The new Playstation campaign
I foolishly picked up the mind-numbingly awful ‘Shortlist’ magazine this morning: I must have subconsciously wanted to see what shite Danny Wallace was spouting this week (in case you’re interested, it’s a fascinating exploration of how Danny harasses people on trains that he doesn’t know very well).
As I was flicking through this literary equivalent of candy floss, I came across this deeply compounding and disturbing image. Perhaps it’s just me and my perverted, damaged mind, but it seems to be feather-light inter-racial porn.
Let’s start with the woman licking her ice-cream. Of course, it’s meant to be as erotic as Nabokov’s Lolita sucking a lollipop; only this petite young thing’s grappling an outsized giant, whopper of a cone! And hey, what’s that trickling down between her fingers? Oh, it’s the melting ice-cream. Wow, as Bill Hicks would say – she’s taken to that like a duck to water!
And who’s that who served her? Why, it’s none other than a giant, smiling black man – cleverly re-imagined by Carol Thatcher.
Caricature...
So what are you telling me, Sony? Is that black fella in the ice-cream van serving that lucky white girl an extra large helping of his love cream? Is he a true representative of the extra super-cool Sony brand, but in this case fashioned to look like a an old fashioned caricature of a negro in the deep South of America some time in the ’40s?
Welcome to more! says the ad. More what? More ‘clever’ bollocks irrationally thrown out by a multinational congolmerate at young boys and middle-aged men. To what? To buy more PS3s and to maybe have a wank while they’re at it. I mean, could you even imagine holding an ice-cream that big? It was miracle enough for me to see Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens famously holding an unsmoked cigarette that had burnt through completely with the ash fully intact – let alone trying to comprehend this violation of gravity.
You’d have thought that now we have a black president (yes, he is black, don’t debate that fact further, please), and that we live in 2009 and not 1939, that this sort of disgusting, stereotypical nonsense (that serves to imply that black men have massive cocks and white women want them) would be laughed out of any interntaional board room.
But at Sony, it seems that the ad execs calling the shots are all white, mysoginistic, racist, bigoted men.