Coke

I don't own a television. This is not out of any particular principle: we had one back in the UK, but just never got around to buying one here in Canada. So I've never been in the Canadian media loop, and have never missed it. Plus I have plenty of other ways of distracting and/or entertaining myself, not least watching television shows that just happen to be packaged in convenient DVD packages.

So with the Olympics, and even though I really didn't see very much of it, I have been watching much more television than usual. And what strikes those of us who are not accustomed to it (or what strikes me perhaps even more particularly given my long exposure to the BBC) is less the programming, which I can get by other means, than the adverts. There are so many of them. And they are often so very odd.

There are two current adverts that were played throughout the Olympics that I find particularly strange, and particularly disturbing. And at the risk of this blog becoming (almost) all Canada (almost) all of the time, I note that they are both selling, in part, images of Canadian national identity. Or rather, they rely for their success on certain images of Canada that are dear to this country's inhabitants.

The first of these ads is this one, for Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee chain. It's discussed, among other places, on Darren Barefoot's blog. Frankly I still can't quite get my head around it, except to say that I think it is truly appalling.

The other ad is this one, for that rather recognizeably US brand, Coca Cola:



I find this extraordinary, too.

The commercial purveys a sense of Canadian identity tied up with sport, specifically hockey, and the rituals and memories that go with that: from playing street hockey to watching a game at school, going out to a bar, or seeing a match live. The Canadianness of this progression, or rather the way in which this is precisely an apprenticeship in Canadianness, is emphasized with images of flags and maple leaves and the consistent presence of red and white highlights. Of course, it is only gradually (and more obviously at a second viewing) that you realize that the most ubiquitous of these red highlights are those associated with Coca Cola: this is an ad about becoming Canadian by growing up with coke as well, if not more than, growing up with hockey. So we are to associate Canadianness equally with coke and with hockey: they form a nexus by which the viewer is to interpret his (or her) progression from child to adult.

But the odd thing is the ad's punchline: As the camera flies across an ice rink towards the goal, as though the viewer were put in the position of either a speeding player or indeed the puck itself, and as the music reaches a crescendo, with cheering in the background and a cutaway to three women in red raising their index fingers, we see spelled out between us and the goal the text: "Let's make sure everyone knows whose game their playing." We then cut to an overhead scoreboard on which we see coming into view... the iconic Coke bottle and the words "Coca Cola" repeated (for good measure) four times.

Again, I find this very strange. The advert works in so far as it takes for granted the fact that any Canadian is going to be able to answer the implicit question: Whose game are they playing? Why, hockey is Canada's game of course!

(The truth of this assertion, by the way, is as far as I can see very far from certain; in fact, of the NHL's famous "original six" teams, for instance, only two were from Canada, the other four all being from the US.)

But precisely because the ad's ideal viewer already knows the answer to this question, they are likely to misrecognize the answer that the ad itself seems to give to that question. For though the ad provides implicit acknowledgment of the contention that hockey is Canada's game, this is not what it actually says. Rather more explicitly, the answer it appears to provide to the question "Whose game are they playing?" is, well, that it is Coca Cola's game.

Now, we can perhaps understand this assertion two ways in so far as the ad is suggesting an absolute identification between Canada and Coke. Hockey is Coca Cola's game because it is Canada's game, and perhaps even vice versa. The circular identification between viewer, soft drink, and country is now complete: the viewer identifies with Coca Cola through his identification with Canada (and again, perhaps even vice versa). This is what the commercial appears to be trying to achieve. But this is surely a hard sell. For after all, what product is more fully identified with the USA, notionally the country whose claim to hockey is here being denied (though when was the last time that a non-US team won the Stanley Cup, I feel like asking), than Coca Cola? Coke is the quintessential product of American modernity. Why else do they call Americanization also "Coca Colonization"?

The other possible reading is an absolutely post-ideological one: the advert is telling us that hockey belongs to Coca Cola because, well, corporate interests have now fully bought up what is imagined to have once been the kind of communal organic activity that the ad's narrative initially suggests. Indeed, finally the story that the commercial most explicitly is telling is this: you grow up playing hockey, and thinking it is your sport, that it is a pastime that defines you and your imagined community; but then at some point you come to the realization that it isn't yours, it's been bought by corporations such as Coca Cola. They own it now, and don't you forget it.

Of course, this is a familiar narrative, too, and you wouldn't have to press a Canadian hard to hear it: they'd talk about "the trade" or about the opening of hockey in Sunbelt markets in the US while it is taken from hockey-mad cities such as Winnipeg. Any Canadian worth their salt can despair at the corporate takeover of their sport, and at the evils of the NHL's presiding commissioners that have allowed it to happen. (Such complaints, too, make up Canadian national identity.)

What's strange is to see one of those corporate interests telling this same story, too.

television

The Wednesday quotation, Part VII: Chávez's government by television.

Welcome to Aló Presidente!, a television chatshow like no other. Sunday's edition, No 295, was the longest yet, a marathon of politics and showmanship, and for many proof that Venezuela has become a country governed largely through television. There are cabinet meetings, national assembly debates and committee hearings in the offices of state in central Caracas, but the most emphatic exercise of power resides in the weekly show hosted by the president. This is where Mr Chávez engages with the masses, announces policies, muses on his political philosophy, and signals the next step in his self-described socialist revolution.

