In what many are calling a brilliant marketing coup, Sprint
is using the same actor who used to be in the Verizon “Can you hear me now?”
commercials, sporting the same goofy black glasses, to talk about how great the
Sprint network is for cellphones—excuse me, hand-held computers that also take
photos and makes phone calls—excuse me again—portable devices.
In the original commercial, the short and compact imaginary Verizon
employee, whose real name is Paul Marcarelli, goes from place to place asking,
"Can you hear me now?” as a means of communicating that Verizon’s wireless
network was the most extensive in the country.
Then a funny thing happened. The character transcended the
commercial and became a punchline for political speeches, editorial cartoons
and late-night humor. Just as it seems as if everyone in the early-1980s was
saying “Where’s the beef?” and “I’ll be back” and everyone in 2003 was saying
“Shake it like a Polaroid” and every other joke included the expression “twerk”
two years ago, so did it seem for many moons as if every conversation included
someone cleverly wise-cracking, ”Can you hear me now?” or any of a number of
smarmy variations like “Can you see me now?,” “Can you feel me now?” and “Can
you smell me now?”
It was some years ago that Verizon retired the “Can you hear
me now guy?” and now Sprint is resurrecting him to make the point that
nowadays—as opposed to 15 years ago when the “Can you hear me now?” guy was
popping up in TV spots, on billboards, in magazines and on the Internet—every
wireless company has a wonderful network. He claims that Sprint’s “reliability”
is within one percent of Verizon’s, but costs a fraction of the price, and then
defiantly asks, “Can you hear that?”
Brilliant to build on the Verizon brand identifier to
demonstrate that Sprint is as good as Verizon in the key attribute by which
Verizon has always sold its product. This aggressive attack on the Verizon
brand is not, however, the first time a television commercial has depended on
viewers knowing about another, years-old TV spot. A few years ago, a commercial
for a laundry soap parodied the old Mean Joe Greene commercial in which the
gruff, mean-looking football player sentimentally trades a jersey for a can of
Coke. Without knowing about a commercial
that was 30 years old, you couldn’t understand why it was so funny when Amy
Sedaris threw Greene’s stinking jersey back to him saying it needed to go into
the wash.
In the case of “Can you hear me now?” the viewer only has to
remember back about a decade. Someone insightful on the Sprint marketing team
recognized that the “Can you hear me now?” guy was 1) still remembered; 2)
still respected; and 3) still linked to the idea of a wireless network that
works and is state-of-the-art.
In short, the
nameless character that Paul Marcarelli played for years has entered the
American cultural vocabulary.
Cultural vocabulary comprises the quotes and
images of literature, the visual arts, entertainment, current events and other
cultural phenomena that people need to know to understand the cultural
references that abound in the mass media, the popular arts and general conversation.
Our cultural vocabulary consists of many artifacts:
- Real and fictional people, such as Adam & Eve, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Pascal and Don Quixote.
- Events, e.g., Hannibal crossing the Alps, the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon.
- Phrases, e.g., quotes from poems, books, movies and songs, anything from “No can do” and “Let’s get it on” to “To be or not to be,” from “Four score and seven years ago” to “I have a dream.”
- Inanimate objects, e.g., the Bible, the Holy Grail or a Super Bowl ring.
From almost the beginning of human culture, artists
in all genres and for all purposes have used pieces of cultural vocabulary in
their works. But in all case, the artist shapes the cultural vocabulary to his
or her own purposes. For example, Odysseus’ wiliness is heroic for Homer,
treacherous for Virgil and bombastic and legalistic for Shakespeare; in James
Joyce’s hands, the character of Odysseus is transformed into a self-abnegating
Jew in turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin. Botticelli’s Venus is a Christian Neo-Platonist
symbol of divine love, whereas Titian’s Venus revels in the sensuality of the
real world and Paolo Veronese’s embodies the civilizing effects of love. Select
virtually any cultural icon that has been around more than a few hundred years
and you will be able to find different versions of it throughout literature,
art, pop culture and even history. In a sense, the artist “cannibalizes” the
cultural icon by spinning the shared understanding of the icon with his or her
own meaning.
