Car commercials, I wrote last month, are almost always nonsense. So that was before professional querulants with even less sense of humor than ad boys decided to take them seriously as satanic messages from Evil.
That became clear when the advertising department of Audi threw a photo of a red Audi RS4 with a little girl on the socials. The cool, indifferently leaning child wears sunglasses and eats a banana. Accompanying one-liner: “Lets your heart beat faster – in every aspect.”
No pin between them. Audis do that with the letters RS in their name. Insofar as Audi is able to put things into perspective, a tough looking child testifies to the dreadful nose of that red man thing of an irony that is refreshing to Audi standards. The choice of a girl instead of the traditional boy’s dream boy can even be interpreted as a commendable emancipatory gesture. In short, I am not allowed to see any harm in this ad.
Wrong! In Policor circles, the house was too small. The respondents stacked accusation upon accusation. The Freudian symbolism of the banana, the disgraceful sexualization of a child! Did Audi know what Audis do? Drive children to death! Shame, shame!
What I would do as a manufacturer? Polite fuck you say. As if one premium brand with a world reputation would be so stupid to deliberately offend anyone. It can always be a customer, and you can never have enough of it. And had one Audi manager seen sexism in this, we would never have seen these images. But none of them saw it. Because it wasn’t there.
But how does Audi react? It humbly bites the dust with the preacher language of the Good Side. “We hear you,” it placates the nagging brigades with one of the most ghastly clichés in modern activist culture. Of course they do not recognize themselves in the sketched image. At Audi, they are very attentive to child welfare, what else did they have more than thirty safety systems for? And so on. Sorry Sorry sorry.
I blame Audi for this unnecessary self-humiliation. It does not half realize how it cuts to itself and others. Give the cancel culture terrorist a finger and he will take your whole hand. Nothing less is at stake here than freedom of expression.
Everyone is already outlawed in public space. In today’s merciless media culture, social media has become the stage for expressing one’s own virtue, which of course is all the more beneficial if the other person is wrong. No hard evidence? Nothing to worry about, then you just make your opponent suspect. Because filth is in the eye of the beholder. What we wish to perceive with our escalated feelings of superiority through our rose-colored glasses of hidden badness is a priori the truth, resistance is futile. Audi is guilty of racism because we think so, that’s the bottom line. That Audi case could have ended much worse. If Audi had had a black child with a banana perform, or a role-affirming white boy, the consequences would have been incalculable at all.
And that other thing than about that Golf commercial on Instagram last May? He had the appearance seriously against, I say right away. A man of color is held away from a new Gulf by a giant hand, and tapped back at the front door of the Petit Colon Hotel with a hateful finger, translatable as ‘the little settler’. The moment the punchline ‘Der neue Golf’ slides step by step into the picture, the first visible letters briefly form the word NEGER. Oops. That is no longer an unfortunate combination of circumstances, it should never have happened. At a time when interracial relations are so under the magnifying glass, all alarm bells should have sounded in Wolfsburg.
But is a white hand a priori racism? You could also call it an example of finished emancipation that in the completely caricatural context of a stupid film, a person of color falls short. There had been nothing wrong with a white man and a black hand, those things are that sensitive nowadays. If I’m not mistaken, in another Golf commercial, by the way, I see the same humiliated man of color, in the same suit, in a perfectly equal role with his girlfriend and a Golf fooling around. And the soundtrack under yet another Golf clip doesn’t exactly sound like white rap.
While something has gone massively wrong here, the suggestion of racism is absurd for this reason alone, that VW sells worldwide to people of all colors of the rainbow. There can and will never have been an intentionally discriminatory statement. The mistake is now all the more to blame VW because you know that everyone will bleed for the consequences. Of course, VW could offer nothing but apologies, but any new excuse is a full confession of guilt that gives the enemy new sticks to hit. Unfortunately, this terror movement can only be stopped by not giving in.
As Audi spokesperson, I would like to respond to the hysterics of the cancel culture with appropriate arrogance. But I already know for sure that I would never get the chance. Market is market. Survival is binding. Until no one can speak freely, until all lightness has been banned, everything and everyone is suspect as long as the contrary has not been proven. We have already gone a long way and now the car industry is also starting to feel bad. Let’s not grant the weeping willows of shame culture that miserable triumph. Let’s resist.