superbowl jesus ad, part 6: the ultimatum
Feb. 21st, 2024 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdWelcome to the final piece in this series of posts analysing images used in the “He Gets Us” Superbowl Jesus ad of 2024.
As with all of these posts, I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, unless, of course, you have already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad, and gives you critical information about the beliefs and religious/political positions of the organisation behind it.
Without understanding that structure, terms such as “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this post will not make sense, so please give it the time.
Thank you. Now, let’s dive straight into the three remaining shots. Particularly when compared to The Triptych, they are relatively innocuous, but I will still describe them and comment on their meanings before moving on to a conclusion.
Image nine presents opposing protestors in close contact, yelling about an unnamed but male speaker at an unknown event. They are standing on a stairwell which disappears at the edges, because the AI didn’t bother rendering it all the way out.
Also, this is not how shoes work:
For more such commentary on how these “photographs” are supposedly not AI rendered, see part four. I’ll try to keep a lid on it here.
All of the participants appear to be dressed for the grunge era. The arguments are highlighted by simplistic signs.
On the Saviour’s side, we have one reading “CENSORSHIP” with a NO symbol around it, and another reading “LET HIM SPEAK.”
The Sinner’s side has signs reading “SILENCE HATE” and “SHUT HIM UP.”
This image clearly references the series of protests over Republicans inviting fascist and other far-right speakers and propagandists to college campuses and libraries, where they would lecture against LGBT people’s right to exist, for racism and misogyny, and other, similar topics. In several of these cases, the speaker’s fans showed up with intent to commit violence, and in the example nearest me, a fan of fascist Milo Yiannopoulos – the speaker at that event – shot one of the protestors.
It’s also probably intended to address so-called “cancel culture” – a.k.a., calls for accountability – for obvious reasons.
This image is unique in that it has a Black woman in the Saviour role. This is because when defending the rights of fascists, they are naturally going to use the type of person they see as most resistant to criticism for holding such a position. Hence: a Black woman.
Most of the others on the Saviour’s side are men, though not all; we also get a rare Black man, again, on the side of the unnamed but historically fascist speaker, for the same political reasons given above.
All of the protestors on the side of the Sinner are women, helping reinforce the gender politics they prefer – men are right, women can be right but are mostly wrong.
I’m also getting a hint of “they’d silence JESUS too!” from this, in no small part because they’ve been saying that about their enemies for decades – particularly LGBT people – and because “LET HIM SPEAK” is found in 1 Peter 4:11 about holy speech, and they use it that way intentionally in more theological/religious contexts.
The Sinner’s sin is not accepting misogyny and hate speech as respectable politics, worthy of hearing and attention.
Next slide, please.
Image 11 is steeped in a deep nostalgia for a past which largely did not happen, and I’ll be the first to say it’s too bad it didn’t because if there’s any image in this set which would be kind of okay if it wasn’t racism-erasing propaganda, it’s this one.
The image shows two men sitting in chairs on a long wooden porch attached to a restaurant helpfully labelled “DINER.” They are sharing a tub of washing water. They are a Black man and a white man, each with one foot in the washtub, the other foot out. The white man looks a bit like Jeff Bridges portraying The Dude, and he holds what looks like an old glass Coca-Cola bottle. A very traditionally-rendered southern bloodhound sleeps on the floor next to him.
While there is no specific indicator of a “Saviour” and a “Sinner” here, there is a pitcher of water on the ground next to the Black man, which may actually hand him that role. Next to him is a table with a glass of water, though, so it may be related to that, instead – or both.
The porch and diner are run down in an old but pleasant way, whitewashed and clean. There is another table on the porch; a man sits at it reading a newspaper. His face is blocked by a porch pillar. At the end of a porch, one can see the grille of a parked automobile, stylistically probably from the early 1970s, as a guess.
The door to the diner is open; to the left of that door are three windows through which you can see a brightly lit kitchen, in which – naturally – the only woman in the image is shown hard at work. Given how she’s clothed, she may also be the waitress.
This is nostalgia for an era they like to tell themselves existed, an era where racism never happened or stopped as soon as slavery did, and women knew their place in the kitchen and stayed there. They insert this false history in place of the real one.
The sin here, in their eyes, is in refusing to deny reality in favour of this revisionist nostalgic history.
Final slide, please.
Image twelve shows a beach and a broken ocean (billion-dollar-with-a-B ad campaign), one with…
…dammit, I’m going off about the AI again. I said I wouldn’t, but fukkit, I can’t help myself.
