In 2005, Tarsem Singh directed two fairly similar Pepsi commercials: one for Europe and one for the Middle East. In both, Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyoncé star as Roman gladiatrixes who incite a populist coup in the emperor’s arena.
At first glance, it looks like the main difference is in the casting. Depending on your region, you’d have gotten either Enrique Iglesias or (Egyptian popstar) Amr Diab as your emperor. But the real divergence doesn’t happen until the final moments of each spot. In the Iglesias version, the coup is successful, and his despot is catapulted into the arena just as the portcullis is raised on a hungry lion:
In the Diab variation, it’s the emperor who raises the portcullis, releasing the lion on the three women:
Of course, there’s no actual footage of anyone getting mauled, but it’s perfectly clear what’s happening. And it blows my mind.
Now, I don’t want to get too facile here and do a purely misogynistic reading of the Diab commercial. Clearly there’s a political element to it all, and to some extent the three gladiators are being punished in their capacity as rebels, as challengers to the social order, and not simply as “women” per se. In his paper “Advertising and Empire: Selling America in the Middle East”, Robert W. Lawrence even argues that what the women represent, above all, is American imperialism. As such, they must be symbolically crushed by Diab, an Arab, so that the Middle East can feel better about buying Pepsi–which is, of course, among the most culturally imperialistic of American brands.
None of this makes the Diab spot any less chilling to watch. I don’t care if Britney, Pink, and Beyoncé are portraying flesh-and-blood women or abstract symbols; the fact is that, in both commercials, their rabble-rousing is working and the crowd is on their side, and still Diab’s emperor flips the switch and condemns them to a violent death. Now, if I happened to be the political advisor to an actual tyrant, this is just what I’d tell him to do, but as a marketing executive for a soft drink (a soft drink!), I might opt for an approach that didn’t end in the capital punishment of folk heroes without trial.
I have long urged copywriters to consider the consequences of playing fast and loose with high-stakes rhetorical propositions. As I noted some time ago, encountering the conceptual morass pictured above, gravitational collapse is not the only process that can create a black hole.
As usual, nobody has listened to me.
Domino’s Pizza recently introduced a new line of “Artisan Pizzas.” Or did they? “We’re not artisans,” the copy reads. “But this might just convince you we are.” They go on to describe the new crusts as “artisan-style.”
So let me get this straight: The pizzas are artisanal in style, but not actually artisanal, although they taste so close to artisanal that they might fool you, only they never get the chance to fool you, because Domino’s has a policy of total artisanal transparency, although it’s a muddy sort of total transparency, seeing as they’ve opted to call their convincingly artisanal yet admittedly unartisanal pies “artisan,” and, while we’re on the topic, what does “artisan” even mean anymore?
After all that, it comes as a relief to learn that the toppings on Domino’s Artisan Pizzas are standardized and non-customizable, allowing me to skip straight past the part where I’d have had to decide whether to ladle my pie with a white sauce or a “robust inspired tomato sauce,” a concoction apparently inspired by robustness, but not quite so inspired that it is able to attain either legitimate robustness or a hyphen, unless I have it all wrong and the sauce actually possesses both robustness and inspiration as entirely distinct qualities, although we are left guessing as to the particular source of that inspiration.
For some of you, the real story in this post may be that I sometimes order from Domino’s. I don’t know what to tell you other than that the only way I can be made to sing karaoke, an activity I avoid as much as possible until it can no longer be avoided, is by the administering of liquid courage in such doses as to result in a profound depletion of mineral salts, for which the only cure is a Domino’s pie with 24 times my RDA of sodium. So what I am basically saying is that my occasional Domino’s orders are manifestations of a form of sporadic, distress-induced pica.
I bought a stack of old Life magazines from a junk store a few years ago and this was in one of them. (It was a great issue all around; check out the pictorial exposé on short shorts–or, as the publication memorably puts it, “tourniquet-tight abbreviated britches.”) I would say that it was ahead of its time, only nobody seems to eat Limburger cheese anymore. I think it would do nicely as a poster, too.
