Silly Rabbit... in anticlimatic

“Advertising is about one thing: happiness.”

I was in the tub watching Four Weddings & A Funeral the other day (yet another indictment of the modern dramady) when it was interrupted by a single commercial break courtesy of Amazon Prime’s weird ass advertising schedule.

Two commercials back to back that I had never seen before, and couldn’t tell you now what they were, but I was enthralled the whole time. A very pleasant experience. I remarked as much when they concluded, as I sipped my wine.

Advertising really is about happiness. Though it’s saccharine, in that sense. Not necessarily in the content as a whole- often there are very unhappy people in commercials, often getting dunked on- but in the sort of “world” of the commercial, the physics of it only allow soft landings and G rated language. Someone in the commercial, someone very John-Q-Average, is unfaltering in luck, confidence, and positive outlook.

Every ‘world’ of The Commercial is like a blanket of reassurance around the viewer.
And that’s great!

For the first few viewings.

I thought back to the time in my life when I watched the most commercials against my will. It was adolescence in the early 90s. Cartoons on Saturday morning, and cartoons after school that I would watch were all packed with them. Programming my parents would watch in the evening, or my great grandmother upstairs, were also half-commercial it seemed.

All of them, but the kid ones in particular, eventually drove me to some degree of madness. I remember literally reenacting the torture and dismemberment of children, with my friends, for all the unfaltering in luck, confidence, and positive outlook kids (part of a balanced breakfast! yippeee!) that for non existent reasons refused to share their Trix with that poor goddamn rabbit, no matter how much acme crap he built or how many schemes he cooked to try it.

Pure Happiness in the first viewing.
Murderous psychopathy by the 50th.

And is that not the way of it?

Good things can interrupt the ordinary pain of existence, but too many- or the same one on too much of a constant loop?- it begets madness. One needs some shadows to hide in, from time to time.

I think it’s important that people know two things:
how good it can be, and how bad it can be.

The degrees with which a person can attest to those two things determines the depth of their character, which is something that happens to people- not something they’re born with.

If you don’t know how bad it can really get, you will think other things are worse than they actually are.

If you don’t know how good it could really get, you will think mediocre things in your life are gold.

Pinched between the two we have the most average coddled westerner, with ideas of neither how bad nor how good anything could be- obsessed with silly grievances while accepting fish heads for their daily sustenance.