EThere is a song sleeping in all things, but we can no longer hear it. The BlackBerry: one of the most coveted status symbols for a few years – until the iPhone kicked it into oblivion. The Air Jordan: a basketball shoe, very pretty, but all in all just a basketball shoe. “Tetris”: a video game from the 80s that was so visually stunning that today you can no longer understand how it could paralyze entire floors of offices because everyone would rather sort blocks than do their job.
Even Barbie was hot once: the first doll for girls that looked like an adult, wore adult clothes, had an adult figure and had a crush on an adult. Until we realized that she was promoting false body image, rampant consumerism, white dominance and adoring hollow guys and that we should give our daughters more realistic dolls.
Unfortunately, no one benefits from myths being busted. How worth living can life be when a shoe is just a shoe, a video game is just a video game, a doll is just a doll, and a cell phone is canceled as soon as a more powerful model comes along?
The disenchantment of the world through reason and the progression of the story leads to a sobriety so desolate that one is hungover and longs for new highs. Or after being told at least once more how beautiful the old frenzy was. This is exactly what art is needed for – so that it sings to us the songs that lie dormant in things.
The manager wins
The film industry is doing just that. As if the studios were conspiring on a commodity fetishism offensive, they are suddenly telling stories about the irresistible sexiness of products, risky marketing campaigns, the sudden rise of devices or the success of video games.
In “Air: The Great Throw” one notices that this takes on the full force of experiences of God: Three men of obviously middle age (it doesn’t look particularly good on them) are sitting around the prototype of a new sports shoe and look at it so transfigured, as if they were kings from the east before the manger in which the Savior lies.
In this film, Matt Damon tells how in 1984 a certain Sonny Vaccaro, employed by Nike to sign promising basketball talent for advertising campaigns, became obsessed with a certain Michael Jordan – far from a legend at the time, but already confident enough to insist on an obscene amount of money and a Mercedes-Benz at that. And on coolness – which speaks against Nike.
In the end, the manager wins – because he doesn’t just want to close a deal, but because he believes. And for his belief, he gets his superiors to pay the revenue share that Jordan demands. This is how the “Air Jordan” was born, the best-selling basketball shoe in the world, profit in the very first year: 126 million dollars, a mega-seller to this day. However, it has also long since become a mass product – which is why an image refresher can’t hurt.
“Air” is therefore a biopic about a shoe, actually not even that, but a feature film about the marketing campaign for a shoe. The highlight: the signing of the contract. In the leading role: an overweight man from middle management whose creativity is exhausted in annoying his bosses so persistently that they do what he wants, namely spend the advertising budget on a single player instead of three.
Until not so long ago, the heroes of cinema biographies were still civil rights fighters or rock stars. And it was about freedom, self-realization and similar higher values. Now it’s all about winning a pitch, finalizing deals, and doing the job in the open plan so well that you don’t lose it. Even in “Tetris”, a film about the legendary video game that took up as much time on computers in the 1980s as scrolling through Instagram and Twitter feeds later did, the most important protagonist is not its Russian developer Alexej Paschitnov , but the Dutch-American Henk Rogers, who wants to acquire the license rights for Nintendo.
A daunting task when you have to contend with Soviet bureaucracy and an era in which Communism is falling – but just a deal nonetheless. Even if the rights man in the film says: “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve been playing ‘Tetris’ for five minutes and I still see falling blocks in my dreams.” And in BlackBerry, a biopic about the pre-iPhone cell phone, the bold technical vision becomes less of a mobile terminals that can be used to check email while on the go, as the corporate urge to get investors to invest in what initially strikes them as the lunatic idea of weird nerds.
Also in the pipeline for this year is a film about the invention of the snack food brand Flamin’ Hot Cheetos by a man named Richard Montañez in the late ’80s, the feature film Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, which the Comedian Jerry Seinfeld shoots for Netflix, and most notably Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie. Its trailer promises a militantly colorful and aggressively exuberant spectacle that stages the doll, who is rightly hated by feminism and responsible parents, as a self-empowerment heroine – it will almost certainly be great fun.
And now in theaters is The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which sends plumber Mario and his brother Luigi from the legendary video game across the Mushroom Kingdom to save Princess Peach from the evil Bowser’s stalkers. It is a work that is by no means only aimed at children. But also to their parents, who once played Mario and are flooded with happiness when they are reminded of the innocence of their childhood, a time when they still had to fight flaming balls and flying bombs and not yet finicky superiors.
Goods as emotional patches
What these films have in common is their unconditional agreement with capitalism. If its products – snacks, games, shoes, toys, gadgets – are fun and cool, its more unpleasant appearances can be overlooked. Consumerism, plastic waste, the working conditions in the sweatshops of a globalized economy, the insanity that lies in the fact that a shoe is a promise of happiness – none of this is addressed in the new product films. Gone are the days when the entertainment industry took pleasure in presenting greedy Wall Street bankers, life-threatening tobacco and pharmaceutical manufacturers, coke managers or fraudulent imposters. Now, in the midst of inflation, capitalism is good again. Because his goods are emotional patches.
That’s probably the reason for all the new product movies. Their creators understood that we, the audience, do not need the inspiration of the heroes whose biographies they have sung about so far as badly as they always thought: How could you do it yourself, someone like Martin Luther King, To become Maria Callas or Steve Jobs? What helps us is the solace of things: the happiness of putting on a shoe you’ve spent a lot of money on, the forgetfulness of being as soon as you play “Tetris” or “Mario”, the bragging rights when you have the hottest gadget owns.
For the film industry, which has become increasingly risk-averse over the years, this is a blessing: if you film a product that everyone knows, you know that there will be an audience, you can save yourself expensive marketing campaigns and benefit from a magic that is not difficult to find have to create yourself. Maybe there will be movies about Birkenstocks soon.