Liar Liar Pants on Fire

Oh, if man could live by HBO alone and watch commercial-free.

But alas, Dr. House — his brilliance and personal pain — is an intriguing character (eight commercials between the first two segments), and the writing in Boston Legal reruns is so great that we must sometimes venture into commercial territory.

For the most part, commercials are benign and often amusing. I like the little green gecko, and we all know that auto insurance is a pretty standard item, claim what they will. But the little green guy is cute, he’s clever, he’s amusing.  And that pretty girl who steals the yogurt and drinks it on the spot  because the taste is so great that she can’t stand waiting to get home to use a spoon…so she’s a yogurt thief. But she’s adorable as she looks around guiltily and smiles.  A little crime. Nobody hurt. All in fun. You’re amused. And what’s the intent of the ad?

Intent is my concern here, and the intent is to  impress a brand name and get you to buy their product. Benign. But take the next level down, nearer the raw nerve of a lie — weight-loss ads. When it comes to weight-loss, the intent is to hook into your vanity and dull your sense of what’s snake oil or a con game, like the glycemic index, whatever that is. Capitalize on those personal little fears. You look into the mirror and realize that life is intolerable with that flab of fat and you want to wave a magic wand without giving up that desire to scarf pizza and pasta and…ah yes…chocolate cake — you can go miraculously from fatty to that gorgeous beauty. But what your eye misses is the disclaimer, because law requires a disclaimer for lies. You see this one down on the right-hand side in letters too faint to make out, unless you’re searching for it. It reads: Results not typical.

Results not typical means what it says. Eat your small portions of this rich stuff and dream on, but you ain’t never gonna get to look like her…or him. But hey, in our logical minds, we know what it takes to lose weight and buff-up. It takes resolve, guts, self-control, and loss of that comfort food that keeps us afloat when life shoves us into deep water.

Another disclaimer for a miracle weight loss, which you cannot read unless you’ve got a 50-inch screen: when combined with diet and exercise. Go diet and exercise. Who needs the pill?

Okay, wonderful fairy tales — not rags to riches but flab to slim. Is the intent within the limits of “truth?” Hey, you say, where have you been living? Where in the world of advertising do we see truth?  We’ve seen Mad Men. And it’s TV — it’s all in fun.

But what is the intent of the insurance company that advertised “income for life?” And if you really look hard and quick at the small white print, it reads: …depending on the insurance company’s ability to pay. The line between entertaining ads and the intent to lie is very fragile, and who wants to be that vigilant slouched on a couch with a beer or a coffee and a piece of something definitely glycemic?

Not only is the line fragile, there is a third level of intent — down closer to you-know-what. Here is where I get nervous, because it’s not the yogurt and the car and the mattress and the cheaper furniture — the stuff budgets are made of — nor fairy tales where Cinderella nabs the prince in clothes from a discount store. Now it concerns mortality.

It concerns illness and death and pain and the world of sickness and fear, waking in the night with a palpitation and a funny twitch of the leg, or that nightmare of a business meeting where suddenly you have to pee and there’s no time to get to the john, or you work hard vigilantly taking care of family,  vigilantly caring for the green earth…yet always aware that somewhere inside you, fatty deposits are piling into your arteries and one day, in the midst of some normal, hopeful activity, you may suddenly die.

Somehow, while we were dozing on that couch in front of the still-droning TV, the pill-pushers have taken over entertainment.

We used to have cigarette ads for which the intent was to get you addicted to a product that might kill you. Too much. We stopped that one. Then, when the alcohol ads produced drunk drivers who ran over kids on bikes, we toned down to drink responsibly and give your keys to an abstinent buddy.

So what is the intent of the pharmaceutical companies who know that we live in an age where society warns us not to get addicted to drugs — if you take a puff for pleasure, you get incarcerated… and yet, to make a profit, they try to frighten us with the fragility of life and urge us to take pills for everything from ingrown toenails to that low feeling…and if you take a drug for depression and it doesn’t work, take another one on top of it.

Of course the disclaimers are no longer in unreadable small white print at the bottom of the screen; they are clearly spoken. While the pictures on the screen show happy folk living happy lives, the voice warns you that even if the pill helps your aching shoulder, it may give you a bleeding gut, a ruined immune system, a heart that may stop and, at a minimum, dizziness and nausea. They suggest you take one drug to sleep and another to wake you up alert.

Nobody minimizes the life-saving effects of modern wonder drugs. Only watch Dr. House and the clever way he saves lives, despite that he personally is a sh-t, unkind to his patients and cruel to his friends…but hey, that’s entertainment. Entertainment is not in the business of trying to convince you that life is a mass of ailments –and  reinforce that set of fears by calling  every twitch of the leg an official title: PAD for peripheral something…an official title makes it scarier, and the folks  you see in the background of the ads looking so healthy and happy, gamboling through green fields with their kids and dogs, are surviving because of the pills which might, not shown in this segment, depress them, wrench their gut, confuse their immune systems and, even if they’re kids, lull them into suicide.

You’re sick, you go to a doctor. It’s scary. You get nervous sitting there waiting for your appointment,  blood pressure rising in anticipation, waiting for the axe to fall or for Fate to reward you with a good score card. You have problems, he will prescribe. But in the middle of a program in a moment of relaxation after a busy and productive day? Come on. Cheer me up with fuzzy animals or yogurt-stealing ladies. Get this cute bright gal to explain that every insurance company has a shelf with my name on it. Okay, I understand fantasy/reality.

Let me lie back and be entertained by stuff I know is fantasy. Scare me. Make me laugh. Make me cry…but don’t keep reminding me that I am mortal and, to survive, I’d better rush to the phone to ask my MD for this pill and that. Give me a break. Let me handle the lies I can handle. I’ve had a hard day. Just let Dexter kill the bad guys and carve them up in fantasy. Don’t keep pushing my mortality button, and don’t push pills on me when I’m vulnerable.

What are they up to, anyway?