Narrative Uses of the Topoi of the Western in Post-9/11 American Television Commercials Józef Jaskulski Praca doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem Prof. UW dr. hab. Marka Pary ża WARSZAWA 2018 Table of Contents Introduction: “Pioneers, Outlaws, Indians, and Gas:” The Myth of the Western in Television Ads Since 9/11 ………………………………………………………. 4 Chapter 1: The War on Terror as Frontier Warfare: Figurations of the Old West in Post-9/11 (Para)military Recruitment Commercials ...………….......... 33 1.1. “They're There, Now and Fifty Years From Now”: The Myth of the Cavalry in Post- 9/11 USAF Recruitment Ads ..…….…………………………………. 43 1.2. Defenders, Avengers: Shades of the Alamo in Post-9/11 Border Patrol Recruitment Videos.………………….....…………………………………….. 66 Chapter 2: Liminal Mediation in Times of Crisis: The Presidential Campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney…………………………............................ 93 2.1.“She Must Be Scared – and So Do You”: The Specter of Ethan Edwards and the 2004 George W. Bush Presidential Ads……………………...……….. 99 2.2. “A Good Man With(out) a Gun”: Mitt Romney’s Presidential Bid and the Legacy of Shane ….………………………………………...………... 130 Chapter 3: Automobiles in the Garden: Cowboys, Homesteaders, and the Pastoral Tendency in Contemporary Car Advertising……………………….. 159 3.1. “Forget There’s People and Things That Ain’t So Simple as This”: Dodge Ram and the Cult of the Cowboy…...……………………………………….. 166 3.2. Towards a Techno-Pastoral: Dodge Ram and the Cult of the Homesteader…..……………………………..………………………... 194 Chapter 4: Consumable Others: Simulations of Ethnicity in Food Industry Advertising in Post-recession America…………………...……………………. 214 2 4.1. Consumable Others: Simulations of Ethnicity in Food Advertising in Post-recession America…………………………………………………… 221 4.2. “Down Here in Old Mexico”: Commodifications of the Carnivalesque in Tequila Ad Campaigns ……………………………………....…………… 245 Conclusion: Come to Where the Flavor Was: The Myth of the Western in the New Gilded Age…………..………………………….………………........ 267 Works Cited .……...……………………………………………………………... 273 Primary Sources ……………………………………………………………....273 Secondary Sources……………………………………………………….........281 Other Sources……………………………………….…………………........... 305 3 Introduction: “Pioneers, Outlaws, Indians, and Gas”: The Myth of the Western in Television Ads Since 9/11 Set in rural Wyoming in 1999, Annie Proulx’s “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” is a story of an aging rancher whose life has been a string of professional and personal failures. Ineffective as a businessman and equally unsuccessful as a husband and father, Gilbert Wolfscale leads a life of an old bachelor, attending to his cattle and caring for his ailing mother, whose death—along with the prolonged drought that stymies his business operations—renders him a recluse amidst the seasonally inhabited, gentrified landscape. In keeping with the fatalist air which pervades Proulx’s short story, solitude and lack of rain only spell more trouble for the protagonist. As usual in the ranch world, things went from bad to worse. The drought settled deeper, like a lamprey eel sucking at the region’s vitals. He had half-seen the scores of trucks emblazoned CPC speeding along the dusty road for the last year, and knew that they were drilling for coal bed methane on BLM land adjacent to his ranch. They pumped the saline wastewater laden with mineral toxins into huge containment pits. The water was no good, he knew that, and it seemed a terrible irony that in such arid country water could be worthless. He had always voted Republican and supported energy development as the best way to make jobs in the rural hinterlands. But when the poison wastewater seeped from the containment pits into the ground water, into Bull Jump Creek, into his alfalfa irrigation ditches, even into the household well water, he saw it was killing the ranch. (Bad Dirt 80) As can be inferred from the above excerpt, Gilbert Wolfscale is a curious paradox, not unlike other characters in Proulx’s short story. Facing a potential economic disaster, he puts his political preferences aside and joins an unusual 4 alliance of ranchers and environmentalists to fight the drilling company. Their resistance seems futile, as the law sides with the corporation, and the ongoing fracking poisons the soil and spoils the water in his wells, depriving Wolfscale of his (already meager) source of income. And yet, although “everything told him that the day of the rancher was fading” (69), this third-generation Wyoming cattleman refuses to concede to unbridled modernity that encroaches on his land, and obstinately continues to scrape along, even if it seems against his own better judgment. Wolfscale knows “the old world was gone” (62) but persists in his efforts to maximize profit by