The shoe company's new ad campaign gives new meaning to "Just Do It"
Nike is in my face and I'd like to take this opportunity to politely request that they get the fuck out. You, dear reader, will have to pardon my language -- they started it.
The athletic shoe manufacturer is currently cussin' and fulminatin' and usin' bad grammar and runnin' photos of a vomiting marathon runner in a nation-wide ad campaign tied to the Olympics. The eight-page insert, seen in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly, is printed on thick, uncoated paper stock and is designed to look cheap and reckless, mimicking the cut-and-paste style of late-1970s punk fanzines, complete with simulated Xerox shadows and Scotch tape.
"Who the Hell Does Nike Think They Are?" brays the headline. "Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?" shrieks an inner page, should you be perverse enough to open it after that unpromising teaser. (I confess that I was. Every so often, I'm gripped with an irresistible impulse to discover just How Bad Things Have Gotten.) In the bowels of this astonishing document, some copywriter has run amuck, producing hundreds of words of demented text vaguely connected to the selling of shoes but primarily intent on taunting the hapless reader and indulging in unhinged rhapsodizing. "'Just do it' isn't some sort of annoying slogan," it asserts, all evidence to the contrary. "'Just do it' is some sort of annoying conscience. That haunts and nags and double-dog dares. . . Just Do It is the collective voice of every Angel and every Devil that sits on every shoulder of everyone who ever faced the big challenge, who ever had to choose between what's behind the curtain and what's behind door number two." Easy there, big fella. And lay off the Kerouac for a day or two, okay?
On the back page there's a photo of a gentleman named Bob Kempainen in the act of "puking," as the copy smugly describes it, after he "qualified for the marathon." The ad expresses outrage that this "moment of glory was cut short when the networks took the camera off him. Why? Did he offend the commercial sponsors? Was it detrimental to the ratings? Was it all just a little too intense and 3-D for the folks at home? Tough. If they really want to support athletes, if they really want to be part of the experience, they can't just turn up for the photo opportunities and the media events, and smile and mug for the cameras. They've got to accept the whole enchilada. And it's a spitting, cussing, sweating, blister-breaking enchilada, with extra cramps. Get used to it."
Sometimes the gambits of pop culture are so blatant that the critic's fingers hover paralyzed over her keyboard while she thinks, "What more can I add?" I could point out that there's no one likelier to constitute "the folks at home" than the readers of Entertainment Weekly, or "the commercial sponsors" than Nike itself, so who's sneering at whom? And of course, the ad also demonstrates how easily the attitudinous "authenticity" of any subculture can be parroted by corporate flunkies. Then there's the queasy phallic symbolism of that foul-mouthed, perspiring, spasm-ridden enchilada, with its unsavory and no doubt highly contagious blisters.
But perhaps that's too obvious. What this Nike ad really, um, hammers home is how the crypto-homoerotic masochism of certain time-honored masculine rituals -- boot camp and fraternity hazing, for example -- are manifesting amid the lightweight fluff of popular media, where the rest of us can join in the pathological fun. Once upon a time, I would have needed a sex change and a draft card to enjoy the abuse of a drill sergeant. Now I have Nike to rant about "half-hearted, mediocre drag-assery" and ridicule me for resorting to "excuses, apologies or a note from your mother." This reveling in insult, humiliation and spectacular suffering is downright kinky -- that's not a photo of Mr. Kempainen bursting triumphantly through the finish line ribbon that Nike offers us, after all; the man is retching miserably, and in public.
Soldier through the gauntlet (and believe me, reading this ad is nothing short of an ordeal) and you win the right to turn around and dish it out to someone else. Let's all make fun of the "folks at home" now. You think you're just buying a pair of jogging shoes or innocently leafing through a glossy magazine of celebrity profiles and the next thing you know, you're entangled in a complicated s/m scenario with a multinational corporation. That's more than I, for one, bargained for, so to Nike I can only reply: Just Stop It.