18th Mar 2007
Billboards, Advertising, and Messages therein
There are certain stretches in Los Angeles that have so many billboards that it is literally like watching TV to drive down the street. Most of them feature mostly half-dressed emaciated young women and men, but occasionally there’s a can of coke or someone dancing with an iPod.
Steve Lopez, in the LA Times, describes one billboard in particular, for a film called Captivity. (If you’d like to see this in person, drive south on Highland, and it’s on the right north of Hollywood High School). The ad consisted of four panels (photo here):
Abduction, in which a terrified young blond woman has either a gloved or
black hand over her face, as if she’s being kidnapped.Confinement, in which she’s behind a chain-link fence and appears to be
poking a bloody thumb through the fence.Torture, in which she is flat on her back, her face in a white cast, with
red tubes that resemble jumper cables running into her nostrils.And Termination, in which her head dangles over the edge of a table, the
murder complete.
Lopez focuses on the reaction of pre-teen girls and their parents to this poster, which they have really no choice but to see as they drive by. It’s hard not to think that there is a deliberate campaign of misogyny in the movie industry, encouraged by lazy-ass writing and an audience’s unrestrained appetite for violence against women. When Lopez tries to find out who is responsible for the billboard, Lionsgate, the studio, says this is a mistake—no one is every responsible for this sort of “mistake.” Read Lopez’s column, Billboard’s Captivity Audience Disgusted, to find out more of the details of the “mistake.”
