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Friday, January 24, 2003
The night of the mooks
Chuck Colson (you know...the guy who would" walk over my grandmother to get Nixon elected") is warning us against the "mooks".
In other words, Miller is saying that every young American male is at heart what advertisers and media experts call a "mook." A mook is a perpetual adolescent. He is preoccupied with sexual matters and cannot rise above the level of the trivial.
As Douglas Rushkoff of New York University says, the mook is entirely "the creation of marketers." He is designed to sell to young men by appealing to an exaggerated version of their worst instincts.
What then happens is that, in what Rushkoff calls a "feedback loop," young men imitate what they see on the screen, which in turn prompts similar images—a vicious circle, in which what people see shapes their self-understanding, as well as their behavior.
So why are we getting all worried about the mooks right now?
Catfight.
Anyone watching this year’s NFL playoffs has probably seen Miller Lite’s newest commercial. The ad features two attractive young women seated next to a fountain. They are debating what’s best about the beer: "tastes great" or "less filling"?
Suddenly the argument degenerates into "an angry, clothes-shredding wrestling match," and the women end up in the fountain. They strip each other down to their undergarments before continuing the match in a cement trough. How degrading to these women.
The ad then cuts to a bar where it turns out that the fight was merely a male fantasy. It was two guys’ idea of the perfect beer ad. In the network version, their dates then look at them in a way that says, "What morons!"
...and that is the point of the ad. (Colson neglects to point out that the cable version of the ad ends with one of the young ladies telling the other "Let's make out"). The sex is the bonus. But the road goes both ways. Apparently Colson had no problem with a previous beer ad where a somewhat dorky man is given oversized bowling shoes at a bowling alley. When a woman at an adjacent lane sees the length of the shoes, her eyes light up and we hear the sound of a horse. Then there is the current Budweiser "True" commercial where a girlfriend wears her old boyfriends t-shirt instead of one belonging to her current one because it's "huge" and she likes huge things. The ad ends with the woman commenting on her current boyfriends "cute, tiny hands". Perhaps these ads hit a little too close to home for Mr. Colson
The fact is that sex is used to sell beer and Colson finds this suprising. You would think that someone who has been out of prison as long as he has would have settled into the culture by now.
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