![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Uncomfortable space with people in their places
For the last couple of months, I have been seeing advertisements around town as part of a new campaign by Citizens Bank: Made Ready. It was bannered all over South Station when I got back from New York in October and the cavernous overlit emptiness of after-midnight in a shuttered train station gave it an additionally ominous look, but I have also seen it by day on the glass planes of the head house at Porter and it still bothers me. Sometimes there's a photo of a person captioned with a monologue beginning I'm made of . . . Sometimes the photo appears intended to embody the viewer: You're made of . . . All energetic, aspirational things, indiscriminately abstract or concrete: Ready to teach. Ready to make it. Ready to set the example. Ready to vlog. They all conclude with the same gnomically inclusive declaration, which appears to be the slogan of the entire project: You're made ready and so are we. It makes my skin crawl. I have been trying to figure out why. I find it impossible to separate the catchphrase from the term readymade, not sensu Dada, but the original sense of the mass-produced, manufactured objects on whose commercial status Duchamp was playing with the concept of found art, as if we are—surely we can't be—meant to take all these go-getting people as coming off the production line stamped for their own particular purposes. So first that gets Malvina Reynolds stuck in my head with her doctors and her lawyers and her business executives all made out of ticky-tacky and then I get the phrase linked up with His Girl Friday's "production for use," which in context of the film is a cynical appropriation of political rhetoric in order to provide a sympathetic angle on a frail little cop-killer and therefore not necessarily to be applied unironically, but it zeroes in on the unease I feel at the idea of summing up a person as made ready. For what? It's a transitive kind of descriptor; there's a future expectation, a tension, as if it's not enough to have accumulated life experience and opinions, there must be a use for it, an end for which you have been unknowingly but fortuitously prepared, whether that's teaching or vlogging or making it—whatever that means in the great American songbook of vague but indispensable ambitions—at which point the whole thing starts to feel like the rebranding of Amigara Fault. I do in fact believe in being prepared for all sorts of eventualities, by which I mean less survival-prepper doomsday scenarios than having some idea of how you might respond in a situation so you don't get caught flat-footed by it and lose your boundaries. I don't believe it is valuable to view a person's life as the sum of its useful applications. I don't even think I believe that a person needs to have useful applications, at least not in any way that can be represented by the pre-packaged arete of thinking outside the box, super-sized dreams, curiosity and forever embracing the unknown. It is wonderful when people transform their lives. It is not because they were always meant to. I was just trying to deposit a check, why am I having an argument about teleology with Aristotle? Or optimism with Leibniz? In short, I can't view the campaign neutrally, as the catchy, challenging, personal-trainer encouragement it seems to want to be; it makes me think of philosophy and dystopias. What does Citizens Bank think is coming anyway, that we all have to be ready for it? Whatever it is, like the man says at the end of Nightmare Alley, we were born for it. The conveyer belt to the future ticks on.
makes my skin crawl too
But I have to say, you made me laugh, too:
as if it's not enough to have accumulated life experience and opinions, there must be a use for it, an end for which you have been unknowingly but fortuitously prepared, whether that's teaching or vlogging or making it—whatever that means in the great American songbook of vague but indispensable ambitions --that. That made me laugh.
Re: makes my skin crawl too
It's such a weird flatly asserted ambiguity, too: there's no time in it. As if it happened just now, as if it's always been true, as if it was always going to be true. That makes me realize it activates for me the same kind of horror as "The Red Crown" or "Sleeper in the Valley." The thing you are is always what you would be, even if it's not you anymore. That must be accidental, but it's not like grammar doesn't have its own overtones!
that type of tense preparedness is never, y'know, to listen with delight to a story your beloved is telling you, or to notice how you can see the color of the dawn sky through the trees now that the leaves are down, or to ponder the words that come to you in dreams, no: it's also preparedness to go get 'em, get it done, take up arms, complete the mission--those kinds of things.
Yes! I didn't put my finger on the boot-camp aspect, but you're right. Somebody's going to fire a starting pistol and you're off.
--and it feels very much in keeping with everything that's wrong in our present society.
Yes. Yes, it does.
--that. That made me laugh.
Thank you!
no subject
Yes!
*Yes*.
no subject
I'm glad it's not just me, but now I'm beginning to wonder who on earth this slogan was focus-tested on.
(It's all over the public transit. It's a really hard sell.)
no subject
no subject
Agh. I can see that.
no subject
no subject
The grammatical uncanniness absolutely helps nothing.
If I were in the market for a bank, this would not inspire confidence in theirs.
no subject
at which point the whole thing starts to feel like the rebranding of Amigara Fault.
What a horrifyingly perfect allusion for such a campaign.
no subject
In your area's defense, the Fiverr campaign is appalling! But, yes. This one really does feel like I should be seeing it in a corporate satire.
What a horrifyingly perfect allusion for such a campaign.
Thank you, I'm sorry.
no subject
no subject
Of course, this is America, how could I think that success in finance could be separated from the state of one's soul?
no subject
no subject
no subject
My own commute is hammered with Bank of America's "The Power to..." campaign that, although it contains one unabashedly gay-positive image still makes my hackles rise. The slogan asks "What do you want the power to do?" and I'm tempted to respond with:
"Disrupt the patriarchy, upend late-stage crony capitalism, and silence advertising at will. Whatcha got for me there, BofA?"
Also, there are a lot worse things to have stuck in one's head than Malvina Reynolds. Just sayin'.
no subject
This is almost certainly true, but I still feel this campaign passed disingenuous and achieved egregious.
"Disrupt the patriarchy, upend late-stage crony capitalism, and silence advertising at will. Whatcha got for me there, BofA?"
I hear you.
Also, there are a lot worse things to have stuck in one's head than Malvina Reynolds. Just sayin'.
(I had "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" from Company for days! It did!)
no subject
no subject
Eminently fair. Playing on how un-thinking most people tend to be is stock in trade, but it certainly can cross the line.
I had "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" from Company for days!
I have a mild allergic reaction to Sondheim. I also find Queen's "We Will Rock You" to be a good antidote to almost any earworm.