In a recent ad review column, my nemesis Bob Garfield announced his praise for the new ad campaign touting Wendy's 99-cent "Value Meal" menu. The ad, which I'm sure you've seen, is supposed to show what other fast food places have on their 99-cent value meals, and is supposed to show that what they've got is unappetizing compared to Wendy's salads, french fries and little hamburger with bacon and "cheddar cheese sauce."
There's something wrong with the review, something wrong with the ad, and probably something wrong with Bob Garfield. Allow me to explain:
First of all, Garfield seems to have nothing to say about the ad. He spends about half the review complaining about a Wendy's night manager who yelled at him for entering a closed store wanting service. What he does say about the ad is awfully pale given his 3.5-star rating. He likes the premise. He thinks it's more amusing than the last 10 years of Wendy's ads (which is true, but those ads have been so terrible that 30 seconds of dead air would be funnier). He likes the line "the boxed nuts are nice."
One obvious thing wrong with the ad is that a lot of the choices they mention are quite appetizing. Having lived in Pittsburgh, probably the pierogie capital of the US, I developed a fondness for the little carbohydrate bombs. Served with grated cheese or carmelized onions on them, they're a treat. This can't sell many mini bacon "cheddar cheese sauce" burgers to polacks in Pittsburgh. (Grilled cheese sandwiches are good, too - especially with tomato soup. But I digress.)
Another obvious thing wrong with the ad is that there's no such thing as "tofu toast points." You can't make toast out of tofu - which is soybean curd, high in protein, often used in oriental soups and entrees and eaten by vegetarians as a meat substitute.
Less obvious, to untrained observers, is the psychosexual fixation - apparently shared by the Wendy's people and Bob Garfield - expressed in the repeated references to male genitalia. A few brief quotations will make the point, I believe.
Garfield usually does not quote so extensively from advertisements in a review, but on this occasion he goes out of his way to note the lines
The references are unambiguous, and Garfield's insistence upon repeating these lines in his review ("the boxed nuts are nice" appears three times - once as a bold-faced heading) displays the depth of his feeling. Something about this has clearly reached Garfield on a subconscious level, as he admits in describing his reaction to the ad:
AHA! Here we see Garfield in a homoerotic panic, reacting through an infantile regression that effectively denies adult sexual response! Instead of facing up to his repressed urges, he has sublimated them to the point that he is no longer capable of a potent response. He even seems to attempt to expel the feelings, through urination. And what could he mean by the following?
What would make Garfield "weigh in" on this matter? Why does this line appear to have so much "gravity" for him? What exactly is he trying to "get his hands on" and "come to grips with" here?
What indeed is bringing this neurotic obsession to express itself? The answer is hidden in plain sight - as so often happens in cases of libidinal repression. His other obsession in the review forms the connection, when, at the end of the ad, Garfield returns to the theme that he spent so much time discussing at the beginning:
Interestingly, in addition, while these fake-competitors' restaurants have been contrived to seem oddball and unappetizing, every single employee represented here is much more polite than that melon ball who verbally abused us at the Wendy's in northern Virginia. [Emphasis added.]
The reference to the Wendy's night manager gives us the key to see the whole picture. Garfield is projecting the image of his father onto the manager - the "verbal abuse" of the manager representing for Garfield, perhaps, a traumatic childhood experience involving his father. This could be a potty-training incident or a case of abuse or excessive teasing, undermining at that early age Garfield's entire adult psychosexual development. This trauma, which we could discover and understand fully only with more extensive analysis, has left Garfield powerless, "impotent" in relation to these rather mundane events and images, and the result is an ad review column that, instead of offering the usual sort of critique, wanders off the theme into the wildnerness of the unconscious.
By the way, the ad sucks.