"Chávez governs from Aló Presidente. It is on this show that ministers find out if they have been fired or hired; it is here where mayors and governors are reprimanded for anything they have done wrong," said Arturo Serrano, a political scientist at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas. (Rory Carroll "Government by TV: Chávez sets 8-hour record". The Guardian 25 September, 2007)

manchester

"Look at Tony Wilson, live on Channel Four."

Sadly, no more. And the earth itself groans. (Via Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From, who likewise was put in mind of The Times's song, "Manchester.")

NB even the BBC can't decide if the man's name is (Cambridge-educated) Anthony or (Salford lad) Tony.

Now watch 24 Hour Party People in which Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, meets God on a Manchester rooftop. "It's a pity you didn't sign the Smiths, but you were right about Mick Hucknall: his music's rubbish and he's a ginger." Marvellous.

Oh, and then there's this (via Blood and Treasure):

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

conviviality

Writing in 2000, a period during which the FARC still enjoyed state-sanctioned control of large swathes of South-Central Colombia marked out as a "zona de despeje," a cleared zone, Alma Guillermoprieto notes the grubby normality of everyday life in this safe haven. In San Vicente de Caguán, "there are loud cantinas; fleshy women in too much makeup under the glaring sun; block after block of storefronts selling boom boxes, high-heeled shoes, glitter eye shadow, and telephones shaped like hot dogs" (Looking for History 55).

The guerrilla, as far as Guillermoprieto can see, spend their time mostly lounging about: buying mascara and nail polish; chatting with neighbours; watching TV, their FALs and AK-47s casually propped up in the corner of the room. Of course, the point about a safe haven is that it's a good place for a little R&R; it's not as though there's no war on, and indeed with up to 20,000 people under arms, the FARC are able to carry out significant actions, "waging something very like real war against the Colombian state" (60). (And here's a pretty good round-up of recent accounts of "Latin American's Longest War".) But even this war has become very much a habit among its combatants, some of whom have known little else than life as a guerrilla.

For instance, compañera Nora, "a trim, agreeable woman in charge of the FARC's liaison with the public" (57) has spent well over half of her thirty-three years in the rebel ranks. Meanwhile, the insurgent leader, Manuel Marulanda or "Tirofijo", has been out in the hills in one form or another since the "Violencia" of 1948 to 1958. In Colombia, civil war is very much a way of life, for some almost a lifestyle option: Nora is reported as saying that she joined the FARC, at the age of fifteen, after she had seen a guerrilla column with its "brisk young women, in uniform and carrying guns, and thought they were the most powerful and glamorous creatures she had ever seen" (59).

At the time of Guillermoprieto's visit, the FARC and the Colombian government (under President Andrés Pastrana) were engaged in a "peace process," though these are hardly exactly peace talks: they are rather a "ritual encounter" celebrated "on a regular basis, and call[ed] progress" (64). No real dialogue was underway, and in any case everyone knew that at the margins prowled the military and their comrades in (para)military arms, the so-called "self-defence" units.

But in any case, such hope as Guillermoprieto entertains is based on the notion that the FARC's experience in this demilitarized zone might bring about a rehabituation. In that they had not been granted sovereignty of this territory that was often misleadingly nicknamed FARClandia, Guillermoprieto notes that ""for the first time, the guerrillas are coexisting with the citizens of a small town, and even having to get along with its mayor" (66). The rebels are forced, in their downtime, at ease, to be "sharing social and political space with the inhabitants of San Vicente" (68).

For Guillermoprieto, then, the experience is a lesson in conviviality, that takes place at a level well below the comandantes non-negotiations with their official counterparts, and even well below the ideology that in any case is hardly the rebels' motive force.

This is not to say, however, that this process of conviviality is not connected in some way with the media--though it may not be mediated in any conventional sense. For Guillermoprieto ends her account with what we are to take as a hopeful sign: a sudden realization that comes to her on her last morning, as she is taking breakfast at a fonda, or small restaurant, abutting the local FARC headquarters. A television is on, as in Latin America one always is. And the programme playing was Xena: Warrior Princess, the TV industry's ironized take on fighting women. But this irony establishes, perhaps, some common ground:

Two waitresses, as young as the guerrillas next door, were glued to the program. And then I realized that the guerrillas were too. The FARC videos were still playing just on the other side of the wall, but the kids were taking turns sneaking out of the headquarters to stand at the doorway of the fonda, watching Xena. (71)

Of course, as a postscript acknowledges, just a couple of months later the US Congress approved "Plan Colombia". And by early 2002, the state withdrew its support for a demilitarized zone, the army returned, and so disappeared any hope for Xena-blessed conviviality.

Abigail's Party

Ray Carney on Mike Leigh's television drama, Abigail's Party:

There is no realm of "truth" underneath or distinguishable from the realm of "falsehood." There are no secrets to exhume. There are no psychological depths to mine–or at least none that matter–in Abigail's Party. No one is being deceitful. No one is covering up anything. That would simplify understanding. We could dive down and discover the truth as we do in films like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. The situation Leigh imagines–here and in all of his work–is far more complex. There is no escape from slippery, shifting, multivalent surfaces. There is no realm of unsullied, uninflected reality underneath. Everything is mixed. We must live in the flux....

Indeed, it's the fact that everyone says what they think in this film that makes it so painful to watch. Which shows that this postideological flux has everything to do with affect (the barbs, the resentment, the worry, and the drunkenness of suburban social interaction) and habit (the pettiness, the gender roles, the classification by taste, and the drunkenness again).