superbowl jesus ad, part 2: there’s so much more to unpack

[solarbird]

This is the second in a series of posts analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism.

I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.

Back? Great.

We left off part one three images into this collection, so here, we start with image number four. If you want to see the images as we go, you can find them on youtube. I won’t be (re)linking, since most of the people with it are horrible, but it’s not hard to find. We’re going through them in the order they appear in the video.

I have learned since Part I of this series that there is a credited photographer for these images, and that the surreal nature of them is intentional. I am reasonably willing to consider that some parts of these are photographs, but I also have a very difficult time believing they are not heavily manipulated using AI tools given the various very clear tells. But that’s speculation on my part, and in the end, not really important; I only mention it because if the AI commentary in Part I.

Image four is … wow. What the hell am I even looking at here? What kind of dreamscape nonsense are they presenting us this time? Seriously, it’s taken me a few goes just to try to start on this one.

First, you have what amounts to a day-for-night sky, which, of course, never works. Then in the background you have Discount Vasquez Rocks with extra greenery and none of the light matching anything else in the image. In front of that on the left, you have an early-1960s pickup truck that looks like something from Tremors (1990); in centre we have a strange land of discontinuity and a partially-derendered metal guardrail where distance means nothing; and on the right, we have some soundstage alien trees that remind me of Lost in Space and a smouldering campfire pit and two remarkably, and I do mean remarkably, large oil lanterns of a kind I saw featured in a Technology Connections youtube video, except those were normal sized.

Moving forward you have another discontinuity and a transition to what looks like a matted-in and fairly sloppily-dressed soundstage. On the left, we see what looks like some strangely vivid purple meadow sage, which isn’t even a North American plant but also does look kind of like something I’ve seen but don’t know by name. I’m honestly wondering if they wanted purple sage because of the Zane Gray novel.

On the right you have some sort of vegetative mass reminiscent of… honestly the only thing that comes to mind is the creeping terror from The Creeping Terror (1964). Matte vegetation like that does exist, but I’ve never seen it look like this myself.

(one billion dollar propaganda campaign. a billion dollars. they put this on during the super bowl.)

Forward centre we have our Sinner and our Saviour. The Sinner is an older Native/First Nations man of indeterminate tribe who is sitting on a long piece of desert driftwood, his foot being washed in a metal washtub by our Saviour, an older white man, who carries vague cowboy iconography including… I honestly don’t know what that’s supposed to be. It’s placed and shaped a little like a holster and sits vaguely like leather but it’s also reminiscent of a bandana hanging out from his coat.

All of the foreground pieces are set on a television-grade thin-sand-on-a-soundstage “ground” and I am so psychically damaged by this cowboys-and-indians-but-fundamentalist mashup of stereotypes that it’s genuinely hard to piece together. If they didn’t lean so much into anti-Mormon hate I could take that approach to it, but the thing is, they really do historically hate what they call “the cult,” so I have a hard time thinking that’s a factor here.

Not gonna lie, this one’s pretty opaque in the specifics just because it is such a visual clusterfuck. I can’t tell if they tried too hard or not hard enough and had to rush it and just ran with the inchoate melange we see here.

Regardless, the intended surface-level read is “reconciliation” with “through Christ” on the side. That’s the same for all of these. That’s the sales pitch.

But the deeper read – I think the key here is that in their culture, God gave the White man this country and a manifest destiny to “settle” it – and Christianise it. It was a holy mission; you can even see it referenced as such in secular cowboy films of the mid-20th Century such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

In that context, the Native man’s sin is a combination of not being white, not being in the Bible and not yielding to the Manifest Destiny of Christian America. The white man is good in terms of being surface-level gracious to his inferior, and also for being a vaguely cowboyish rural white man with an old truck which has a rapidly dying battery because he left the lights on, I guess.

Because the white cowboy is always the good guy, right?

I’d guess this is also pushing back a little on land-back and treaty-rights movements. But the iconography is so vague and unfocused I can’t point to anything and say, “See? This means that” so I won’t.

(one billion dollars. for the love of the gods. a billion dollars.)

Next slide, please.

This one is much simpler and at first glance doesn’t need much analysis, but bear with me – it does.

