The ads in Munich are speaking to me. by risa
by Risa Dickens
I went to watch two movies in one day because the early bird gets the worm. When Professor Soar, the diligent Dr. schemester behind Brandhype.org, let out on the Concordia mailinglist that he had tickets to Brokeback Mountain and Munich for anyone who would go and write down product placements, I lept at the chance. I wanted to have seen some of the Oscar nominated movies this year so I could catch Jon Stewart’s jokes. But also, it’s about time someone started keeping track of how products are being played on the big screen. Are movies always puppets to the brand that pays the most? Are we being subtlety oriented towards associating brands with ideologies by virtue of how close we let the corporations get to our narratives?
I don’t know, but here’s what I found out on that big movie day:
Ads in Brokeback Mountain:
Tons of old Fords around everywhere.
the word Ford: at least 8 times.
GMC= 7 times (one clearly dusted off just around the logo on the door)
Another character drives a Mercury (Ford)
Camel cigarettes= 2 times
Budweiser appears on bottles and signs throughout- at least 13 times.
Coke bottle, coke sign
Pepsi- in Mexico
Whiskey- with a black and gold label always turned away from the camera
other brand- “Old Time” visible twice.
Better Most Beans. at least 3 scenes.
Other visible brands:
Michelob
Heinz
Redpath
Greyhound
Lee jeans
BF Goodrich (tires)
Ads in Munich.
Coke in Hebrew
Emerson and Phillips TV’s
Texaco appears in the old footage.
Martini and Cinzano appear in scene in Cafe in Italy
The Mercedes logo appears often on cars throughout the film.
Pepsi Cola in Beirut
In Munich the word Pepsi appears the one time they go to an Arab country- Beirut in Lebanon. The word Coke never appears, except in Hebrew in a very early shot in the movie when the Israeli’s are already watching the terrorist attack on the Olympics on TV. When I saw the Hebrew word on the red sign in the cafe, my impression was that it was in Israel. But I don’t speak or read Hebrew so I can’t be sure. I just had a strong flashing impression – it reminded me immediately of the kid at my school who had the red t-shirt with “coke” written on it in Hebrew. It may not actually have been the word Coke I saw over the cafe owner’s head. Still, the setting is beige and the bright red sign stands out. Someone should check who reads Hebrew to know for sure; but even if it’s not actually the word Coke, the red background and and the white, distinctive style of writing hanging behind a bar in a cafe is enough to communicate the brand.
In Beirut the sign was a vintage, curly “Pepsi Cola” sign. Definitely. It looks dusty and old, perhaps because it is night. The sign is large. It may have been hanging behind a stage of some sort. You see it before the secret Israeli task force arrives with the Israeli army and begins shooting people.
The “coke” bottle in Brokeback- you only see the top of it, and it’s definitely a straight girl who’s drinking it. I think it’s Heath’s wife. Sorry I can’t place the detail exactly, but the funny thing is, all I’m left with from that fleeting shot is=”Straight pretty girl looking sad, sweet and familiar, framed with the top of the distinctive bottle.” So I guess they did their job, eh? Coke is straight and American, and Pepsi appears in Mexico when poor sad Gyllenhaal is trolling a dark alley for a guy to comfort him. Not subtle.
With product placement goggles on, I sort of felt like I was watching the movie from further away. I had to set up a wider angle, and more of a critical distance, to watch the screen for visual cues which otherwise I would have been trying to ignore. I definitely noticed things I wouldn’t have otherwise- the brushed off GMC logo, for example, was a funny surprise.
Both stories I watched that day were about people with simple loves and ideas about happiness, being ravaged over years by big, distorted, machine-like thinking. To watch these tragic characters weaving through this newly-visible grid of carefully placed products highlighted this feeling of living with land mines. The ads aren’t what are keeping our heros down- in fact they feel kind of democratic, stitching together people and places. And when I think of ads as “character traits,” in the way I was encouraged to in a script writing class, then again they feel pretty harmless.
It’s when that motivation becomes questionable, and you’re forced to start wondering who is calling the shots on which products appear where, that product placements feel insidious and dangerous. It feels like the author/directors best intentions could be subtly contradicted at any moment by another layer of meaning imposed by someone higher up the industry food chain.
