Would You like a McFamily with That?
On Commercials and Culture War
Andrew McLuhan tweeted this out this morning and I couldn’t help but feel it was a subtle way of saying Matthew, don’t write this. Nevertheless, here I am. More opium, good sirs and madams? Perhaps some slop to wash it all down, courtesy of America’s processed food powerhouse, McDonalds.
It’s odd to write about commercials, hell, I’ve only done it once in a video that I am not sure if I even like anymore. However when you’re on the website formerly known as Twitter, it’s like taking Debord’s Society of Spectacle and injecting it directly into your cranium. The platform changes the way you think (in meeting fellow anons irl I’ve had people say “you should tweet that” to something I said verbally) and that it makes your perception of time seem unfathomably off.
It’s important to contextualize this, because if you’re not on the discourse app or the soon-to-be everything app, I’m basically speaking Greek to a good deal of people. Perhaps I should be lucky that so much of my audience is either as online as myself or understands that the Twitter platform is the place where today’s tweets become tomorrow’s culture war chyrons on the news. With that being said, we can get onto the main subject, fresh off the heels of slopgate.
This little ad went live on McDonald’s Japan Twitter Account just two days ago.
It’s a cute little advertisement, right down to the oddly Western looking characters in the Japanese animation style. It’s nice, it’s cute, and boy did find itself landing on my side of twitter like a flashbang in a crowded Greek wedding. Like a flashbang, I’m sure this will enter the collective memory hole in just a few days just as one’s vision and senses eventually returns to them. I don’t know how much citing Debord would do here, as this little spectacle offered a flash in the pan moment that society is actually pretty unwell. This ad blew up so fast that it already has a Know Your Meme page.
One only need to scan through the quote tweets of the original ad tweet to see how this is primarily a Western, or importantly American flash in the pan moment this is. This ain’t something the Japanese or other East Asians are arguing about (maybe with the exception of Ian Miles Cheong) as it’s almost entirely in American English, with the usual bouts of streamers, YouTubers, bloggers, pundits and shitposters chiming in. To be honest I didn’t really partake, perhaps it was because I saw it as a commercial first and not necessary scraps that I can throw at the other “team” in the proverbial and existential food fight that is the culture war.
The West is pretty damn unhealthy, not just in the food we eat (so this being a McDonald’s commercial is even more ironic) but in our sense of society and family formation. The idea of children or having them is up for debate, something which Oswald Spengler noted in The Decline of the West is the sign that a particular society has reached towards its decline. Even in the wake of the recent Dobbs decision in the US Supreme Court, access to killing children (which is almost always elective) has spurred up millions of women and millions more in private capital to make sure reproductive justice is still accessible. Other concerns of course is that we live in a society where family formation is increasingly difficult at least for those who already live inside the country. The advertisement itself was a way to vent, to express publicly and to scream into that digital void that things are completely dysfunctional and that we live in a society with transgender Calvin Klein Models and our McDonald’s advertisements and tweets showing off the most grotesque facets of the progressive idolization of stupid and ugly. It is a fetishization of the other that plagues our polyglot, multiracial west, thrust upon those who already live here as to make way for the millions more that will come here that share no tongue, culture, or sameness of being that you might have.
In America you get movies about the Air Jordan Shoe or the Flaming Hot Cheeto as a way to assimilate the country, America is about brands and consumer product. So when an American Corporation like that of McDonald’s has localized advertisements that illustrate something completely different (like a nuclear family) the online discourse machine just like our money printers go brrrrrr.
So let’s look at the quote tweets like we would Paul Allen’s business card.
Alongside these there was a multitude of English-tweeting Europeans, Asians, and even Africans wondering why this ad ended up being the cudgel that the American Culture War (and to some extent of the USA’s cultural exports, the West’s) that was used to smash up liberals and conservatives alike?
