Uncomfortable space with people in their places

[sovay]

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.

Comments

makes my skin crawl too

[asakiyume]

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 --PREACH. Strong agree! What a creepy ad campaign! "You're made ready and so are we" is, for one thing, ambiguous, because "made" can mean both "born/created/from inception have been," and also "rendered." In the first meaning, it's crass presumption for a place of business to make the comment (what are they, a place of worship? a school of philosophy?), and it's just threatening in a Scar-from-the-Lion-King-singing-"Be Prepared" way if they do it in the second meaning. It's also vaguely--or not so vaguely?--coercive and has overtones of militarism, I think because, like with Scar's "Be Prepared," 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. What I'm saying is, (a) I think it's wrong for a financial institution to be trying to hand out ontological slogans, and (b), boy, when they try, they sure do get the tone wrong--and it feels very much in keeping with everything that's wrong in our present society. So yes, STRONG AGREE on "it makes me think of philosophy and dystopias"

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.

[callunav]

I absolutely read 'Made Ready' as readymade, in the first line of this post, and it absolutely did make me twitch. (I've been lucky enough to avoid the actual ad campaign since currently I can't make use of public transportation and I toss any mail I get from Citizen's into the recycling unread.)

I was just trying to deposit a check, why am I having an argument about teleology with Aristotle?

Yes!

It is wonderful when people transform their lives. It is not because they were always meant to.

*Yes*.

[naraht]

It has resonances for me of "Get Ready for Brexit," which has been our current ever-present advertising campaign over the past few months...

[movingfinger]

It has a diconcertingly off ring to it, like someone who doesn't know that "make ready" is already an English phrase with its own meaning and grammar. If I were in the market for a bank, this would not inspire confidence in theirs.

[brigdh]

Ugh, how awful. It reminds me of this ad campaign, which was ubiquitous in my area recently and which I loathed, but the strangeness of yours somehow makes it even more dystopian.

at which point the whole thing starts to feel like the rebranding of Amigara Fault.
What a horrifyingly perfect allusion for such a campaign.

[dramaticirony]

One thing that strikes me is that one thing the campaign seems to evoke the polarizing nature of income inequality and financial instability in our society--if nearly half of us can't deal with an unexpected $400 emergency, we are not ready, and are beneath the bank's notice. And the advertisement's implication is that not being ready is to have willfully fallen from a natural state of grace.Thou shall be judged, and the system shall not, for it is perfect, as demonstrated by these omnipresent airbrushed avatars.

[drwex]

I love this analysis, but I have to believe that almost no ad campaign is going to survive a concerted philosophical inspection.

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'.