The visuals used in this commercial are, with the exception of the Star Wars clips, all from comedies. It starts out with a brief scene from Futurama, an almost instantly recognizable show to many American viewers, in which the crew is on a giant pile of 20th century trash which was launched into space. Whether or not the viewer knows the original context of the clip, the basic concepts are all pretty much laid out: they're in space, on a pile of trash, and it's 20th century trash. Viewers who are familiar with Futurama might take away more meaning from this clip than nonviewers, though, because they would know that the show is set in the year 3000, and in that context, when Fry calls the trash a “glorious monument,” it's not much of a metaphor. They might immediately take away the implied meaning that our trash will be here long after we are gone, but for those who are not viewers of Futurama, many of the other visuals used also include this meaning in some sense.
As well as being mostly comedy, most of the video clips I used were also set in the future. The most obvious examples of this are the Futurama and Star Wars scenes, but the garbage avalanche scenes are from the movie Idiocracy, in which the solution to waste management continued to be dumping for another 500 years. Even the Simpsons clip at the end has a futuristic feel to it since the waste depicted is a bright green river of nuclear waste through which Radioactive Man floats in a Flash-looking costume. The only exception to this theme is the clip from 30 Rock, which is set in the present, although Tina Fey's cry of “Mortality!” as plastic bags are blown into a tree can be seen as a less explicit version of the idea expressed by the first clip's memorial comment: our trash will outlive us.
I chose to use mostly future oriented clips because recycling and waste management aren't really the kinds of issues that can be once-and-for-all resolved. Even if we managed to reduce our waste as much as possible, we would have to continue doing so in the future also, or the same problems will continue to arise. By using future oriented visuals of trash this idea that there is no quick fix is very subtlety implied, and the feeling of responsibility is also included through the idea of working towards a better future.
Besides being mostly future oriented comedy, most of the clips used in this commercial are also easily recognized. The original Star Wars Trilogy is of course, one of the most widely known series of movies ever created, and the white Storm Trooper armor seen in the clips used is immediately evocative of the trilogy even to those who wouldn’t recognize Luke, Hans, and Leia. Both the Futurama and Simpsons visuals are easily recognizable due to their well-known animation styles, the Simpsons especially since they’ve been a part of pop culture for almost a quarter of a century. By using iconic visuals viewers should be able to identify more easily with the scenes shown, even though they are fictional and set in the distant future.
Earlier I mentioned that the attempted tone of the commercial was one of “lighthearted responsibility,” which may sound like an oxymoron, but is certainly the easiest kind of responsibility to bear. The entire reason satire exists is to bring attention to important subject manner in a non-threatening way. As Freud so dryly puts it in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
“If [any] speech is given such a marked appearance of logic which, on careful examination, is recognizable as being only an appearance, the truth behind it is that the joke declares the [speaker] to be in the right; the thought does not venture to do so seriously... It is only this employment of sophistry for the disguised representation of truth that gives it the character of a joke.” (128)
In other words, we recognize satire as humor because it appeals to our ideas of what is right by asserting the opposite. For already widely known subjects like recycling, comedy can be an especially useful tool in reinforcing basic ideas to which the viewer has already been repeatedly exposed.
While comedy can be helpful in making responsibility easier to bear, it can also have the drawback of being easily dismissible after the initial thought has passed. To make up for this, I reinforced the idea of responsibility through the Radiohead song, “Just.” This song's chorus repeats the phrase “you do it to yourself,” which may be a little harsh since many people are trying, but we could all be doing more and this song makes the commercial as a whole emphasize individual effort. When combined with the future oriented visuals, the overall effect should be to foster a feeling of worthwhile responsibility.
Of course, just about every individual piece used to create the commercial has to be taken out of its original context to be given the pro-recycling meaning. The exception to this might be the Futurama clips, since they were from an episode criticizing 20th century waste management procedures. The Star Wars movies were not about recycling, and a (entirely hypothetical) case could be made against recycling if one were to assume that the Death Star was only built with a trash compactor because of their own inefficient recycling program. The garbage avalanche clips from Idiocracy are only slightly out of context because the movie asserts the mountains of trash as more of a policy (or lack thereof) problem than one of individual effort. The episode of “30 Rock” from which the trash bag clip came isn't our trash outliving us, but about the futility of trying to remain in control of a world dominated by chaos. Of course the song used almost certainly wasn't about recycling, though it can be interpreted any number of ways. In each of these cases I have assigned new meaning to these pieces of the commercial by placing them in different contexts than they were created under.
Works Cited
“A Big Piece of Garbage.” Futurama. Twentieth Century Fox. 11 May, 1999. Television.
“Everything Sunny All the Time Always.” 30 Rock. NBC. 28 April, 2011. Television.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1960. Print.
Judge, Mike, dir. Idiocracy. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006. Film
Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. Film.
“Radioactive Man.” The Simpsons. Twentieth Century Fox. 24 September, 1994. Television.
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