For starters America and its citizens, residents, and illegal aliens are the most psyopped people on the planet. Not just front and center in the battles of cultural messaging, programming, intelligence community network mapping, silicon valley start ups and Santa Fe Institute projects but for now the center of cultural and imperial capital on earth, which entails its politics will be the most schizophrenic to a point where seeing a cute functioning family will lead to a digital battle royale playing out before your eyes as we witnessed just earlier this week. To be honest if it weren’t for following Stonetoss or Tony Sneedprano (great username btw) I probably would have missed out on this little bit.
The key takeaway is that in a society in which the normalcy of family formation has been reduced down to an increasing cost of living that makes having a family difficult, coupled with material pleasure and passions that can be entertained that makes America one of the most decadent places on earth in the history of the world, and we’ve come to the conclusion that marriage is nothing more than a sheet of paper that says you either get some tax benefits or you’re committing financial suicide if you get divorced. From the paradox of female happiness to the desacralization of the West’s traditions and values from rampant secularization and immigration, seeing a happy little family enjoying a product that is renown in America for being low class or having its obvious racial issues show up at fast food joints.
The Golden Arches are an American staple, at least as one of the most identifiable symbols in the world alongside the Cross or the star and crescent. This little flashpoint of a foreign commercial for locally selling American Fast Food to the Japanese was a collective moment of the Two Minutes Hate from 1984, but rather than just yelling and hating Goldstein it was a Two Minutes Exasperation. We’re exhausted, angry, and lonely. Even those who do have families or are married without kids know that things are harder than ever before to find someone who wants kids or even to find a mate in general. Instead our instinctual desires have been instead swapped out for consumer products.
The girl next door you fantasize about? You can have her, for $8.99 a month.
Positive Male Role Models and Fathers? You can have them with a parasocial relationship, you don’t need your dad, a Priest, or an older male co-worker to talk to.
Healthy sexual relationships? Marriage is tanking, PrEP is subsidized, and don’t even think that monogamy is in vogue anymore.
We find ourselves in a society wherein the young, the aging, and newly online are all wondering will it always be this bad? The commercial is a commercial, but at the same time it was spun in such a way to the Americans and the West that there was proof that the magical culture war Prester John was out there somewhere, overcoming the slop and managing to just sit down with their families in peace. No IRL Livestreamers, no criminal characters that will be called anything but their race, and where the Ice Cream Machine actually fucking works.
Then again, there’s this, and if there was an image that could summarize this whole accord it would be this patent image for how to get people to engage with advertisements before returning to their programming. I would love to know what the ad team thought of when they were making this advertisement as the art style and tone isn’t different from the other ads with people hanging out with friends and family. Then again, I’m sure McDonald’s saw a bump in sales, site/profile traffic, and people stanning for the golden arches. Perhaps we still are in that society of spectacle, and those making the spectacle know that culture war sells.
The medium is the message, and it showed in that little video that we want the image of the happy, healthy looking family where the mother and father are there together loving one another alongside their offspring just having a meal together. Perhaps some of us would be happy if things just went back to having White people in adverts that weren’t played as the racist or the bad guy or doofus, I think for someone that be enough even though it’s far from it. For some of the terminally online this is an impossible desire that will never be fulfilled, and to others an image of what “healthy” advertising would look like that doesn’t have an overabundant LGBTBBQ messaging or obvious interracial angle. I think Dave The Distributist had one of the more humorous takes on it all:
We want families, we want something that doesn’t make us feel like shit, or seeing even our traditions of sports and masculine competition be reduced down to anti white “anti racist” messaging every time someone wants to see how the New York Jets are doing. For the first time in a long time, people saw an advertisement that made them feel, that made them want something, and made them realize things really are as bad as they seem back home in burgerland.
I’m a bit older than you (42), so to me it doesn’t feel like THAT long ago, but it wasn’t THAT long ago that this ad would have raised zero eyebrows altogether. My old-man take is anger at how fast we let everything get so bad.
How far that little cartoon throws its beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.