¶ … Seeing: Cultural Artifacts
Contemporary commercials have presented the viewer with some truly startling and sometimes graphic images. In recent years, Carl's Junior/Hardee's commercials have made heavily sexualized commercials their veritable calling card. However, as this paper will demonstrate, these commercials do more than simply show sexy girls handling the products of this fast food restaurant chain. Rather the two forces at work are a fragmentation of the models in the commercials, along with a fragmentation of the meat, and both are sliced up into bite size images which objectify them and splinter them from entities with a complete that have authority to a compilation of snapshots essentially. This fragmentation helps to unite the models with the meat in the commercial, making them synonymous.
A cultural relic that has been garnering some attention is a Carl's Junior and Hardee's advertisement which shows two hot girls in a barbeque cook off: they're both wearing skimpy cut off shorts and bikini tops as they grill burgers and pulled pork side by side. During the commercial, one can argue that the image of these girls and the image of the meat they are grilling (and the product which is essentially being sold) have both been changed by photographic reproduction. In this example, it's in both the literal and figurative sense. Literally these two products, the girls and the meat, have been photographed and videotaped and reproduced through television and the internet to audiences all over the nation. However, there's another aspect of reproduction also at stake. The camera is fragmenting and reproducing parts of the girls and the meat for the spectator. For example, the camera scans the butt cheeks, their breasts, their lips and stomachs, in quick cuts to the viewer, or in long lingering shots. The same is done with the meat presented: images of plump pieces of pork slathered in dressing or round, curvy beef patties sizzle on the screen in short cutaway shots, or drawn out images. By fragmenting both the girls and the meat in this manner, there's a removal of authenticity and a distortion. "When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of the image. As a result it's meaning changes. Or more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings" (Berger, 19). In this commercial, the creators are making the sexy girls and the hot meat into synonyms for one another: there's a roundness, ripeness and juiciness which has been instilled onto both the girls and the meat. In this sense, one can argue that the commercial creators have reproduced the girls via the meat and the meat via the girls. Both entities are being copied and distorted. The fragmentation of the camera shots which both cut up the girls into splintered images of breasts, butt cheeks, and lips furthers this distortion. "Reproduction isolates a detail of a painting from the whole. The detail is transformed. An allegorical figure becomes a portrait of a girl" (Berger, 25). This is akin to how the fragmentation of the young girls (and even the meat) on screen has become distorted into something verging on pornography, and is fundamentally a celebration of lush body parts or meat.
Another Carl's Junior and Hardees commercial which promotes their cod fish sandwich, features a hot, young bikini model on an isolated beach. In this commercial too, the model is fragmented, the camera seizing into her lush body parts, though in this commercial the reproduction which occurs truly helps to isolate a detail from the whole -- transforming the entire girl into an object of the male fantasy. The commercial shows a far away tropical island with a lone girl. The camera voyeuristically follows the girl through her body parts -- her butt cheeks bouncing as she walks on the sand, her torso and breasts swaying as she sprays herself...
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