Monkey Spanking Punkers
In 1993, Jeremy Davies was cast in a TV commercial for Subaru
in which his character compares the car to punk rock.
The commercial was noticed by numerous casting directors and
industry forces. Davies found himself being sent feature film
scripts. He chose to do Spanking the Monkey, written by its
first-time director, David O. Russell because it appealed to him.
His remarkable performance opened a new chapter in his life.
NB, no trunk monkeys were spanked.
From Hegemony, Subculture, Advertising and the Spectacle,
Edward Ames, Julia Reid, and Tim O'Connor.
March 19, 1993
SOAN 370 - American Advertising and the Science of Signs.
SUBARU IMPREZA
The spectacle subjugates and incorporates all real human experience
(fluid lived value), even those elements, such as punk, hiphop or
grunge, which set themselves up in opposition to its movement. Guy
Debord wrote that the essential movement of the spectacle consisted
"of taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state so
as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the
exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value"
(Debord 1977:35). In the spectacle, we see the jealous workings of
the commodity form, which never rests until all experience is
abstracted, reified, and made equivalent after its pattern.
Advertising is the vanguard of the hegemonic domination of the
spectacle on culture. Culture, the sum total of human activities, is
stolen, cooked and distilled in the pattern of the commodity, and is
given back for our consumption. Advertising is the avant garde of the
spectacle, ever sniffing out ever newer contents of human meanings
for colonization.
The spectacle gleefully appropriates and commodities its opponents,
rendering their energetic protest into bland, safe depoliticized and
reified units. For example, there are now grunge fashion shows in New
York. Seattle Salvation Army fashion is sold to very rich people. A
paraphrase: "It is silk, but it has the look of polyester." Nothing
is sacred for the spectacle either, except the spectacle itself.
The recent spot for Subaru Impreza is a perfect case in point of the
appropriation of a subculture's oppositional meaning by the hegemonic
forces of the commodity form. It is an appropriation that
depoliticizes the critique offered by punk, and reinforces the
hegemony of the spectacle.
In this spot an absurd equivalency is made between a mythified
signification of punk rock music and the qualities of a car. The
analogy is so absurd that we suspect, combined with other elements of
the commercial, that this is an extreme case of falsified
metacommunication: they are showing us that they aren't trying to
fool us, so as they can fool us even more. The juxtaposition of punk
and a car is interesting for this aspect, but it is also of value for
showing how advertising, one of the institutions of dominant culture
hegemony, appropriates and depoliticizes a subculture.
The spot opens with a young man, dressed in what could only be
described as Northwest collegiate chic, jumping into a camera shot of
a car. He appeals to us: "I want to talk to you about my new Subaru
Impreza, and explain its relevance to you, and me and the car
business. Okay? Okay." Having appealed to us with his offhand
conversational sell, and replied to his request for us, he proceeds
to say: This car is like. . ." He is grasping for an analogy,
supposedly. He comes up with a signifier: The car is like ". . . Punk
Rock!" He pretends to be unsure of himself, and tries to reassure us:
"Now just trust me. This is relevant." The connection is so silly,
since punk seems too indigestible for a car commercial to
appropriate, that it must be an attempt to pull us in and catch us
off guard with humor. We must expect that punk will appear in this ad
as a gutted, sterilized, clean second-order signifier for a concept.
Our young salesman (jumping around as quicker and quicker as the cuts
speed up,) continues with his explanation of punk equals Subaru. He
asks for us to recollect some ancient history. (This must be
falsified meta-communication, because ads almost never conjure up
that unsteady genie of the past.) "Remember when rock'n'roll was
boring and corporate? Well, punk challenged all this and said, "Hey,
excuse me, but here's what's cool about music. Remember?
The ad reifies punk, by attributing to it the conversational
qualities of an individual. Punk is constructed in terms of
rock'n'roll. It's critique of society has been abstracted from the
dim hazes of history so as to apply the punk critique solely to
music, and (very interestingly) to the big business institutions of
music. This reference to the anti-corporate "challenge" is
interesting in an ad put out by a giant corporation; it's preferred
reading becomes apparent in the next section of the commercial. The
destructive feelings of punk towards all institutions (and everything
'normal' and sacred) is side-stepped here, suppressed. Punk's assault
on culture becomes a "challenge," and almost sounds like punk had a
constructive attitude towards the institutions of the music industry.
Personified punk is offering positive criticism to mainstream, and
hegemonic, music: "here's what's cool about music." Here's how you
can save your product from being boring, Mr. friendly corporation.
Not a whiff is there of the attitude of institutional and ideological
anarchy and destruction that was demanded by the early punks, and
many of their flag-bearers to this very day. Subaru, as would be
expected in the advertising form, commits gross distortion in its
mythification of punk. Punk is stripped of its unsavory and
threatening elements, and, though still slightly exuding an odor, is
used to prop up the corporate sign, and to reinforce the hegemonic
domination of big business.
"Remember?" (Does he remember punk rock? I don't remember punk rock
and he looks younger than me.) He gets to the portion of the ad where
he cements the constructed equivalency of punk and the car, and
supplies a more solid concept to attach to signifier-punk. "Now,
Subaru, with this Impreza is challenging some car thinking here."
Just as mythified punk "challenged" music thinking, (the hegemonic
ideology within the music business?) Subaru is challenging the
ideology of what makes a car. Just like sanitized-punk revolutionized
boring and corporate music, Subaru is challenging boring and
corporate cars. "This car's all about reminding you and me what's
great about a car, and moving forward, and making cars better, and
less disappointing." Punk is constructed as having done analogous
things for music and the music business, and it is the manufactured
sign-value of punk which is supposedly to explain the transcendently
advanced things Subaru is doing with this car.
The concept is about better, more advanced, less disappointing cars,
and it is one that could have been piggy-backed onto an infinite
number of mythified signifiers, but for the specific purposes of an
extreme falsified metacommunication, they chose to steal punk. The
too few words they use to describe punk and its relationship to cars,
and thus ours to the car business, creates a highly absurd distortion
of punk, one that's had the guts removed, and attached to an
exceedingly arbitrary signified. Just to remind us of the equivalency
set up, his spiel ends with the words: "Just like punk, except it's
cars." (sign-punk --> myth-form-punk plus car-concept equals
revolutionary Subaru.) In this ad, depoliticization is almost
complete. The fluidity of punk's great refusal is congealed and
appropriated into the spectacle. Remodeled along the lines of the
commodity-form, the rebellion of punk is stripped away, and the
resulting myth is used to sustain corporate sales.
To say that there is an active conspiracy amongst among the elites of
this country is unnecessary. No such organized thing exists. The
system, decentralized among many institutions, works to exploit and
discredit all alternatives, all challenges to the status quo. This is
not for any other consciously insidious agenda, at least not in the
institution of advertising, except to expand economic production, and
control of economic production. Even such relatively benign threats
as punk, grunge, and hiphop are continents waiting to be colonized,
to provide that new bit of blood for the vampiric appetite of the
expanding spectacle.
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[Read the whole paper]
