A modest proposal (with apologies to Mr.Swift)

Celebrity endorsements. Not only are they as annoying as a normal advertisement, they have the additional oomph of putting people we are already quite familar with right back in our faces.  Although I hail from the land of the hollow shell that is Hollywood, I now live outside the U.S., and that means that I get to enjoy all the big celebrities that would never be seen hawking products in the States everywhere here, pushing designer jeans, perfume, cars, etc.  You haven’t really seen advertising until you’ve seen Brad Pitt telling you what type of watch you should wear.   (Does the time run backwards on that, Brad?)

What the hell are you pointing at, anyway?

But even back home, it seems that celebrities are always using their looks and fame to tell us how to enrich and enhance our pitiful, non-famous lives. Even if they themselves have no life at all (literally).

I’m talking about advertisements using dead celebrities here. Those even more soulless, cold and downright creepy signs and commercials which feature a celebrity we were sure had shuffled off this mortal coil, yet they really want us to look at the features of this new toaster. These are like regular commercials, with an extra steaming helping of repugnant.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a huge fan of either celebrity or advertising, and I’ve never professed to be anything approaching normal, but I think that even normal, well-adjusted consumers would admit to feeling a little uneasy about being pitched wine by Orson Welles when he himself was likely mostly liquid.

Let's get stiff!

In case you can’t read badly compressed type, that image above is a trade advertisement-which is like an advertisement selling advertising, to retailers.

Apparently there are multiple layers in Hell for a reason.

The creepiness only increases when we’re dealing with television commercials.  It’s bad enough when a celebrity did the commercial while they were still converting O2 into CO2, but it’s damn near an abomination to feature cgi-inserted products into film clips with deceased stars.  It’s sort of like if George Lucas redid Casablanca, with product tie-ins for Mountain Dew. Which is to say: Horrifyingly refreshing.  I don’t think Rick would have worked out his depression by “doing the Dew”, and I’m really not sure that Fred Astaire was thinking of household appliances when he did his dance numbers. Yet:

Hot-cha! It's great on dust! (which I am now)

I also would like to point out here that Fred Astaire has never even been the subject of a biopic, since his will has a clause that specifically disallows it.  He was quoted as saying:  “It is there because I have no particular desire to have my life misinterpreted, which it would be.”  I think I can hear a loud spinning sound coming from underfoot somewhere.

So, I’ve rambled on about the evils of advertising, and the abuse of the dead (even if they are just celebrities).  So do I have a solution to this dillema, or am I just ranting under the stars?  I mean, advertising is never going to stop, and people will always respond to famous people, (who will die eventually, I’m fairly sure), so what can we do?

Zombies, that’s what.

That’s right-the living, shuffling, product-shilling dead.  I’ve locked my anger and hatred at this practice in a hotel room with my fondness for the animated dead and the misshapen brainchild from that unspeakable night is this:  a law that forces advertisers who want to use the likeness of a dead celebrity for their purposes to use imagery that represents that celebrity as a rotting corpse.  Totally, completely,  zombified. (or “Romero’d” for the purists out there)

Think of the excitement of seeing that Orson Welles ad for wine with Orson expounding the virtues of its heady flavor while his skin is falling off.  And green.  Doesn’t that make you want to drink?  And now, the uneasy ache you feel in your soul when you see the advertisement can be explained away by disgust at the visuals, rather than the faint wriggling of your vestigial conscience.

And I know, some of you will argue, and you’ll bring up the celebrity “scare” ads, which use the images of those who died from excess as a cautionary tale against drugs, or drinking, or smoking, etc.  To that, I say-the only thing more likely to convince people to ease up on the drinking and smoking than an advertisement where Yul Brenner says it killed him… is one where he says it killed him and he really does look dead.

One of these is a little more convincing to me.

I agree, my proposal’s in terrible taste, and it’s reprehensible, and I will likely burn for it(among other things, of course).  But I think you must agree that it is at least honest. And perhaps it might make some advertisers think twice before buying the rights to someone’s image who is unable to speak for themselves.  Or at the very least, make sitting through ads a whole hell of a lot more interesting.

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