Image twelve features a scene set in front of a broken ocean, an ocean with tides but without waves, judging from the nearly featureless beach sand and all but absolutely flat water.
In the midground lies a thin band of grasslike greenery highlighted by a single spindly Dr. Seuss tree to the right.
In foreground, we have a paved area with a concrete bench, on which sits an ambiguously-racially-coded but probably mixed-race gay man with unintentional but severe shoulder deformities. His feet appear to be locked into place like Barbie’s, ready for high heels. He has a preternatural sense of balance, in that he can sit on the edge of a bench using only his left buttock while his right foot is stretched out in front of him – supported in part, I suppose, by our Savour, if he is one. Our Sinner’s left foot daintily touches the ground, not en pointe but not so far short of it. His 1970s roller-rink skates are off to the left, and he’s wearing a torn-off short-shorts coverall and a green T-shirt.
In short, he is a caricature of an urban gay man, and a very old style of caricature at that.
(Have I mentioned lately that the people behind these are all so fucking old? Christ, they’re old.)
To his right, we have a confusing choice of image: a Catholic priest washing this nice man’s feet, via water being poured from a bottle. This is strange because mainline Christianity doesn’t apply all the same meanings to foot-washing that fundamentalist evangelicals do, but also, because the people behind this ad still really don’t like the Catholics. They dislike them less than they used to, and perhaps this is about that, but I don’t think so because they really don’t like the current pope.
Maybe it’s “we won’t touch the fags, but somebody has to.” Maybe it’s a genuinely horrible riff on the Catholic priest child molestation scandals; naturally it’s a priest who is sympathetic to the gay man, given how the fundamentalist blood libel that LGBT people are all formerly molested kids who got turned queer and now rape kids to reproduce. He’s probably queer too. One might call it a kind of professional courtesy.
Or maybe it’s that they’re both lost from the sight of God, one by being gay, the other by being Catholic. Maybe they’re both the Sinners, with no Savour in sight, except the light of God above that they’re both ignoring.
(The light of God as represented in the form of light from the off-screen sun – or rather the Son, as in Jesus. Yes, that lands pretty much like a cement block lands in a roadside ditch, but it’s the kind of GET IT AR AR AR AR AR AR AR subtlety they can just about manage. Sometimes. Youth Pastor jokes, thy source is fundamentalism.)
Honestly, I’m flummoxed by the deeper meanings on this one. All of those could be true or none of them. But I’m not at all flummoxed by the fact that by any reading, our gay man is our Sinner, or at least one of them, and his sin is being a gay man. His sin is another one of existence, and his only option to avoid hell is to become someone else.
It’s not as vicious as Slide Eight, but it’s the same message. Go forth and sin no more – go forth and stop being who you are, become someone else, or you will burn in hell.
And all that brings us back around to what prompted this whole series.
Partly, yes, it was the ad itself, with all its racism, misogyny, jank-ass memeable imagery, and other horrors.
But partly, it was the clear and open reaction of the fundamentalist / fascist right, angry at it for not being judgemental enough, for not emphasising the Now Go And Sin No Longer requirement they have for reconciliation and/or redemption and/or forgiveness of sin.
This whole reconciliation / we-don’t-have-to-fight offer, you see, has terms. It has a price.
And for a lot of us, those terms – that price – is…
…stop existing.
Just stop. Be someone else, or just don’t exist at all and we don’t care how. Maybe we’ll help with that last part.
Be who you are not, stop being who and what you are, or otherwise there can be no reconciliation, no love of neighbour, no peace.
And that’s not a peace offering. It’s just not. It’s the same demand for surrender as always, their eternal ultimatum in a shiny new AI-generated billion-dollar wrapper.
And it should be treated exactly as such.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 12:18 am (UTC)https://www.biography.com/actors/mister-rogers-officer-clemmons-pool
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Date: 2024-02-22 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-23 01:08 pm (UTC)priests
Date: 2024-03-01 08:03 pm (UTC)I’m still not looking to the Catholic church for leadership, but Francis is undoubtedly the best pope in my lifetime.
Re: priests
Date: 2024-03-01 08:12 pm (UTC)I mean, given the whole lie-like-they-breathe part, it's certainly possible they decided to do that as an outreach to Catholics individually, which they've always done, seeing them as targets for conversion.
But there's no way in hell they'd actually endorse a less-queer-hating Pope.
And yes despite all that I agree that Francis is the least bad Pope in a while, which also makes him the... ugh... best Pope in a while. Now never make me say that again.
(child molester church says what)
Re: priests
Date: 2024-03-02 02:59 am (UTC)