothing lines, show them to her and ask her how they make her feel. Abnormal reactions to marketing will be the Rorschach test of the future.

As the plane began its descent into Las Vegas, that little girl looked at her mother and said, “It would be sadder to die before shopping at Aéropostale than it would be to die after.” With these wise words they all bowed their heads in a silent amen as they gave thanks for their coming shopportunity and indeed, for all the shopportunities they have already been given.

- David Wahl