I don’t know where I’ve been for the past eight months or so, but I somehow only saw Burger King’s “Manthem” commercial for the first time the other day. In case you’re the other person who hasn’t seen it, it goes like this: guy stands up and storms out of his date (as flabbergasted hottie girlfriend looks on) at the chi-chi restaurant and into the streets where he meets up with horde of other storming doods who are tired of being pushed around, of being forced to eat “chick food.” As they march through the streets of the city, they sing their “Manthem,” sung to the tune of “I am Woman.”
Several a blogger have written about the add, among them someone at Creative Destruction, who noted, among other things, that
“The “guys should be guys” ethos of the Burger King commercial is nothing new, although it’s perhaps a new achievement in the compulsive over-the-topness of its sexism. For example, at the climax of the commercial, the mob of whopper-eating men toss a minivan off a bridge, symbolically rescuing the pleased family dude who got out of the van from his emasculating family attachments. (And if you think I’m reading too much into it, tell me why else they would throw a minivan off a bridge while singing about manhood?)”
What was surprising to me was the majority of people who offered feedback to the CD post pretty much said not that CD was “reading too much into it, but, “Eh, what’s the big deal, it’s a commercial,” which made me wonder why they were reading the blog in the first place. Also interesting among the pro-masculist responses were those of men decrying the neanderthalization of men in TV commercials. Andrea Rubenstein at Shrub.com addressed this in her fascinating and detailed close reading of the commercial:
“Rarely have I seen such contempt shown for men as when they are portrayed as what I can only describe as “cavemen.” Uncivilized at heart, barely above animals (and, to be sure, in the minds of the person making the connections, animals are base creatures without intelligence), who have no real control over their actions. They’re men, after all!”
(I won’t go into how horribly offended my favorite car insurance Cro-Magnon would feel about the above) Both of the aforementioned blogs discuss the ad as a step backwards in terms of bullying men into eating bad food. (And by men, of course, we all mean HETEROSEXUAL men. If you don’t eat BK you’re worse than not manly, you’re a big, or rather, skinny little fag, of course.) And even Anja, my woman (I’m being tongue in cheek here, y’all) who usually calls me out for being too sensitive to sexism was repulsed, said that the ad “gives men every reason to be gluttonous and gross.”
While I agree with all of the above, I think there’s another reason that “Manthem” not only fails but arouses such ire. If you’d be so good as to read the lyrics, as I’ve painstakingly transcribed them:
I am man, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I’m way to hungry to settle for chick food.
‘Cuz my stomach’s startin’ to growl
and I’m goin’ on the prowl
for a Texas Double Whopper,
Man, that’s good!
Yes, I’m a guy,
I’ll admit I’ve been fed quiche
Wave tofu bye bye
Now it’s for whopper beef I reach
I will eat this meat
Until my innie turns into an outie
I am starved, I am incorrigible
(and I need to scarf a big burger bacon jalapeno good thing down)
I am hungry, I am incorrigible.
I AM MAN!
It’s just B-A-D bad. It’s horribly, lazily written, it’s NOT FUNNY! And it doesn’t scan. Like the Milwaukee’s Best Light ads I ranted about previously (and unlike the Geico Caveman spots), it shows absolute contempt for the men it’s selling to. Note, if you will the surplus syllables in “And I’m way too hungry to settle for chick food” and the missing iambs in ,“Yes, I’m a guy, I’ll admit I’ve been fed quiche.” It’s clumsy, it’s dumb, and it makes no sense. How hard would it have been to make it at least make sense and metrically work? Let’s see: “Yes, I’m a guy, I won’t eat no stinking quiche.” There. Lines like that insult the both the viewer who would normally either ignore or be sold by the ad, and doubly annoy those who would tend to be offended by the content alone: women and quiche-eatin’ doods. The whole thing lacks all wit and charm, and as any man or woman who’s repeatedly fallen for a slick cad can tell you, a little charm goes a long way.
I am starved, I am incorrigible, but I am no way gonna get me a Texas Double Whopper. It’s lunchtime, and I’m heading for them golden arches: “I’m lovin’ it!” ba ba-da ba ba! And if you think I’m mad because they came up with “manthem” before we did, well, I am (. . . I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all, not even the chair).
