Giant Pretty People and Processed Food
Manila is an interesting place, so radically different from the chilled out islands in the rest of the Philippines with their lovely beaches and lush green mountains that, if not for the same cheerful people inhabiting both places, it would appear like a city in a different country. There is some science fiction to it, not the cool flying-cars and speaking-holograms sci-fi, but the unreal, huge-metropolis, human-ant-hill aspect of sci-fi.
Manila has 14 Million people, many of whom buy stuff, and many of whom are stuck in traffic every day, so the advertising folks put lots of advertisement posters next to the busy roads of Manila.
When it comes to advertising, I always like to quote the late great Bill Hicks, a philosopher camouflaging as a stand-up comedian:
What better way can you find to make an ad more salient than to make it bigger. And even bigger, and then some. That’s what happened to the advertising posters in Metro Manila.
It’s not normal advertising anymore. It’s mega-advertising fit for a mega-city. Food and clothing ads have been up-scaled to truly monumental sizes. Posters selling textiles and fast food are rising up to the sky, covering two thirds of 30-level apartment buildings. Billboards span 12 times 30 meters, all dedicated to the face of a single woman, or to the image of a single chicken meal on a plate.
The chicken glows appetizing; the chick looks seductively sexy without actually having anything sexual to her looks – her make-up is too perfect, he face too plastic, the highly professional yet overdone image post-processing had robed her of individuality. She is not up there on the giant billboard as the 20 year-old Maria or Grace who posed in front of the camera for the advertising photographer, but transformed into The Goddess of Shampoo of eternal youth; a kilometer down the traffic jam The Astral Princess of Lipstick looks down on the crawling traffic, and around the corner smiles the gigantic Valkyrie of Washing Powder. These are the Übermenschen of consumer products commanding the attention, and cash, of the Manileros and Manileras.
Notably, the skin tone of the gigantic Übermenschen is like that of someone from northern Denmark in the winter, yet another result of overt image post-processing. The obsession with pale skin in a country full of dark-skinned beauties certainly stems from Spanish colonial times. And all of that paleness is printed on a tarp which could cover four lanes of the road below if it fell down.
What if we actually took these gigantic images at face value? What if these were not crass magnifications, but 1:1 images of humongous young beautiful people and gigantic greasy meals? An intriguing thought, and while the higher cognitive centers in our brains understand that these are magnified photos, there will be some lower circuit in our visual system which has no access to the social context of these ginormous photos, and will take the sizes of these huge faces at face value. Let’s listen to these lower parts of our visual system for a while, for the fun of it ….
If the woman on the 30 x 20 meter shampoo ad billboard was actually as huge as depicted, all her sex appeal would disappear right away. Any humanoid that size will instill only fear and horror. Forearms the size of elephant legs, eyes larger than those of a deep-sea giant squid, her ear-rings large enough for a tiger to jump through and nipples the size of fire hydrants – positively scary and intimidating, even for men not afraid of strong women. The pale male teenage with the semi-stylish polo-shirt who got magnified to the size of a tall apartment building might not be able to grow facial hair just yet, but his nostrils would be large enough to hide in if one was to be chased by fire-hydrant-nipple woman.
And then there is all this unhealthy, sugary, fatty, processed food, mammoth sized. Soft drinks the size of oil barrels. You could drown in ice-cold, sugary, orange lemonade – not the peaceful death I wish for. Deep fried chicken legs the size of Brontosaurus limbs – what kind of frying pan do you need for something like that? Hamburger patties which could feed the Dallas Cowboys – the whole team – for a whole week. How many cows do you have to kill to make one such a Cowboy-team-feeding patty? What’s the carbon footprint of such an outsized piece of ground beef?
Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, rightfully pointed out that magnified close ups on faces are something normally outside of our perceptual experience and hence a form of psychedelic experience. In Manila, this kind of psychedelic gigantism is present all around the city, visible to everyone who is stuck in traffic. The purpose of these ads is mundane – selling processed food, cosmetics and overpriced clothes. But the effect is entertainingly bizarre to the observer who knows how to appreciate it.
PS: On this trip to Manila, I observed a significant increase in miniature dog breeds, dressed by their owners in ridiculous little dresses such as ballet outfits, pink shoes, or Hello Kitty shirts. Dogs in the Philippines are supposed to be rough, rugged street dogs with a skin disease or three. This is a sign of decadence, and I don’t like it.
