MEDIA MONDAY
What have you been watching, listening to, reading?

How Do You *Feel* About Your Car?
Stanley Fish wonders about the advertising effectiveness of those new Avis/Infidelity commercials, you know the ones where the narrator is someone's old car realizing that the owner is about to, or has been, traveling around (disloyally, from the car's pov) in a fancy rental. Fish confesses to an irrational (and familiar) sensation: that of a certain guilt over trading in, or otherwise abandoning, a car that's been with you a long time. He thinks this strange-but-true emotional instinct just might work against these otherwise brilliant pitches.

Strange to say, these are not good ads precisely because they are so good. The point of a commercial is to make the viewer fall in love with the product, in this case the hot cars Avis is pimping. But the viewers of these commercials are more likely to give their affections to the product’s victims, for it is from their point of view that the narrative has been presented.

While Avis’s intention is, no doubt, to advance its corporate fortunes through these commercials, the image the ads project is less than flattering. Avis comes across as the supplier of temptation, the enabler of seduction, a corporate madame. Its stable of “hot cars” lure men and women to default on their responsibilities, to throw away the tried and true, to surrender to the meretricious glitter of the new. But these wiles are defeated by the sympathy we are made to feel for those who have been harmed by them.

Weekend Box Office
1. Iron Man
2. Made of Honor
3. Baby Mama
4. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
5. Harold and Kumar...

Article 19 Film Recommendation
Lewberry and I saw Iron Man over the weekend and I was pleasantly surprised. Genuinely funny in spots, the outfit and gravity-defying effects were pretty cool (and that's just Gwyneth Paltrow's contribution -- rimshot -- but seriously folks). There's not too much to the film, of course. And it would have been nice if a few of the Afghanis were not terrorists. But Robert Downey's real good, and at least the American weapon manufacturer is the biggest villain at the end of the day. Pretty good summer super hero fare, if you're into that.