Off to the Movies? Would You Like Some World Peace And/Or Pepsi?

It's only in the last ten years or so that we in the US began seeing commercials before the movie. The exotic and bizarre cinema-going experience in the UK, which once included not only the opportunity to buy cocktails in the lobby and to smoke (usually in the balcony) during the movie (I know, gross, whatever, I am just saying-it was a lot worse on the plane, believe me), has featured commercials for about forever. I had a special fondness for the hallucinogenic Babycham ones ("Nothing sparkles like a Babycham!").

Complaints about this relatively new practice in the U.S. seem to have fallen on deaf ears, in part because moviegoers don't seem to mind seeing a few commercials before the trailers, while they are still blabbing with their mates and eating popcorn. The revenues are perfectly staggering: well over half a billion dollars in 2008. Recent news indicates that we'll be seeing more and more such commericals, with some firms promising to screen "advertainment" (#$*!) programs of up to 20 minutes' duration before the movie.

I bring this up because of the Pepsi ad that has been running at the Five Star Los Feliz 3 for the last month or two.

It features reasonably appealing music-video graphics set to the Black-Eyed Peas song "One Tribe," and touts the Pepsi Refresh Project, which aims to "give millions in grants to refresh individuals and communities." This attempt to "rebrand" the idea of community involvement or charitable works with the Pepsi-related term "refreshment" is weird enough on its own. But there is more to it.

In sharp contrast to the "stand apart ad" that Thomas Frank and David Foster Wallace dissected with such brilliance (in The Conquest of Cool and "E Unibus Pluram" [PDF], respectively,) showing how notions of "individuality" and "uniqueness" were successfully coopted in order to sell you stuff in the late 20th century ("as unique as you are," that sort of thing), Pepsi's "One Tribe" ad attempts to take ownership of the idea of community and social responsibility. Because you're watching it in a real community, instead of alone in front of the TV-and I would argue that the closest many of us can feel to a group of strangers is in an audience for entertainment, whether at a movie theater, a sporting event or a nightclub-the implications are that much more intrusive and disquieting.

After the campaign to seduce consumers into parting with their cash by appealing to their "individuality" and "rebellion" lost steam, advertisers developed a more transgressive line. By the 1990s, commercials almost uniformly sought to out-ironize their audience, as Zack Stentz wrote:

[T]he medium has stifled mockery and opposition by beating viewers to the punch and doing the mocking for them. By gently making fun of itself or its own advertisers, be it in a David Letterman monologue or smirking ESPN Sports Center promotion, television lets the watcher feel superior to the common herd and in on the joke, even while he or she is still glued to the sofa.

Pepsi was heavily invested in this approach; Mark C. Miller wrote brilliantly in Deride and Conquer (1986) about the Pepsi "Choice of a Generation" commercial that featured a horde of thirsty beachgoers stampeding to a Pepsi vendor en masse the moment the sound of fizzing soda poured over ice is broadcast along the hot, sunny beach. Commenting on Miller, Wallace noted that "[t]here's about as much "choice' at work in this commercial as there was in Pavlov's bell kennel. [...] the point of this successful bit of advertising is that Pepsi has been advertised successfully."

Pepsi has by now perfected its strategy of creating an artificial connection in your mind between its sugary fizzy obesity-promoting tooth-rotting brown fluid and all sorts of attractive ideas-individuality, ironic awareness and now, just like other companies, it has turned to charity, a green earth and general do-gooding. The sentimental will.i.am may seem to have grown troublingly fame-whoring after the success of his "Yes We Can" video, but there is no question that his music is stirring in just the button-pushing way that Pepsi can exploit really well in order to make these false new connections.

Not unlike the "Yes We Can" video, "One People"-and this ad is the product of TBWA\Chiat\Day, by the way-concerns itself with beliefs dear to the hearts of many ("we are one people," etc.). And it uses its possibly familiar imagery very well.

But instead of promoting a relatively progressive presidential candidate to a desperate, heartsore electorate, however, this song is flogging soda.

Maybe all this looks benign enough on the outside, like any other Trojan horse does at first. After all, the change (as in coinage) that Pepsi is handing out to all these worthy causes amounts to quite a lot in non-corporate-behemoth terms, and of course that is a good thing. (Pepsi, like all corporations, has charitable giving programs and is also publishing the grants issued under the "Refresh" program.)

But consider what happens when we feel something of significance to have been cheapened and coarsened by its use in advertising. We can hardly even stand it when they use "Ceremony" in an Absolut ad, because a commercial impulse seems to be intruding on what used to be the hallowed ground of pure, disinterested belief or appreciation. Now here is Pepsi, engaging in the co-opting of people's fondest, most distant hopes, such as racial unity and peace and restoring the forests, and then art-directing and Autotuning and rewrapping them all into a glossy, easily-digested package distributed before the movie, in the interest of profit. And still worse, it's all being used to make a buck in that rare atmosphere where strangers really do feel a vestigial sense of community. It gets sick when you consider all those diabetic teenagers and millions of empty aluminum cans and lakes of never-decaying two-liter PET bottles out in the Pacific Ocean.

Maybe it won't take long for the mockery of "One People" to spread around the culture, because of how cheap and sorry the underlying motives are, and how even-cheaper and more useless and destructive the actual product is. I should really hate to hear "one people y'all" become an ironic little joke for teenagers to make when they see news stories of a race riot or a gay-bashing, but I can already see it coming.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.