Air Mario

Two type additions for movies and how they get on you

Once upon a time, the term” branding” only applied to the hideous physical marking that indicated ownership on the skin or hide of living things. A label was something you created for yourself and attached to another to demonstrate your complete ownership of the living thing, or it was a creature’s way’s of demonstrating ownership. It was, in essence, either strictly descriptive or, at worst, a hint of something horrible.

Now,” branding” is the main focus of the mass entertainment industry, and possibly the entire market sector, with a modified concept that takes its precise meaning and turns it symbolic. The majority of entertainment products are designed to deliver a company’s”‘s brand,” or the image and ideal of itself it wants to project onto the world, rather than just generate revenue. It may try to do it physically if it could, but since it is unable to, it resorts to advertising and overwhelming force of will.

We are now drenched in branding. We’re drowning in it. Case in point: Wednesday, April 5. Two movies opened that day. One is Air, a fact-based tale about the making of a sneaker with two of the last old-time movie stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (who also directed). It is the best-reviewed film of the year so far. The other is Super Mario Bros, an animated version of a classic series of video games. It is the blockbuster of the year so far and will earn close to $150 million when the final tally of its first weekend results come in. You’d think they have nothing in common. But in fact, they are both studies in branding—so much so that their entire emotional impact is based on how you respond to the evocations of the products they are showing and celebrating.

Air is set in 1984, and throughout the movie director Affleck is constantly hearkening back to the consumer products at that moment. We see the Wendy’s “where’s the beef” commercial. We see people playing on Coleco hand-held gaming devices. Pepsi is the choice of a new generation. Affleck and the movie are trying to have it both ways here. Good student of the vile work of Howard Zinn that he is, he wants Air to be a critique of commodity capitalism and its effort to hypnotize us into wanting things (even as Affleck is literally buying and selling $50 million mansions in and around Los Angeles). But the entire film depends on its target audience (basically American adults who have some memory of the 1980s) swooning every time they see a blue Slurpee come out of a 7-Eleven dispenser.

Air is about a billion-dollar business that wants a player named Michael Jordan to endorse its sneakers. Affleck and screenwriter Alex Convery have made this a scrappy underdog story, because we’re told that in 1984, basketball players and black people didn’t like Nikes and Jordan was going to sign with Adidas.

Sonny Vaccaro, who has been hired by Nike to identify upcoming experienced ring lights, is portrayed by Damon. Although he is a shleppy and out-of-shape play addiction, Damon is smart, funny, and brave, making him an absolute pleasure to spend time with. Jordan, who wasn’t even the top draft pick the date he entered the benefits, becomes Sonny’s obsession’s. He wagers everything on a long-shot attempt to persuade Jordan’s mother to support Nike. In order to support one trainer company over two others, this movie asks us to do so.

I’m sorry—what? We’re supposed to think Nike is better than Adidas and Converse because Sonny Vaccaro sees that Michael Jordan might be so good and so charismatic he will transmute himself into the greatest brand in the history of sports. That’s nice and all, but there’s one too many speeches from Viola Davis about how “my son is going to change the world.” Mrs. Jordan was a smooth and clever negotiator, and it turns out she understood stakeholder capitalism so well she forced Nike into giving her son a piece of the action—a piece that is, the movie tells us, worth $400 million a year in passive income to Jordan even now, almost 40 years later.

But, um, how exactly did Michael Jordan change the world? By making athletes richer through the act of separating generations of kids from oceans of money by convincing them into thinking they will somehow have Jordan’s spirit enter their bodies by putting on an expensive sneaker? “A shoe is just a shoe, until my son steps in it,” says Mrs. Jordan in a line Viola Davis improvised. No, a shoe is still just a shoe. Air is very entertaining, but it’s one of the most sheerly hypocritical movies ever made.

Super Mario Bros is, by contrast, a peculiarly honest example of brand exploitation. It doesn’t do what cleverer branded fare, like The Lego Movie, tries to pull off, which is to play subversive riffs off the very product they’re using to sell tickets. It’s the story of a Brooklyn plumber named Mario who is considered a loser by everyone from his old boss to his own father and has only his loving younger brother Luigi on his side. When the two of them get sucked into a pipe and into a magical land, Luigi ends up in a hellscape prison while Mario finds himself in the cutesy Mushroom Kingdom. Mario needs to rescue Luigi and the Mushroom Kingdom needs to save itself from the hellscape.

The movie features musical cues, character design, and imagery from four decades of Mario video games along the way, I’m told’m— I’ve never’ve spent a second playing these things. To demonstrate that the film’s creators’s are stronger to the product they are using, this is done without apologies or any attempt to smile at the audience. Children of all ages adore these Mario items, and the film does not treat them with disrespect, which is why it is and will remain quite popular.

How much has brand colonized our neurons and taken over the world? I recently received a question regarding the everyday radio I host and its objectives. I also stated that we did it to” enhance the Commentary Magazine company.” Then I finally wanted the earth to open up and accept me completely as the editor of a 75-year-old publication that seeks to discover and enhance the best that has been said and thought in Western culture.