I thought Speilburg did a pretty balanced job with Munich- emphasizing that on both sides all that’s worth killing for is “home”. And I can see, under that “character trait” model of thinking about brands, how one might rationalize putting Coke in one place and Pepsi in another in an attempt to communicate something about how behind apparent differences these two things are deeply the same. But Speilburg has no control over how those two brands are used in other films. And so his intentions (if they were ever good) can be dramatically under cut by a meta-message about “good and bad” that some uber-marketeer is trying to communicate. Scary stuff.
Maybe someone is sneakily getting the mega brands back, though. In Munich the violence between Israelis and Palestinians becomes a conversation. A conversation that’s gone horribly awry, but still they compare it to a conversation. The appearance of the world’s most famous competing brands at 2 moments when the world’s most famous fighting people are doing infiltration and murder is not meaningless. It might make us think: who is profitting from this distorted communication?
But should anything be done about it? Should we stop people from saying things in loud or subtle ways? Or stop artists from making the bargains they choose to make to get their films made? If the movies are saying things with brands about “good” and “evil” in an attempt polarize for stupid beverage profit, should we make layers of laws or elaborate punishments to stop them?
If, instead of regulating harder, we shame companies that try to divide us, (we do that well enough on our own, thanks) will they change their tactics to be more lovable?
I think and hope that knowing the truth about the forces at work on our communication will be enough. Knowing this truth requires keeping detailed and complex accounting of the patterns being played out, and then telling the truth about it. This is such a ginormous and monumental task that we might be tempted to dismiss it as an illegitimate solution. But this is what the next generation web is all about: a productive interaction between software designers and other people- filling in content from distributed perspectives, questioning the content, catching bugs, and slowly constructing acceptable depictions of truth. It’s like Wallace Stevens says- the task is to find what will suffice. This is the kind of feedback system they are working on setting into motion over at brandhype.org, and more power to ‘em.
March 4th, 2006 at 8:52 am
NB – liked the post; i just saw munich last night and the branding was absent, which is to say that my gaze didn’t register them. yet, as you say, different optics, different films. i was sutured into the sweeping events… you leave the intentionality of product placement open, which is great because it suggests the very accepted ubiquity of these kinds of signs and the affects and effects they have – common-sense, taken for granted. films – arguably different from commercial television where the program is the free lunch (i.e., the ads are the “real” contents) – are discrete and have a unity not found in western-style tv programming and content organization. a commercial every six miniutes is not indidental nor natural (duh). when ads do dominate in movies, it’s apparent, or at least that’s what i’d like to think…but when i take no notice, does that mean the ads aren’t apparent or that they aren’t registering or that, maybe, i’ve trained myself to not salivate with the bell-ringing or that they’re working across that virtual level of the uncnscious so favoured by ideologically-charged film criticism of the late 60’s and early 70’s…? dunno.
March 12th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Go Matt Soar!
*Canadian website lets people track brands in films*
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/03/12/productplacement-website.html
March 14th, 2006 at 7:38 am
yeah, he was in the mirror this week too.
this reminds me of something my dad john told me about – the practice of sending out press kits on research. it goes on in psychology, sometimes before much conclusive data has actually been accumulated. that’s why i liked matt’s interview in the mirror- where he could have trumpeted suspicions or even relatively well-founded hypothesis to make the “most” of his limelight time, he instead emphasized the importance of critical conversation.
June 3rd, 2006 at 6:35 am
from what i understand, the better most beans were made up by the prop company — B etter B eans M ost…
the whisky was called ‘old rose’ and alludes to them growing older, young and “stemmin’ the rose” on the mountain, and then later, older, but still stemmin’… haha. if you notice, there were roses throughout the film, in paintings, on wallpaper, etc.
the girl with the picking idly at the coke bottle was alma jr., ennis’ daughter. if that’s ad placement, it’s very subtle. that’s like saying cassie’s silly shoes were an ad for famolares or something. everybody makes something, and a movie about life can’t help but have products that help paint the landscape of a film. of course, the obvious ads, like the macdonald’s “ad” in fifth element, is overkill, but what are they supposed to do? remove all chrome from trucks to make them generic? people would still recognize the vehicle by the body design.
i didn’t see spielberg’s munch, but i think BBM did a fairly even handed job with the product placement. and even so, it’s a wonder those companies allowed themselves to be connected to a movie about gay cowboys, how un-american is that?