Assvertising

[Content Note: Emotional abuse.]

Have you seen these fucking ads for DirecTV (hereafter "Advertiser") with the straight white guy who's married to a marionette lady and has a kid who is a marionette boy? Jesus Jones, these things are terrible. The basic premise is that the guy is SO THRILLED to have gotten rid of cable wires after getting Advertiser's service that he can't stop talking about how awesome it is to have no wires.

Which is a stupid conceit made even stupider by the fact that Advertiser is basically driving home this WIREFREE UTOPIA message with adverts featuring the guy's marionette family being all freaked out by how he can't STFU about his new blissful wireless life.

The last advert in the series was his having to reassure his kid that his marionette wires are totes awesome (right before the kid gets caught in a ceiling fan), and this is the latest fucking disaster in the series:

The straight white thin young dude is chilling in bed, remote control in hand, staring at a TV on the wall across from him. His white thin young marionette wife — and I cannot emphasize enough that she is a marionette with strings attached to her leading who knows where — comes galloping into the room wearing a white robe and stands between him and the TV. She sighs. "Do you still think I'm pretty?" she asks.

"Of course I do!" he replies. "What's this about?"

She explains: "Since we got [Advertiser's Service], all you talk about is how we can put TVs anywhere without having to look at those ugly wires." She flops her stringed limbs about.

"No, baby," he says, gesturing at the television. "I meant the cable wires, not you!"

As she rips off her robe (in physical defiance of the existence of the wires that are the centerpiece of this garbage advert), she whispers, "Okay then." She reveals a red teddy. Her husband makes a sexyface at her. "So you like what you see?" she asks.

"Yeah, I do," he says. She begins to "dance" for him. "Like it?" she asks. "Yeah," he tells her. She starts doing the Charleston, looking totally desperate. "How about that?" she asks. "Yeah, that's sorta jazzy," he says.

Male voiceover: "Now you don't need to see cable wires and boxes in every room." Blah blah Advertiser info fart.

See, it's meant to be funny because his family members are marionettes, and we're definitely not supposed to see a basic form of emotional abuse replicated for our supposed amusement.

One of the most common forms of emotional abuse within family structures is the expression of negative judgment against people like that by parents, siblings, etc. when one family member is, or will be, a person like that. And one of the most common responses when it's called out is: "I didn't mean you."

Why the fuck is this dynamic, which we're meant to recognize in some way as his self-doubting son appeals for his acceptance and his insecure wife shimmies for his affection, being used to try to sell a TV service, as if it's not abuse because the guy's family aren't human?

Whoever is doing the calculations over at Advertiser that dehumanizing people in order to abuse them is appropriate and amusing needs a remedial math course.

I'll give Danger Guerrero the final word:

This is the second straight commercial where a marionette member of this family has come to this guy with concerns that he considers them to be hideous monsters, because this bozo — who is married to a marionette and has a marionette son — has been running around telling everyone he can corral for 10-15 consecutive seconds how happy he is to be rid of the "ugly" cable wires all over his house. Hey, ding dong, SHUT UP. You're tearing your family apart over six inches of cable that no one even notices because it's stuffed behind a dresser or something. Jesus. This is all just a sad, disturbing mess now. Shut it down.

For real.