I've been meaning to post this all week, since I see this commercial every single time I watch a Sox game, but then I get distracted.
You know those "let's vent" Coors commercials? In case you've been blissfully spared by the miracle of Tivo or something, guy gets a phone call from a friend and says to his wife/girlfriend, "So-n-so needs to vent." Wife/girlfriend is all, "Oh, yeah, you should be there for him." Cut to friend's apartment where bunch of guys are getting wasted on the new Coors from the vented can. Guy calls wife/girlfriend and tells her they're going to be venting a little longer.
Hate. So. Much. Hate.
First of all, I fail to understand how this "vent" is supposed to make that crappy-ass swill they're passing off as beer any better. Secondly, I could happily take the guy and his friend out with a semi-automatic, they're so annoying. But those are just minor points. My major problem is that this commercial shows me, once again, how apparently out of step I am with quote unquote normal middle-class American values and attitudes.
Seriously, it's 2008. Women are supposed to be somehow upset that their husbands or boyfriends have friends and want to hang out with them? It sounds like a bad sitcom plot from 1964. And then the husbands or boyfriends are supposed to, instead of acting in an adult manner and standing up for themselves, creatively lie to put one over on the woman, like eight year olds going behind mommy's back? And this is supposed to be amusing and cute or something? Jesus.
We're supposed to see being jealous and controlling and overly needy of your partner's attention (on the one hand) and being childish, dishonest, and game-playing (on the other) as normal behavior in a putatively loving relationship. Feh. I mean, I know, what we're supposed to do is buy beer that tastes like ass, but in order to get us to do that, they're assuming we identify with the people in their stoopid ads.
Well, I don't. And I weep that other people do. So there.
xoxo
3 comments:
Love to add something terribly insightful, except you've pretty much managed to hit on all of it. I hate those commercials with equal passion.
Not just those commercials, though, all those others that are supposed to appeal to the male beer drinker by applauding behavior that resembles a 4-year-old or gender relationships that resemble those of a stupid 12-year-old--who's only interest is in somehow pulling the wool over the eyes of a woman who's only worth is in having blonde hair and big tits (and a small enough IQ to be taken in by such antics).
I don't just find such commercials offensive to women, I find them offensive to me. I mean, there are many of us who enjoy drinking beer who's social development didn't stop when we hit puberty.
It's the same sort of mentality that, when Jay Leno makes a joke about how W. is a moron, is actually making a pro-Bush point. He's just like one of us -- stupid -- that's why we should support him.
Luckily for me, all the beers that advertise in that Cro-Magnon male manner (<--probably an insult to the maturity of Cro-Magnons) are beers that I wouldn't offend my taste buds with if I'd just spent a week waterless in an arid desert. Those commercials just serve to remind me to steer far away from their tasteless (or in the case of Bud, sour) "beverages".
Beer advertising in general *is* vile, but it's this modeling of relationships in which two people are spectacularly crappy and immature towards each other as normal and expected that really makes me nutz.
Hate!
Advertising, like journalism (I've done both) is an occupation in which the exceptional genius of a few blinds us to the arrant stupidity of the many. Only when really idiotic advertising joins up with a really vile product can we penetrate the rosy haze of virtue and see things as they are.
I would rather drink moose piss from a puddle than drink Coors of any kind. Same goes for a lot of people. This leaves Coors and its agencies with a market that is much the same cut as the "creative" staff who come up with such swill. If these juiced ex frat boys think at all, they know they can't sell this urine to anybody but other people who will drink anything. All they can do is get them to drink more of it.
Yanno, the stuff doesn't even have any trajectory at beer pong?
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