“What he’s doing there,” Frank said with slow deliberateness, “is messing up the shot. What he’s doing there is interrupting a carefully choreographed milieu of young, genetically blessed Argentines—who are each, incidentally, being paid union rates—with his, his … I don’t even know what you call this. Porcine! His porcine appearance.”
“Maybe he’s meant to be adding some, you know, like, reality to the scene?”
Frank gave the editor a murderous look. They’d shot in Argentina for the better production value, though any sign of authentic South American culture had been scourged from the product itself （the company was trying to disassociate itself from the Latin market）。 The spot featured a suburban yet improbably good-looking white guy sitting alone in a bar. He orders a drink—a glinting, jewel-like glass of rum—tosses it back, and is suddenly transported to a tropical beach. A crowd of attractive revelers （tanned, but in a familiar European-looking way） gather around him. As one taut, bikini-clad girl passes him another drink, an airplane garishly emblazoned with the brand logo pulls a banner declaring “There’s a party somewhere. Find it” across the empty blue sky.
The irony that Frank should have to work on this particular ad while feeling as he did, like his brain was a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol slowly drying in the sun, was not lost on him. He’d gone to meet Anders after work the night before with the innocent enough intention of watching highlights from that day’s Premier League game. Anders was already there when he arrived, recounting last night’s sexual exploits to the bartender.
“I’m telling you,” he said, signaling for the bartender to bring Frank the same dark lager he was drinking, “if the genders had been reversed, it would have been sexual assault.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t get hard?” Frank mounted a barstool and looked at Anders over his glasses.
“Well.” Anders ran his hands through his sandy hair and offered his gap-toothed smile. “I did not want to offend her. But she was certainly the aggressor. Much too aggressive for me, in fact.”
“You’re lucky Cleo’s not here,” Frank said, taking a thirsty gulp from the pint glass that had appeared before him. “That comment would definitely incur a feminist outcry.”
“Perhaps,” said Anders vaguely, turning back to the glow of the screen. “Ah, did you see that pass? Beautiful!”
“I’m only drinking beer tonight, by the way,” said Frank, taking another deep sip. “Sólo beer.”
Anders raised a white-blond eyebrow. “Did Cleo decide that for you?”
Frank had noticed that Anders was unusually tight-lipped on the subject of Cleo. He wondered if Anders was jealous of her. He and Anders had a decades-long friendship that was both deepened and threatened by an intense rivalry. When Anders split from his ex-girlfriend Christine, it was Frank whose couch he slept on for weeks while he looked for a new place. Neither of them had been in a serious relationship for years—they were each the other’s emergency contacts, for Christ’s sake—so it must have been disconcerting for Anders to watch Frank go from being single to married in only a few months.
Or perhaps, Frank thought, Anders was jealous of him. Who wouldn’t want to be with someone like Cleo, so thoughtful and special and beautiful, after the parade of dull models Anders had dated since Christine? Either way, the thought that he had something Anders wanted gave Frank an inner glow of satisfaction.
“So you want me to crop the shot?” asked the editor. “Even though that means we’ll lose the parakeet in the branch over there?”
Frank refocused his eyes on the screen, staring at the god-awful tagline hanging like a divine verdict in the sky. The whole thing was, of course, unadulterated shit. What had started out as an ad that was going to subvert the standards of alcohol advertising had become an ad that was playing off the standards of alcohol advertising, and had now devolved to an ad that was just trying to meet the standards of alcohol advertising.
“Yes,” said Frank, cracking open his third Diet Coke of the day. “That’s what I want you to do, Joe.”
“Dude, my name’s Myke,” said Joe. “With a y.”
“Not until you get that shirtless asshole out of my shot, it’s not,” said Frank.
Frank wasn’t surprised at how the ad had turned out, but at heart he was still a bit of an idealist. He’d skipped college and started as a copywriter at eighteen, coming of age at a time when it was still possible to make work that felt, somehow, important. He had a gift for storytelling and a strong visual eye; he’d had ambitions to write and direct movies, but the family money his mother had lived lavishly on for years had dried up, and advertising was the more dependable bet. He’d earned awards and bought his own apartment in his early thirties, but he had not forgotten what his former boss, an icon who’d been one of the creatives behind Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, had slurred to him at his retirement party. If you want to make good art, don’t go into advertising. And if you want to make good advertising, don’t stay in America.