Some speculative and unscientific hypotheses I have developed watching the "publicidad" on Spanish TV
Faithful readers who are practicing their Spanish may appreciate the clips below, as they are narrated nice and slowly and clearly. Be warned, however, that while repeated viewings will lead to full comprehension, they may also lead to a strange desire to buy beverages and cleaning products.
I'm just back from a fun but exhausting weekend in Belgium, and feeling very happy to be back in my cozy city once more, where I can see the sun. I've been given another good archive lead, which I will follow up shortly, as tomorrow and Friday are both puentes which I plan to use for rest, recuperation, and possibly some writing time. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts about Spanish TV which have been kicking around my head for a while (I watch way too much TV here), and which being away for a few days brought into focus.A Russian friend of mine this weekend, in the attempt to persuade me that the world was not falling apart, said that she traced social progress through Hollywood movies because they are mass, popular culture, so once an idea is there it is never radical or elitist, but by default mainstream, and said that she traced the rise of tolerance to the ways movies were made now as opposed to fifty years ago. I see her point, but what I didn't say at the time is that even Hollywood movies are frequently aspirational: they don't so much reflect an actual social consensus as the social consensus that the people in Hollywood wish existed. In that respect they may be more progressive than the US as a whole. (My friend doesn't know the US at all except from the movies, so she has no way of realizing that.) I assume that the same is true for Spanish TV advertisements, and perhaps even more so since the point of a TV ad is even more explicitly to get people to buy stuff, so obviously the ads present an aspirational lifestyle --- a world which doesn't exist but which could if you are willing to buy X product (or a dystopia which doesn't exist but which might if you don't buy X product). Still, to the extent that ads reflect both the preoccupations and the dreams of their target demographics, I have made a few tentative hypotheses about Spain the present day. These are unscientific and unsupported by any hard demographic data, but I bet they could be confirmed (because I bet the highly paid people who made the ads confirmed them). Read on for my thoughts, and for some funny youtube clips.
