Clearing the Air, Muddying the Waters

Information isn't used in a purely objective fashion, of course. Never is: it's slung about to prove points, make points, drive points home. Data serve agendas. Sometimes such usage is so egregious as to make one cringe.

A smallish case in point. Last week or so my TiVo started wanting to show me a piece of cinema from an outfit called Shell Films titled "Clearing the Air." This slickly produced, glassy-eyed short straight from Shell's corporate boardroom propounds the doctrine that large companies aren't all that interested in profit, but rather with staffing themselves up with prophetic voices - characters determined to change the system from the inside, while wasting scads of cash, for the general benefit of humanity and the planet. I suppose the logic here is that with enough chutzpah anyone can make a dent in the larger pattern of corporate avarice, and that if you're one such person, your employer will stand by and let you do it.

Really? Can you still get dental?

Many folks are sufficiently attuned to this sort of hogwash and have an internal light that goes off, warning them not to give much energy to the consumption of such enterprises. To the rest, woe betide.

Such corporate prattle is no big deal, we think. We just allow it to pass as a one-off instance of self-congratulation - that they had money to spend on PR last year and by golly they spent it. That may be, but only in the smaller sense. You also have to stand back, look at patterns and contexts, see how things play over time.

And just what happens when you stop and add it up over the long haul? McDonald's becomes a major benefactor of NPR in the wake of "Super Size Me," and part of the critical machinery goes away. Coca-Cola generates an incredible quantity of logo impressions per half-hour in its "Screen Play" sponsorship of trivia games running in theaters prior to movies (which are themselves playing to Coke's massively coveted teen demographics, who are paying to receive such ad impressions!). Today it's "Shell Films presents..." In a decade, it'll be "Shell Films Presents, For Your Consideration..." Unless we ask for better.

I suppose it's not inherently evil for big money to attach itself to decent artifice (as opposed to outright propaganda). Disney's umbrella logo has been riding on Pixar's coattails for a good decade now, and without Starbucks, "Akelah and the Bee" may have lain fallow, which would have been a real shame. Heck, for that matter, would Michaelangelo even be in our art books if he hadn't had an underwriting pope? Yet in the long run, end and mean, messenger and message, are becoming so much more easily confused and comingled. Information, however spuriously cobbled together, is simply used to the benefit of those who wield it.

Although ... has it ever really been any different? Consider Jesus. On what we call Palm Sunday, he rode into Jerusalem and checked out the Temple. The next day he came back there and made a religio-political demonstration against the trade he found. It was the first of many stinging barbs of truth he handed out that week, and it wasn't just a hissy. It was an apt argument founded on the propositions of his faith. But I'll bet to a lot of people it came as a total shock.

It's just so easy to inure oneself to this ethos. The company no longer merely backs or approves the message; the company is the message, and you're going to take it. You're going to take it because they know where the line is and how far they can push it; they know where your breaking point is, and they'll probably never cross it. Isn't that alone enough cause for alarm?

Be smart, people. Don't let the corporations do your thinking for you.

[P.S. - You can read about using film for multiple high-end commercial purposes in the March 17th New York Times.]