A 1960s modernist building with long-brick walls and no windows fills the left and centre background. It has two metal doors which do have windows, and an armoured and very obvious security camera not really pointed at anything in particular. There’s a small anti-abortion protest on the right, beyond which we can see a somewhat shabby motor hotel with a cleverly branded rooftop sign reading MOTEL, in case you weren’t sure. Beyond that are palm trees, implying California, though it could as easily be Arizona or… sure, even Florida, the colours on MOTEL could be right for Florida.

But given who they hate and the small size of the crowd, I’m leaning towards California.

In front of the clinic on a badly-decayed concrete sidewalk there is a bench, on which sits our Sinner, a young white woman not visibly pregnant but she’s wearing baggy clothes so there’s room for ambiguity. Her jumper is thick and has extra long sleeves, and we’ll get back to that. She has a tattoo on her right leg, and we’ll very definitely get back to that. Her left foot is being washed by our Saviour, one of the anti-abortion protestors who, like everyone else in her group, is both white and overdressed for the weather.

This one in at first glance seems less bad than most, if you ignore the underlying meaning of the ad’s framework. But the combination of MOTEL, “bad part of town” (via the trifecta of decaying infrastructure, generic family planning clinic in an old building, and security camera), and most importantly the tattoo give it away.

Our young woman is placed in the role of the Sinner here because she’s been sex trafficked. The tattoo is an ownership indicator. MOTEL is indicative of where she’s forced to work. She might be seeking an abortion, she might just be seeking birth control, and both of those are sins too, but the big red flag here is putting her in the role of Sinner for being trafficked for sex.

Being a woman, she’s always at blame for anything related to sex, up to and including being kidnapped for forced prostitution and raped, so naturally, having been trafficked for sex makes her the sinner in this perverse little diorama.

By proximity and habit, they’re also implying collusion between the “family planning clinic” and the sex traffickers. This has been a trope through their modern history, since at least the early 1990s and almost certainly before. They also have a history of asserting for internal consumption that “family planning” agencies aid child molesters and other rapists.

I don’t know that the extra-long sleeves imply she’s hiding needle tracks in her arms, but they might.

If she had Jesus in her heart, whispers the theme, she wouldn’t be here. That’s both the general miasma of their belief system and the specific context; accept their version of Jesus and she can get out.

You’ll excuse me if I throw up in my mouth a little bit at these self-righteous motherfuckers, particularly since if she’s there for an abortion, they will absolutely demand that she carry her rapist’s child to term if she wants them to help. After all, it is go, and sin no more.

Not sinning any more includes delivering that rapist’s baby.

Otherwise, she’s on her own.

Next. Slide.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Comments

See the Electrical Light and you shall... 3! 3 last chances!

[frith]

I'm missing the Light of God aspect of this last one, the abortion clinic Holier Than Thou foot washer. In the other four you note the lights, oddly placed ceiling light, the school sport display case and both motor vehicles with their headlights on. Thus, I expect that there is something particular happening with a light source in the last one too? It surely wasn't the 'Motel' sign! 8^D It really isn't worth my while to hunt down a YouTube slideshow of this stuff, you've done a great job describing the scenes and thanks for that!

Edit to add: I guess I'm giving the people making these images too much credit. The car headlights were probably just a result of AI plausible image building where 'light' is part of the prompt.

Re: See the Electrical Light and you shall... 3! 3 last chances!

[solarbird]

Oddly, there is a light fixture on the outside of the family planning (abortion, for them) clinic, and it's lit up.

It's glowing all on its own because it's a bulb fixture and there's no bulb, but it is lit up.

Inside, however, allllll the lights are off. Or at least you can't see any thing through the windows on the door.

Re: See the Electrical Light and you shall... 3! 3 last chances!

[frith]

So that would be four out of four so far. The absence of a light bulb gives weight to my guess that 'light' was a constant in the prompts fed into digital image generator/manipulator. Based on your analysis, thus far it really doesn't look like these are only staged photographs, not that that changes the message.

Re: See the Electrical Light and you shall... 3! 3 last chances!

[solarbird]

Yeah on that whole AI thing, wait'll you read part 3. xD