I saw an ad lately that struck me for some reason. It’s just a picture of Zac Efron with a good haircut, sunglasses, a good red dress shirt against a red background, and superimposed on it is the word “Cartier”. They aren’t selling anything material, you can barely tell what it is that they’re selling. What they’re really selling is youth. I know that’s no revelation, that’s been said and done before, but it made me think about the relationship between youth and advertising, and how corporations are people that don’t die, but require new generations of young bodies to enthusiastically associate themselves with their products on billboards, bus stops and just about anywhere where there’s eyes. After Zac Efron is old and grey they they will guide the next generation of pretty young things to the altar of the photoset and put their unwrinkled faces in service of the corporation’s “image”. All of the pretty young things die, but Cartier lives forever as a young, hip company as long as there’s a new generation it can attach itself to. Like a lich or a vampire. Like another old, stodgy ideology that leads its adherents to death but it itself does not die. In the bloodstained Middle East, Islam and Christianity outlive Muslims and Christians no matter how many they kill. Like human sacrifice. Apparently it’s quite an honor to be in an ad.
Do we sacrifice virgins? Well, it’s not exactly the Mayan sacrifice, the actors and models don’t die from being photographed to death. But we do sacrifice virgins, or at least youths for our gods. With the stresses of fame, I’d say we wear them out, we kill them in less direct ways. They get burned out and die and Cartier lives. And all of this is definitely true for our day to day labor, where our youth and adulthood is spent giving energy to a company that will outlive us. Cartier lives like an intergenerational virus, as long as there is a new generation to do its paperwork and pose with their products (if that), there is Cartier.
We think that we need commodities to become sexy, bu the truth is that we make commodities sexy, and that people like Zac Efron are needed to turn Cartier, simply a stack of dusty legal documents signifying incorporation, into a sexy young brand again. It’s always the young & sexy in advertisements, pulling the weight of some old cantankerous, bureaucratic machine. It needs the youth to look young but the youth don’t need it to be young. We don’t need capitalism for good haircuts, sunglasses or good shirts, and we certainly don’t need capitalism for young & sexy bodies when that just comes with being young to being with. FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SEXY SPACE COMMUNISM FOR ALL.
Discursive Discourses 