I hesitate to bump Jamie’s musing on the Britney/K-Fed romance, but I caught this Old Spice commercial over the holidays and thought it was significant. Of what, I’m not entirely sure. Some big chunk of it is making fun of the traditional sports-is-life mode of advertising to men, some of it’s just trying to be funny, and some of it (note. e.g., the hottie-umpire in short shorts at the end of the commersh) is just selling the same old story that Old Spice is the manliest of deodorants.
It’s interesting to me, sometimes, the degree to which advertising is now able to rely on such an incredible degree of media fluency–of mastery of the canon of advertising tropes and imagery–from its viewers that it can produce short narratives that are essentially associative and poetic in their structure.
UPDATE: Over at The American Scene, which is an interesting group blog on politics and culture written by a bunch of mostly young, mostly conservative, almost exclusively male journalist-critics, I came across this post by Reihan Salam on the weird afterlife of 80s curiosity Chuck Norris, and it occurred to me that Norris seems to exist in the same universe of semi-nostalgic ironic half-macho masculinity in which the Old Spice guy lives. Salam writes:
Not only has Chuck Norris discovered the secret to achieving negligible sensescence — he is also, according to a friend of mine currently in Baghdad, bizarrely well-loved by the US military.
have you heard about the US army chuck norris fixation? he’s literally on the walls of every port o john in iraq. at a base in kuwait, i peed into a urinal that said “chuck norris is watching you.” here in Baghdad, I’ve seen these: “Chuck Norris isn’t hung like a horse; horses are hung like chuck.” “Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.” and “Chuck Norris once ate a 72-ounce steak in 45 minutes. He spent the first forty minutes making love to the waitress.”
So perhaps General Petraeus will not lead the American military coup of 2012. Rather, it’ll be Norris and Huckabee, both bare-chested and festooned with bandoliers. Meanwhile, Barack Obama will lead a doughty band of center-left law professors and knife-wielding social workers in armed resistance, backed by Virtual Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Republic of Cyberbolivaria.A
Also living in this universe of post-macho, self-reflexive double take masculinity, maybe, are William Shatner, and Bruce Campbell (the guy from the Evil Dead movies who’s also featured in a recent Old Spice ad). I was thinking for a second that maybe Stephen Colbert lives there as well, but he’s missing the essential element of earnestness that the other guys have.