Mass culture chews up images and concepts
quickly—be it fictional characters like Robin Hood, Mr. Spock or Jason Bourne;
historical figures such as Napoleon at Waterloo or Washington crossing the
Delaware; sayings like “where’s the beef?” or “I’ll be back”; real incidents
like the Spitzer prostitution scandal; fictional ones like movie plots; or new
products, especially strange ones. Situation comedies, comedy sketches, TV
commercials, spoof movies, newspaper headlines, news programs, comic strips,
catalogue captions, advertising slogans, postmodern art and book titles are
just some of the communication forms that routinely cannibalize cultural
references. One week, we’ll see hundreds of references to twerking and a few
weeks later, they’ll be gone, only to be replaced by hundreds of references to
1970s race car drivers, thanks to the movie “Rush.” Like twerking and “Rush,”
most of this cultural phenomena is ephemeral—here today and gone tomorrow. But
you can still provoke a heart swell with a reference to Moses and Lincoln, or a
chuckle with an imitation of Richard Nixon.
Cannibalization of cultural iconography occurs
primarily through direct reference or through imitation, parody and, travesty.
James Joyce structures Ulysses after Homer’s epic and a
secondary character in the “American Pie” movies calls himself the
“Sherminator,” referring to another movie in another genre. Over time, we
expropriate and distort the content of a cultural icon, sometimes to the point
that we cannot recognize the original, as when Robin Hood becomes an anti-tax
conservative in the Russell Crowe movie remake instead of someone who takes
from the rich to give to the poor; or when Martin Luther King comes to
represent general service to the community in place of seeing him as
representing civil rights and civil disobedience. We morph cultural icons, as
when the Terminator and Joe Isuzu transform into good guys. We take them out of
context and thereby change their meaning, as Andy Warhol did with Elvis Presley
and Marilyn Monroe.
The surest sign that an event, person, character or
saying has permanently entered the public collective consciousness is that it
has undergone a large number of these cultural expropriations over a period of
years. It’s one thing for Johnny Carson to joke about the Mean Joe Greene soft
drink commercial in 1982. It’s quite another to recycle the concept as a
homage-cum-parody 30 years later to sell suds to housewives.
The longer a cultural artifact remains part of the
cultural vocabulary, the more it changes from its original form and meaning,
until finally it can mean anything to anyone. In a sense, frequent morphing of
a cultural artifact hollows it out so it becomes an empty vessel that can be
filled with any idea. Take the United States constitution, not the document
itself, but its cultural meaning as a holy icon that guides our society and
sets our laws. In any given year, dozens of conservative, progressive and
centrist writers invoke the constitution, each meaning something completely
different. Years of reinterpretation and misinterpretation by the news media,
politicians, writers, filmmakers, composers and public relations professionals
have slowly hollowed out the concept of the constitution, so that it can come
to represent anything—and everything.
It’s likely that the “Can you hear me now?” guy will
eventually disappear, much as most cultural artifacts do. I doubt anyone would
catch a reference to Spencer Tracy in “Captains Courageous” anymore, although
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca retains a grip on the public consciousness. In a
similar way, a reference to Christopher Marlowe would go over most heads; even
an allusion to “Dr. Faustus” would probably be mistaken as referring to
Goethe’s version of the medieval myth of the man who seeks all knowledge. But
again, a television commercial in which a troubled-looking young man looked at
a skull and said, “To network or not to network” would resonate with most high
school graduates.
We could glibly predict that the “Can you hear me now?” guy
and the advertising caricature of Mean Joe Greene will likely disappear in
time, as will Joe Isuzu, the “Where’s the beef?” lady, the cannibalistic Mr.
& Mrs. Potato Head nibbling potato chips and the prematurely retired Dell Dude. But we can’t really be sure. The line between
fiction and truth blurred decades before the partially mendacious “The
Imitation Game,” “Selma” and “The King’s Speech.” The right-wing news media
long ago blurred the distinction between truth and falsity. Sponsored content on the Internet and on TV
has now blurred the distinction between programming and commercials. The
commercialization and commoditization of most entertainment, information
gathering and communications makes it more possible than ever for television
commercial slogans and characters to remain memes long enough to make the leap
to lasting, even permanent cultural relevancy. Perhaps centuries from now, a
future Mel Brooks will have a character walk around in Renaissance tights, sword
in scabbard, staring into a skull and saying, “Alas, poor Yorick. Can you hear
me now?”
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