Media:
McConnell, Frank
MEDIA FOODSCAM ONLY THE FAT ARE FREE My concern here is with food, and the way we sell food. Did you see the commercial, that ran for about a year, for a very popular brand of margarine? A...
...cut to his wife, carrying a plate of salad and explaining that then they began to eat more sensibly, with low-cal meals and margarine...
...Drink Evian bottled water and you might look like one of the living slabs of cheese/beefcake in their epicene commercials...
...We love to watch the Connors, fat Roseanne and fat Dan, just because they are losers: they make weekly compromises with the squalor and untidiness and infantilism of their lives, and they spend a lot of time remembering that things were once different, and wondering what went wrong...
...and cut back to husband, with wife smiling at his side, telling us that last time he went to the doctor his cholesterol count was down two points...
...FRANK McCONNELLANK McCONNELL...
...Hopelessly in debt, governed by scoundrels and incompetents of our own choosing, and over whose betrayals we can hardly anymore muster even anger, and living in a messy, malodorous room-planet Earth-whose disarray is also mainly our own doing: in a fairly serious sense, we are the naughty, frightened teen anorexic on Oprah...
...On the lower frequencies of the spirit, it will have sounded the bass chord for the high-level, frenzied and self-loathing gluttonies of the Trumps, Boeskys, Helmsleys, and-yes-cabinet members...
...I think it is because we are the Iranscam generation...
...Can't we extend this idea from the latest recovering teen bulimic on Phil or Oprah or Sally to our life as a nation and the most sensitive register of that life, the Tube...
...Eating disorders-bulimia, anorexia-have become some of the trendier feelgood issues of the last decade, featured on talk shows, news specials, and even made-for-TV movies...
...commercials, the theory was still in force, although with an ominous undertone: Clara Pelter, the little old lady who croaked the now-famous question, was obviously close enough to having achieved her allotted fourscore and change years that she could afford to eat for enjoyment...
...Now that Clara is gone, the only character on TV who still eats because he likes to eat is Morris the Cat...
...As we consumed more, depleting God knows how much of the planet's nutritional and atmospheric substance, we also worried more and more about what we, personally, took into ourselves...
...Buy Weight Watchers TV dinners and share the secret of metabolic metamorphosis with the defiantly svelte Lynn Redgrave: "This"-with a toss of the head-"is livingl" Truer and sadder words were never spoken, or at least not spoken in my memory...
...A middle-aged, handsome fel-low sitting at his kitchen table tells us how he exercises regularly, etc., but how-trouble in paradise-he went to his doctor and found that his cholesterol count was too high (expression of high anxiety...
...Like something out of an especially grotesque medieval pageant, we were both bulimic and anorexic, consuming and fearing consumption at the same time...
...The message is clear, and deeply distressing: eat our food, and you will not die...
...so they are perfect scapegoats, free, like classical fools, to act out the failure of control the rest of us keep trying to work off or sweat away or starve out with the pounds...
...As recently as the great Wendy's "Where's the Beef...
...And they are/af...
...We ate yogurt out of sty-rofoam cups...
...And Roseanne...
...Food used to be sold on the theory that eating was/un...
...Obsession with food, we have been told by any number of psychologists and specialists, has little to do with food itself and a lot to do with the victim's sense of being out of control of his/her life altogether...
...Have cereal with lots of fiber, says Wilfred Brimley, because-and he's an old guy and he's still alive-"it's the right thing to do...
...If Roseanne never sees another season, it will have been an important moment in TV history: the perfect ritual for America at a crucial and low point in its career...
...Surely it means something that, while we as a people become weight- and nutrition- and harmful-substance-conscious to the point of neurosis, the smash of the 1989-1990 season is the ongoing parable of a couple who could, between them-or maybe not even between them-counterbalance an Audi...
...I suggest that at this point in our history we feel about as out of control of our public fate as a "free" people can...
...Mangia...
...How unhappy we are-poor little rich kids-and how ill-equipped to deal with our unhappiness...
...This is living, or at least the imitation of living, that they want to impress upon you...
...Why are Roseanne and Dan Connor the Rob and Laura Petrie of the Iranscam generation...
...The Reagan Decade was a period not only of unbridled waste and greed, but also-if you checked out the evolution of advertising, and especially advertising about food-of stunning narcissism...
...And like him/her, in our despair we concentrate our attention on the one thing that seems still within our control: what we put into our bodies...
Vol. 117 • August 1990 • No. 14
