The irritation with the Dodge commercial from the Super Bowl
has been one of those things that I can both sides of the coin. From the
perspective that A laid out earlier in the week, this makes complete sense. I
can’t imagine it being OK to have a commercial with a bunch of black guys
saying, “I will shuffle and grin when you tell an N joke. I will not mention my
penis is three times larger than yours. I will speak ghetto when you ask me to.
Because of this…” and then fill in something horribly racist afterward. So
why is it OK to basically say, “The bitch I married, the job I’ve taken and the
life I lead has neutered me. Here’s the car that comes with a nice set of brass
truck nuts on the tow hitch to get me back in the game?”
The answer is two-fold: One part is simple, while the other
is complex.
The simple answer is that advertising appeals to an audience
in order to create a shared understanding that is used to sell a product. To
that end, that’s why crappy beer often has very good-looking people in
swimsuits breaking into beach volleyball games at the drop of a hat. This is
why commercials for watches rarely show the watch but instead show a guy with a
tux, way too much gel in his hair and a shit-eating grin on his face. He’s then
draped by a blonde in a red dress, all of which seems to say, “If you buy this
watch, you will get laid.” Dodge’s commercial is one more attempt to appeal to
a market that is under-tapped: guys hitting a mid-life crisis during a time
where you’ve probably got a fuel-efficient hybrid or a mini-van (or both) in
your garage and the last time you saw more than six-cylinders, it was in a
12-pack of beer. You don’t like your job (much of that was job stuff, not wife
stuff), you thought your life would be different and you’ve really got a sense
that there are more days behind you than in front of you. That’s
understandable.
The more complex answer is in the societal shift we’ve seen
over the previous four decades. Good, bad or whatever isn’t what I’m going for
here, so please don’t deluge me with a ton of comments that argue things
weren’t as great in the ‘50s or ‘60s as we’d like to believe. That’s not the
point. The point is that societal norms have changed and there has been a
steady erosion of what was once the province of men. However, that change has
been something that not all generations who are alive have experienced and
there are still plenty of pockets of neo-traditionalism that leave many people
feeling like the guys in “Men of a Certain Age.”
People see their lives turning out certain ways. They
imagine themselves to be something specific by the time they are X age. The
line from “Reality Bites” comes to fruition for most of us: “I really thought I
was going to be something by the time I was 22.” However, at the age of 22,
you’ve got a lot of innings left to play. However, once you get married, have
kids, get a mortgage and so forth, you find the strictures of life tightening
around you. You can’t just say, “Fuck it. I’m doing X.” There are consequences
and repercussions for every action. We are afraid of everything now. What they fail to see is that you’ve traded in bits of yourself for
other bits of yourself. It’s like having $20 and spending it on a baseball card
you always wanted. You can bemoan the fact you don’t have $20 to spend on lunch
or on something else or you can enjoy the fact that you’ve got something you
always wanted.
When give up the life of a single guy for the life of a
married guy, there are trade offs, regardless of if you’ve got the best, most
understanding wife ever. (Sorry, you can’t have her. She’s mine.)I listen to kids all the time talking
about the random hook ups they’ve had or the dates that have gone to shit of
the “Why isn’t he calling anymore?” conversations and believe me, I’m grateful
as hell not to be in that boat anymore. However, that means that I don’t get to
hang out with a group of guys at a bar for 10 hours after work and ogle the
waitresses or come home at 4 a.m. without any kind of consequences. That’s a
trade off.
Before I was married, I made about 1/3 of what I do now.
However, there was always a ton of money to blow on worthless crap because all
I had to care about was me. However, that was a pretty lonely time and it meant
always going home to an empty house. Now, we watch cash like a hawk watches a
rodent. We’ve got a mortgage, a kid to put through private school and a ton of
other responsibilities. Sure, I get horribly wistful when I’m looking at a
Borla dual exhaust system for the Classic and I can’t just buy it because it’s
not just my money, but the car can’t hug you when you buy it a McNugget kids
meal. It’s a trade off.
However, the problem for most guys is that the pendulum has
swung so far against the life they thought they should have or the one lived
out by their parents and grandparents that it’s sometimes tough to reconcile
these issues.
For years, the workplace was like the office in “Mad Men.”
You could smoke (sometimes drink), tell off-color jokes and have cheese-cake
photo calendars on the wall. I go back to the line from “Hoffa” that DeVito
issued about a community home for Teamsters that Hoffa was trying to build:
“It’s a place where broken down truckers can drink beer, fart and lie about the
waitresses they fucked. If you want to make truckers feel at home, put a condom
machine on the wall of their living room.” Eventually, the smoking and drinking
disappeared (which was probably good). The calendars became more and more taboo
and the off-color jokes became frowned upon. This continued to swing further
past the “Hey, Frank, you wanna put that Playboy away?” era. Suits became
filed, many of which were necessary (I’ve seen “North Country.” I get it.) and
things got cleaned up even more. However, once that line had been crossed, the
fear of suits, the fear of being labeled as “anti” something or other and just
general fear made for the type of environment you were seeing typified in the
Dodge commercial. You tell a joke that someone doesn’t like? Sensitivity
training. You say someone looks nice in that outfit and they take it the wrong
way? Suspension and sensitivity training. You decide you don’t want to answer
the phone on the first ring? Firing squad. (OK, I made that last one up.) The
tension between what was and wasn’t acceptable became more taut and the
penalties for failing to see the line were more severe.
Home, family and other aspects of life all started following
a similar pattern: simply being a guy didn’t give you the right to do what you
wanted. In fact, in many cases, the opposite was true. Being a guy meant you
were supposed to sit down, shut up and take it, lest societal scorn and other
painful consequences befall you. Eventually, like a beaten dog, men were just
doing it to themselves. Thus, tapping into a potential dying ember, Dodge put
out the commercial. It’s not the first time someone tried going against the
grain for a commercial: The Harley campaign of “Screw it. Let’s Ride!” was a
failure during the core of the recession, as it seemed to promote irresponsible
spending on luxury items. Still, it tapped into something people wanted to
feel: freedom.
Is it a good commercial? Not really. Most men who are that
hen-pecked aren’t buying the car. However, men on the border of a mid-life
crisis are likely to at least look at this and say, “I want to be happy again.”
Maybe it should come from a wife or a child or a job. However, if there’s
potential to use an item to jumpstart the happy and watch that happy wash over
the rest of your life, hey, there are worse things.