Movie 666

Product placement in movies is nothing new, but its contours have changed significantly in the last several years. Consider these examples:

• Wayne’s World
  Wayne launches a diatribe on product placement in movies, comically undermining his own effort by showcasing a variety of products.
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
  Dr. Evil makes plans to rule the world from his corporate headquarters — an elevated Starbucks Coffee House.
• Fight Club
  Riding a wave of anti-consumerist violence, the members of Fight Club blow up a computer store. Apple Computer logos and products are clearly visible in the destruction.
• The Matrix
  Outlaw humans communicate on Nokia cell phones, all the while brooding about demon technology and industrial apocalypse.

A couple examples from television further clarify a recognizable pattern in visual media:

• ABC Television Promotional Campaign
  ABC teases viewers with billboards, banners, and trash cans featuring slogans such as: “It’s a beautiful day, why are you watching TV” and “We Ask Only 8 Hours a Day”.
• Saturday Night Live, “Conspiracy Rock”
  The animated short, “Conspiracy Rock”, jokes about the corporate family connections of Saturday Night Live and NBC and GE, the later makers of nuclear weapons and other tools of mass destruction.

What ties these bits together is a “strange” willingness by corporations to somehow criticize, mock, disparage, or even destroy themselves (in the story of the movie) for humorous, narrative, and other reasons. Furthermore, in the new advertising, a product can be as readily employed by a villain as a hero, and sometimes shown as ineffective, broken, or socially destructive.

Apparently, many corporations are now willing to take a few jabs in the course of a story if it allows them to deliver a few punches in the course of the overall viewing experience.

A bold example already cited is the destruction of an Apple Computer store in Fight Club. Apple products and logos are clearly visible as the bombs tick away and the store explodes. Apple Computer becomes a symbolic showpiece for the anti-consumer revolution depicted in the story of the movie.

There are a few explanations for this kind of advertising, the obvious one being that in some cases advertisers and moviemakers would rather integrate a product within the narrative of a film instead of expose their promotional efforts through such deliberate techniques as overstuffing refrigerators with Coke or having characters say things like “let’s run down to Kinkos to download the secret email file on their new lime and grape colored iMac workstations” (not to say that this kind of advertising does not exist).

Another explanation for destroying a product onscreen is as part of a strategy of anti-advertising that marks a company as somehow different from the rest. Since Apple failed in its own attempts to rule the world, it now stands in pointed opposition to those who successfully rule it. Current Apple advertising features the mugs of various revolutionary personages, while Apple products are strategically placed in various movies — Apple computers are bombed in Fight Club and ward alien invasion in Independence Day. In this regard, Apple sets itself up as a kind of rogue, proletariat, anti-corporation that stands in opposition to monolithic, business-oriented giants like Intel and Microsoft. The irony, of course, is that Apple is a corporation like any other — publicly traded and profit driven — and not some revolutionary think tank staffed by the Dalai Lama and Yoko Ono.

The last reason for advertising via destruction is perhaps the most sinister. A general advertising trend is the move away from specific product messages towards a more general attempt to familiarize consumers with specific corporate symbols. “Corporate branding” is the process whereby a company attempts to familiarize potential consumers with its logos, mottoes, colors, and other symbols.

In terms of placement, a corporate “brand” might appear as a product in a movie, a logo on a bumpersticker, a banner on a float, a watermark on a web page, an icon on a blimp, a symbol on a box, or a color scheme on an envelope. There is sonic branding as well — consider the inescapable, four note jingle of Intel.

In cinema, brands appear as logos on the products that characters drink, drive, and dial. Sometimes these products are used with infomercial intensity (consider BMW promotions in the most recent James Bond films), while other times a fleeting, background glimpse of a Pepsi machine will suffice. What really distinguishes branding from other forms of advertising is that the brand need not carry any message other than the brand itself to be effective, hence its effectiveness even when framed in negative terms within a film narrative. Instead, the brand forms a message through its parasitic association with the host movie. The brand takes partial credit for the cinematic experience (or football game, or rock concert, or…), since the corporation is now part of the cadre that made the movie possible.

Branding, as a kind of advertising, should also be considered in a more literal sense, as a burned impression on flesh. Ultimately, the goal of a brand is to not deface a movie or football field, but to burn a lifelong impression of a company into the thinking flesh of a potential consumer. This is why branding takes on the simplicity it does — simple logos, slogans, and patent color schemes. Corporate brands strive for archetypal significance, forming and reinforcing nonverbal product recognition. The simplicity of design also beckons universality, cutting across geopolitical borders as well as constraints of language, gender, and age.

In cinema, corporate branding frustrates pleasure and freedom. Even in its negative, parodic aspects, it is still a manipulative and intrusive attempt on the part of a corporation to mark a potential consumer. It should be resisted by filmmaker and spectator alike.

If the audience does not resist the brand, and instead grows used to seeing dozens of intrusive logos during movies, they will never wonder why red and yellow no longer make them think of autumn colors, but instead the salt and grease of McDonalds. This is something even Dr. Evil would appreciate

Related posts:

1. Special Delivery for Robinson Crusoe: Dreamworks Sells out Cinema with FedEx Corporate Love Song
2. The Rules of Fight Club
3. Corporate AmeriKKKa Gets Two Weeks Notice
4. Stanley Kubrick and the Death of Cinema
5. Beyond the Hollywood Domain: the Cinema of the Web

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