Truck commercial

The dodge ram truck commercial we watched in class that originally aired during the super bowl played on American religiosity and sentimentality for their own agricultural heritage to subtly sell trucks.  The commercial began with the words “On the eighth day God…” Pointing directly at the creation myth of the Christian doctrine that is most popular among Americans.  It took that excerpt from genesis and tied it directly to the land now called the United States of America skipping over several intervening millennia during which time that land was lived on by other people.  It used evocative diction to spur a pleasantly proud emotional response to the way things used to be while depicting images (in black and white) of modern farm-scapes. 

The commercial was disturbing for me because it was a well-choreographed attempt at emotional manipulation.  Not to say that emotions are a bad way of making decisions- but there is a difference between responding in accord with emotions that are generated by direct observation of the world and responding in accord with emotions that are generated by a series of images carefully selected to motivate a particular effect.  Offensively and slyly, it ignored completely the way that the land was used between the writing of Genesis and the beginning of colonization by Europeans.  It describes the farmer as the ‘caretaker’ of the land but shows him spraying pesticides and plowing fields.  What is actually happening is maximum extraction of sellable goods- as a remix of the commercial pointed out, extraction well beyond what can actually be consumed by the population.

The remix of the commercial by Funny or Die kept the syntax of beginning every line with “Then God made…” but changed the end of these statements to things like “created high fructose corn syrup [and mountain dew]”.  While the viewer of the original commercial will likely permit unquestioningly the claim that God made the farmer this key method of attributing credit for the way things are to God is less likely to be permitted by the viewer of the remixed version.  We feel good believing God made us because God is so good that this must mean we are too.   Yet we are aware that Mountain Dew is not quite so inherently good, posing health risks and being ultimately a tool for extracting profit.  While God may bear some indirect responsibility for the creation of this product we recognize that it would not exist at all without humans.  The phrasing of the commercial however portrays it as an extremely direct chain of creation and thus prompts concerned questioning and a little more careful analysis of the original message.