Yesterday I posted links to (arguably) the best and worst Super Bowl commercials of all time. I was gonna' post one of the numerous links to the best commercials of Super Bowl XLI, but somehow that damn Snickers commercial made every list... which, frankly, freaks me out."Which Snickers commercial?" you ask? The blatantly homophobic Snickers commercial. The one without the weird guy strumming a guitar and serenading an office drone.
While I'm fairly certain you saw it (I understand everybody in the world watches the Super Bowl, and most of them watch mostly for the ads, which have been almost entirely disappointing since people decided they were cool), I'll do my best to describe it for you. A mechanic decides to open a Snickers bar while he and his co-mechanic are bent over the engine compartment of a car. It seems like a strange time for a candy bar, but okay, I'll go with it. At least he's not smoking. His co-mechanic is so drawn to the Snickers bar that he starts eating it from the other end while the first guy chomps away at the end already in his mouth. The two guys eat their way down the bar -just like Lady & the Tramp! How sweet!- until they meet in the middle, and accidentally kiss. The guys recoil in disgust... and then start ripping out their chest hair with their bare hands.
The ad is clearly homophobic, but at least the guys are just mutilating themselves. While they're doing so though, you're encouraged to go online and view the other possible endings for the ad, vote for your favorite, and see which ad runs during the Daytona 500.
So I dutifully went to the website. There you can view the ad that aired, and you can watch recorded-live-on-video reactions of real Bears and Colts players watching and reacting to the ad. And, of course, you can even watch the ad with 3 additional endings not shown on TV. You then vote on the three endings and the most popular one will air during the Daytona 500.
Now, you wanna' see what a homophobic, gay-bashing bunch the marketing geniuses and CEOs of Mars, Inc really are? Watch those alternate endings. Alternate endings, mind you, that those corporate whiz kids assume will appeal even more to stock car racing fans than the ending they aired for the football fans. Watch them, then try explain to me how the message they send is anything but "Anything is better than being gay."
Even if you think I'm overreacting to the ad in any of its forms, how do you justify the video clips of the players reacting to the ad (specifically to the mid-Snickers kiss) with grimmaces, looks of utter horror and more than one disgusted "That ain't right."? These guys are supposed to be role models, and there they sit, telling rednecks and kids that homosexuality "ain't right."
It's been almost three years since those blissful days of gay marriage ceremonies in San Francoisco's City Hall when -downtown anyway- it actually felt like there was hope for us as a species. Those of us who endorse anyone's vows of dedication and matrimony to anyone they choose knew -and know- that it's an uphill battle against a heterosexual establishment that so far has proven to be notoriusly bad at both love and marriage, and that matches their gusto for abandoning their own relationships and commitments with their insatiable need to deny that inalienable human right to others. There is no logical argument against gay marriage, but I undertstand that the legal argument is, at this point, unbeatable in most states. Fine. It's stupid, and wrong, and this "separate but equal" shit does not -and eventually, once again, will not- stand, but the fight goes on and those of us who just believe in love and justice go on fighting and hoping for the best.
But in the meantime, the NFL sanctions violence against gays on our airwaves all in the name of "good fun." The viewers laugh over a Snickers bar while the mechanics in the ad drink motor oil and anti-freeze to prove their manliness (and, ostensibly, die in the process, "proving" that dead is better than gay), and I'm supposed to think this is anything but gay-bashing and socially-sanctioned hate? Will we really never learn?
I used to think so. Hell, I used to hope so. Now, not so much.
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