Blog Post #4
This political remix video takes a Walmart advertisement and, through the use of audio adjustment and interspersed clips from The Terminator (1984), turns it into a mock fascistic propaganda piece that looks like it could have come straight from Skynet itself. The Walmart ad used in the remix video is titled “I am a Factory.” The ad consists of a monologue from the first-person perspective of a factory as shots of decrepit factories and old footage of things reminiscent of industry (a rocket launching, cars being made on an assembly line) punctuate the factory’s claims of how it once used to be great. As the monologue shifts from talking about the past to talking about the future, the visual footage changes to portray happy factory workers and active industrial processes. The ad flashes some statements about how Walmart is committed to supporting local industries, and then the monologue closes out with the message “work is a beautiful thing.”
In the remixed video, as soon as the monologue shifts from the past to the present/future, the voice gets perceptively deeper and more filtered, as if it was being said by a machine. The music also takes a turn, becoming more sinister. Both of these aspects of the audio work to shift the implications of the monologue; while the original speech was meant to inspire hope for the future of the American industry, the edited version makes it sound like a grim warning. It’s also not hard to notice some of the dogwhistling present in the ad: while the statement “but I’m still here, and I believe I will rise again” only vaguely suggests the reactionary conservative ideal of traditionalism in the original ad, it becomes a darker portent reminiscent of the kinds of things thrown around by radical nationalist organizations. In this context, the statement immediately following, “we will build things, and build families, and build dreams,” sounds like a fascist slogan that seems like it belongs on signs held by red-faced crowds shouting “blood and soil.”
The remixed video also intersperses clips from The Terminator showing the titular robots being made by similar industrial processes as the one depicted in the ad. One of the final shots, which reveals a completed Terminator after the monologue states “it’s time to get back to what America does best” conveys a scathing critique on American industry and large corporations. The juxtaposition between the monologue and the Terminator clips suggests that the American industry is best at making things that kill people (a critique on both poor work environments and the military-industrial complex), and that American capitalistic ideals are turning factory workers themselves into selfless automatons. Finally, the recut ad closes out on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic red-eyed stare as the altered voice asserts that “work is a beautiful thing.” A large quantity of theoretical work has been done on the aesthetics of fascism, but for the sake of brevity all that needs to be said about the combination of the connotations of the statement, the cultural context from which The Terminator was created, and the juxtaposition of the two in an edited Walmart ad is that it succinctly ties up everything previously outlined in this blog post in a way that’s both humorously absurd yet undoubtedly a little haunting.