cutting the middleman (he fails due to limited market leverage), dabbling in turkey farming (he falls short of projected Thanksgiving sales results, and ends up eating most of the meat himself throughout the winter season), and selling surplus hay to his neighbors (until the drilling irreversibly wrecks his grazing grounds). Disenchanted and embittered, he gradually surrounds himself “with an atmosphere of affronted hostility” (62). Subscribing to conspiracy theories and externalizing his own mercantile shortcomings, Wolfscale projects his ambitions on his sons who, much to his chagrin, prove completely disinterested in following in his footsteps, wise enough to avoid getting “caught in the downward ranching spiral of too much work, not enough money, drought” (67), despite Wolfscale’s desperate attempt to lure them back home by having the ranch electrified and buying a brand new TV set. If anything, they treat the ranch as an a dubious pastime when compared with the glitz of Denver, or the more modest pleasures of a Wyoming small town. A small-time landowner, Wolfscale (un)wittingly replicates the fate of his ancestors, and seems bound to spend his final years putting up a hopeless fight against the structures of ownership that were established and cemented long before him. Standing up to the corporations and their lobbyists, Wolfscale is as doomed to 5 fail as those who once stood up to cattle barons and fossil fuel moguls. From the opening sentence, Proulx portrays the Wyoming scenery as a juxtaposition of “isolated coves with trophy houses protected by electronic gates,” on the one hand, and “slanted trailers on waste ground,” on the other. Hers is no country for small entrepreneurs. Climate change, sliding economy, failing welfare state, ineffective legislation, and Wolfscale’s own ineptitude as a Westerner (an uneducated would-be Vietnam conscript, short on economic, social, and cultural capital) all combine to prevent him from breaking out of the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Wolfscale’s grim economic prospects are no exception to the rule. His wife ends up charged with the embezzlement of tax money, his mother falls victim to mail fraud, while his two sons work dead-end jobs in a Japanese restaurant in Denver and a local video rental, respectively. Each of these characters is a byproduct of technological progress and economic rationalization or, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, their “wasted lives” represent the collateral damage of “liquid modernity” marked by an excess of goods and a surplus of work force that seems readily disposable in the increasingly deregulated global market ( Życie na przemiał 153). In political terms, Wolfscale is a quintessential example of millions of Anglo-American males who have fallen prey to the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with neoconservative social values that helped solidify deregulated capitalism as a globally dominant axiom, “not just the default model, but the only available option in our political vocabulary” (Hassler-Forest 9). The roots of this fusion date back to the 1960s, when the rise of the New Left initiated the gradual retreat of the Democratic Party from welfare state issues in favor of civil rights policies and the empowerment of minorities. The successive uncoupling of these two strands resulted in a radical shift in the political base of the Democratic Party, which began losing its traditional blue 6 collar voters as the public discourse moved from class to race and gender issues while tacitly overlooking the brewing neoliberal reforms that eventually bumped economic inequalities to unprecedented heights, and facilitated the coagulation of plutocratic structures of privilege. Meanwhile, the Republicans used the rise of “soft- core” cultural left—which brought about a sense of abandonment among the traditional Democratic electorate, i.e. the socially conservative Anglo-American working class—to draw them to political programs combining market deregulation (which the Democratic Party no longer seemed to oppose) with conservative social values (which the Republican Party cynically championed, using them as disguise for its libertarian economic agenda (Judt and Snyder 346-353)). The separation of the issues of social parity and civil liberties within the Democratic Party, and the bipartisan turn from economic to moral issues pushed numerous former Democratic voters towards the Republican Party, while also bringing about a political consensus on the matters of market non-interference and trickle-down economics, promulgated under the cloak of meritocratic narratives. Over time, the meritocratic discourse that stipulated professional diligence and entrepreneurial spirit as prerequisites for economic advancement in a post-class, post-racial society of