Elements of ancient style guidelines exist in modern media today. Such guidelines and categorizations have withstood the test of time and are relevant to modern communication. I have chosen a Hulu commercial to illustrate some aspects used in their unusual campaign. I will dissect the monolog in chronological order of the advertisement.
Since the commercial is spoken, and I do not possess the exact language and punctuation of the monolog of this commercial, I cannot be sure that I have translated it exactly; however, I have made my best guess to transcribe the monolog in the below paragraphs. Since the language is meant to be heard and not read, I would say it might be a bit form informal than if it were written, but the communication still maintains conventional correctness. Further, the dialog doesn’t tend to run on, and it has a periodic style, because all the sentences are right to the point, and don’t continue to string on more phrases or words with commas or other punctuations that would add significantly to sentence length.
The following is a basic summery and transcript of the commercial along with an identification of basic style elements:
We zoom in, from a very wide shot of Earth, to a closer shot of Alec Baldwin standing by the Hollywood sign. Baldwin says, “Hello Earth, I’m Alec Baldwin, ‘T.V Star’” (makes little finger quote hand sign). Then he walks into the entrance of what we will suppose is a secret laboratory inside the Hollywood sign.
“You know they say TV will rot your brain?” Baldwin asks. Here he is using a well known figure of thought that is commonly used and associated with television watching. It does not mean that TV literally kills brain cells, but that a TV watcher doesn’t have to do much thinking during the activity and is associate with ‘getting dumber’ though less brain use. This saying is pretty common, as TV has a negative intellectual connotation, that I’m assuming the audience if familiar with.
Then he continues, “Ha, that’s absurd: TV only softens the brain, like a ripe banana.” Here we are using simile to describe how our brains will become “like” a rotting banana. Brains and rotting bananas are not normally associated with each other but like Crowley and Hawhee describe a simile as, “two unlike things are placed together so that the attributes of one are transferred to the other” (Crowley 229). There is also a second meaning of the ‘softened’ brain, that we are supposed to interpret as our intelligence and ability to think melting away as the structure of our brain tissue liquefies.
Baldwin continues, “To take it all the way, we created Hulu. Hulu beams TV directly to your portable computing devices to give you more of the cerebral gelatinizing shows that you want, anytime, anywhere, for free.” In the commercial, Baldwin looks through an x-ray screen at a male ‘test subject’ who is watching TV and laughing. The x-ray indicates brain liquefaction. Baldwin says, “Mushy, mush.” Baldwin is further playing on his earlier comment that your brain will get soft like a rotting banana.
Balwin continues,“And the best part is, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. I mean what are you going to do? Turn off your TV and your computer? Ha!” Here is a rhetorical question mean to taunt the viewer. The rhetorical question is a statement in the form of “asking” that’s not really meant to sincerely ask the question it is asking. A rhetorical gets the point across without needing an answer (Crowley 249).Baldwin knows that we’re too plugged in to unplug. This fact is taken to be so obvious that he doesn’t even have to say it, he can simply challenge us with a question that he doesn’t need us to answer: he just laughs at our pitiful helpless state.
The ad goes on, “Once your brain is reduced to a cottage cheese like mush we’ll scoop them up with a melon baller and gobble them right on up!” Balwin uses simile again here with the phrase, “cottage cheese like,” to impart the characteristics of cottage cheese to the characteristics of a TV watching brain.
Baldwin says, “Opps, I think I’m drooling a little. Because we’re aliens, and that how we roll.” Baldwin is using a colloquial “that’s how we roll,” a phrase considered current slang for Hulu’s target audience, meaning — that’s how we do things, get used to it. Colloquial words change with generations, although some tend to hang around longer than others (Crowley 232). This is probably done to “connect” with the audience more by using their slang.
Then there is a different unseen speaker to announce the tag line. The voice-over says, “Hulu. An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy.”
The whole time the commercial attepts tocommunicate the opposite of what it is literally saying, Hulu isn’t really telling us that TV will rot your brain, and that we ought to stay away. They are communicating exactly the opposite, they want you to watch more TV, and are providing you an additional tool to watch TV when you normally can’t watch TV. The irony of the whole contradiction is supposed to be funny, and self-mocking. It’s almost as if they are trying to take the guilt you might feel at watching more TV, by ‘putting it out there’ already, and then making light of it, and poking fun at the stereotype though exaggeration. Hulu is not completely unique in their advertisement choices, as Crowley and Hawhee point out as one of their examples that: “ABC Television Network’s 1997 promotional campaign turned the focus back on itself—television as a medium—and embraced the commonplace that television is harmful to the mind. The one-line ads made ironic claims such as ‘Don’t worry, you’ve got billions of brain cells’” (Crowley 253). It’s seems as though Hulu chose to follow suit with a similar ad a decade later.
The commercial has another running theme, most of which is expressed visually, but also verbally. At the beginning of the commercial, Baldwin introduces himself while making a quotation mark gesture. Also, at the end of the commercial Baldwin admits that he’s actually an alien, and a tentacle slips out from his normal wardrobe. Further, throughout the commercial, there are various background scenes that imply that Baldwin is in some kind of alien lab where they study the liquefaction of human brains via TV watching. Then there is also the comment that Baldwin, and the other aliens plan on eating our mushy brains. This is an example of hyperbole. Baldwin exaggerates and builds on the premise that ‘TV rots your brain’ and takes it on a far out tangent that your brain literally becomes useless and then, of course, that is a master plan conspiracy put together by aliens so that they can feast on human brains. The exaggeration is done for humor, and to poke fun at the stereotype, and maybe even at the company, and the TV viewers alike (Crowley 258).
We have dissected a current example in mainstream media that directly applied to ancient style principles and elements. We identified elements of irony, simile, periodic style, rhetorical question, and colloquial words, The media example was a television commercial, rather than the spoken or written word, but the style applies to communication in many forms.
Works Cited
Crowley, Sharon and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. Second Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.
