Read the Printed Word!

Wednesday 22 June 2016

Save the Children: Saving Them and Saving Us

Some adverts are really creative and get your imagination working (though, as is typical of adverts in the automobile industry, they don't have any apparent connection with the product or service advertised besides a tenuous adjectival link), others are seductively persuasive and manipulate a good combination of music and graphics to promote whatever it is they seek to sell, and others are simply, obnoxiously, ridiculous. And then you get the rare advert that really makes you think. 

I went to the cinema to see 'Me Before You' earlier this evening and though the film itself has much to provoke discussion of, both good and bad, it was a (roughly) minute long advert which caught my attention and continues to peruse about it. The new Save The Children advert shows a young white girl fleeing a war-torn Britain, relocating the plight faced by millions of refugees from marginalised regions loosely fabricated as that normatively termed 'Middle East' (see Culcasi, 2012 for further discussion) to the intimately familiar UK. Upon hasty reading as I left the cinema, I've since found that it's a sequel to an earlier advert depicting the same girl experiencing her homeland turn into a war zone. The first thing to strike me about the campaign was the use of familiar cultural features - the thick British accents; the locations of the second-long shots; the BBC news coverage in the background - which explicitly situate the context of the imagined war in the realm of the local. The second was the use, powerfully, of a young, white, middle-classed girl to focus the experience of the imagined war upon; besides the connotations this invokes of parental and generational sympathy ('Think of your children's future!'), it appeals to the privileges of power typically hidden within complex subjugations of relational webs. To expand upon the wordiness of the latter point taking skin colour as an example: race is generally taken by white people to mean the colouring of other people's skin, rather than their own. Rarely does the term 'race' provoke thought of 'whiteness' for a white person, but rather of 'coloureds'. In the same respect, the imagined context of war is rarely located by the popular imagination in the realm of familiarity, be this in terms of race, religion or other differentiated forms of commonality; as such, it is harder to relate to or effectively empathise with. The tag line of the campaign inherently stresses the inactive, dismissive attitude such a lack of commonality or empathy risks.  

"Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening."