Superbowl commercials do tend to further the narrative of men as boorish, stupid, overly obsessed with shitty beer and loyal to a fault to their tortilla chips. Also: Women are just awful, awful people who do nothing but get in the way of men’s joy.
(Assuming this joy is unrelated to The Watching of Boobies, in which case women do a lot to help in commercials – but they could be doing so much more. DAMN YOU, FCC!)
But the general horror-show that is ad agencies’ idea of how men view themselves reached its apex with the seething, dead-eyed rage of the Dodge Charger commercial.
It caught me off-guard at first, because, well, “Man lying in bed with droll narration” could be a lot of things, and frankly I’d tuned out after watching Betty White get tackled anyway. So it took me a moment to realize what was happening here. But by the time the camera shifted to a third dead-eyed (Zach Galafianakus-esque) man’s internal bitterness at a life that asks him to Do Things, I started to pay a little more attention. (See the commercial after the break.) Read more »
