#149 - Office Crush
Perhaps the popularity of the British mocumentary The Office (or the American version), with its central plot of an unrequited office crush, has sparked a number of advertisements that also toy with this theme? Taco Bell, Burger King, and Southwest Airlines have all created ads in the past year that revolve around the messy mix of love lives and work settings.
The Office made much of the dramatic tension created by the discomfort, the awkwardness, the sheer social pain of the office crush. But why would this dynamic be useful for selling products?
All the ads revolve around the intrusion of desire into supposedly inappropriate places, its unruly appearance among the ordered cubicles of white-collar work. Do these ads hint at something new in the lower orders of American corporate workforces?
Work itself is but a background here. The job is pointless, but the social life of offices -- the personal connections forged on the new factory floor of the postmodern, deindustrialized age -- become very important. Why?
Maybe the tension between individual liberation and corporate control erupts through sexual attraction. Disorderly social energies accumulate and burst forth in creepiness (Burger King's "French Things" spot), awkwardness (Taco Bell's ad that features a third worker uncomfortably present at the flirting of fellow workers), and desperation (Southwest's "Out on a Limb").
Are these ads really about the disappointment of unrequited office love, or are they about something bigger: an alienation from the entire world of office work as a whole?
The ads play with desire and shame -- they spark the feelings and then sell their products as a way to cope with the forbidden and taboo. The overall message of these spots is that one has to stifle urges, rein in individual dreams of intimacy.
Unlike The Office, which stubbornly lingered on the absurd climate of corporate work, these ads toy with the desire to fight for fulfillment. But ultimately, they flee from a confrontation with alienation. Consumption provides the salve, the ads insist. Get in line, workers. And when you "wanna get away," as the Southwest spot puts it, we're here to sell you flight, a temporary escape.
These ads are cultural responses to The Office. They turn its profound anguish into pulp. To counteract The Office's fake realness, its dramatic usurpation of the "reality show" format, these advertisements reassert the real fakeness of the modern corporate workplace, in which the intimate gets forced into "Friday casual" and the private gets privatized.
Keep things under control. Fingers tap across computer keyboards, photocopy machines whir, email messages arrive and depart, mice click and roam across their pads, phones digitally clang, survey data enters database cells, transactions occur endlessly in the background.
Longing, desire, shame, and humiliation burst forth, powerful feelings that threaten to derail the smooth system. These emotions surface in the televisual dreamworld of the advertisement office. They rip the normal order open for a moment, on purpose. There are cracks in the cubicles. We are tantalized.
But then, as they must do, these ads crush the crush.
1 May 2007