A Little Less Conversation

Some of you will recall my earlier jeremiads about drug ads for potions to stop brittle bones and stave off penile-implant surgery. Those of you who don't, and those of you who for your own unfathomable reasons wish to relive the horror, can click on 'Sally Field' or 'flaccidity' in my Labels list to the right and share in my pain of many months ago.

Let me begin by saying I don't watch television all that much. I have a very small set, and it is hard to see from where I usually am, which is at my computer desk, ordering antique perfume bottles off Ebay or once again struggling to come up with ideas for a seasonal dish in the cold and stormy heart of winter that does not involve turnips or kale. And since I generally turn the sound off when it is on, I seldom have any idea what anyone is saying, since I can't read the subtitles at all from thirty feet away. Still, occasionally, I have both the television and the television audio on simultaneously, and when this baleful combination of phenomena occurs, it is rare that I do not regret it subsequently.

Recently I was foolhardy enough to press 'power' without 'mute' before walking over to the vanity to select the day's fragrance, whereupon I was wrested from my tranquil toilette to stand agape and aghast at the horror that flickered before my widening eyes. For it seems that now Viagra has a new campaign, worse than all the rest, and while I hold no particular affection for any Elvis song or film from the 1960s, it does seem that using Viva Las Vegas to hawk erection pills diminishes substantively whatever charm or cachet that song can be said to have once possessed.

Not that it wasn't full of macho swagger, boastful virility, and the desire for unbridled hedonism -- if, admittedly, less than artfully put by the crack songwriting team of Messrs. Pomus and Shuman. But that's just it (well, part of it): the ad is using the universally-recognized song to evoke that libertinous 'I'm just a devil with love to spare' strut in the back of the viewer's mind, while the new lyrics, by contrast, kick the unsuspecting rogue in his pants. Not to mention his cerebellum.

Firstly, let me say that I understand Cialis is doing well, and has done well marketing itself as the flaccidity fixer for men who already have women to have sex with. It has advantages Viagra does not, including more rapid and longer-lasting effects. That's hard to battle, and simply whining, 'Heeey, remember us? We've got one, too. And it's kinda the same' is clearly insufficient. If New Coke had done well, its competitor would have had to strive to position some new product of its own as being similar, and similarly delicious. So Viagra finds itself wanting to declare that even married men who want to have sex with their wives will find it useful.

Of course, Pfizer (or their ad agency) could have said that. Explicitly, and in uncloying language. Instead, we are given the image of a group of early-middle-aged men in the widest assortment possible of casual wear (so that you, whoever you are, will surely be able to find one to 'identify' with: is it the plaid-shirt guy? the rakishly-untucked one? or are you really the bandanna'ed motorbike rider in your heart?) who got together in a bartenderless roadside tavern in the middle of the day to turn Elvis Presley songs into paeans to Erectile Dysfunction drugs and sex within the bonds of marriage.

How do I know they're married? Could I not just be leaping to conclusions for the sake of being able to hate all these ads equally (and by the way, I have never yet seen a single ad for Levitra, and for all I know they could be as bad or worse, but if we fall in love, you and me, and you find you're having a bit of a problem, and I still haven't seen any, please do the right thing and support Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline)? No, I know they are married because I was subjected to first-year-film-school clunky closeups of wedding bands on left hands playing various instruments, and because my brain was fried by having the following lines imprinted on it, forever:

• This lonesome toad is sick of the road/Can't wait, can't wait to get home
• At the end of the day/I'm not a guy who'll stray/'Cause she's my heart's desire

'Lonesome toad,' I guess, is supposed somehow to make them seem like normal men who say manly, cowboyish self-deprecating things in bars, rather than go to them to sing about drugs and impotence and monogamy and how they are inexplicably stuck in the bar, when really all they want to do is go home and have drug-enhanced sex with the wives they miss so much. And, since they have been trapped there who knows how long, and have been thinking of little besides their wives and the great married sex they are going to have with their 'hearts' desires,' I can presume that they, unlike Elvis, are not wishing that there were more than twenty-four hours in a day -- unless their Honey I'm Home package includes a Cialis tab or two.

I Broke My Hip in a Cialis Commercial

Cialis. It's the extended dance-remix version of Viagra. Take it, and you've got 36 hours to convince someone to have sex with you.

I could care less.

But while I am as sick as anyone else of the constant stream of content-free drug ads featuring frolicking puppies and toddlers, harmonious family dinners, fleece-clad upwardly-mobile thirty-somethings scaling mountainsides and dancing in pollen-infested meadows, and sixty-year-olds demonstrating their newfound taste for Moderate Physical Activity, with no mention of what, other than some general improvement in quality of life, these drugs can be expected to proffer, and while the Cialis ads do speak of what it is they are meant to address ('erectile dysfunction'), they manage to be as noxious as the vague 'you'll just have a better life, but we won't tell you how' ones.

Why? I don't mind the naughty-naughty nudge-nudge-wink-wink 'we're seventy but we're still going to git-it-onnnn' tone. Get it on, septuagenarians, get it on! And if you need a pill or a pulley system or a troupe of Chinese acrobats to get you there, it's not for me to judge. I think the more people there are succeeding in having happy sex lives, the fewer aggressive drivers, bar brawls, and Monster Trucks we will encounter in the world. And, the drug is about sex, after all, so fair play to the advertising firm for finding the space in their thirty seconds to be clear about that.

So clarity or frankness is not what gets under my skin here. It is those accursed bathtubs! These ads all focus on sex within a relationship, the intimacy of it. That the sex, qua vehicle of intimacy, guarantor of intimacy, proof of intimacy, was what was missing in an otherwise good relationship. Take this pill, you'll get that back, and then all the other good stuff that you did have will be even better by virtue of this restored sexual sharing. The ads show the couples doing things together, looking good together, sharing vacations, sharing a life.

And then they close with them up on a hill in separate bathtubs. Matt Beebe of Lilly says that shot was all but accidental originally. But they've stuck with it, and it's stupid. Take the drug, get it on, and then go your separate ways. If there has to be a bathtub - which is, I would argue, not necessarily the case - then have one bathtub, with the happy and contented reconnected seniors in it together.

The bathtub evokes a womb. Security, comfort, safety, warmth. Which is, in the ads, part of what the sex was meant to signify for these couples, as well. The men are portrayed not as popping a pill and heading out to the local bar to troll for strumpets, but, rather, as still attracted to, and wishing to have sex with, their wives, who are presented as attractive and havesexwithable. And then, after the shots of romantically-lit cuddly moments, the tinkling of soft jazz and wine glasses, a voiceover about livers, kidneys, blood pressure and the risk of four-hour erections takes place over a shot of the couple unable to have sex, because they are stuck precariously on a cliff, or stranded in a field, separated by walls of porcelain, something perhaps a four-foot, but not a four-hour, grandissement could solve.