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So, the talk of the Internet this week is an ad by Pepsi featuring Kendall Jenner, one of the extended Kardashian family members, de-escalating a protest by handing out Pepsi to the officers on duty. It was an incredibly brain-dead commercial, handicapped even further by how incredibly smug and self-satisfied the production of it came off.
The commercial is brimming with various young, protest-oriented artists all plying their craft and carrying poorly written signs about “joining the conversation,” all completely stopped in their tracks by the power of Pepsi and Kendall. It’s been maligned from all sides and suddenly makes that Coca-Cola ad of America the Beautiful sung in various languages seem like an Oscar short.
However, the intrusion of terrible advertising got me thinking about one of my favorite films of all time- How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Advertising and PR have always been a weird and vexing subject for cinema and television. I think it’s that these endeavors, though more artistic, are inherently aware of the fact they exist as symbiotes stuck to the side of marketing and media manipulation, all at once repulsed by the concept but also thoroughly aware their own existence depends on it.
Sometimes that produces thoughtful and character driven meditations like Mad Men or the enjoyable irreverent Thank You for Smoking. Other times it produces high-concept weirdness like The Stuff or They Live. How to Get Ahead in Advertising is like some weird, curdled mixture of both sides of the spectrum mixed together with The Thing with Two Heads- let’s dive in.
