The Duffer's Lack Of Subtlety And Control—A New Generation Of Orange! 🔗🔒
Product placement makes everything a joke when you become aware you're watching one long commercial instead of a film or television show. Many satires have peeled back the curtain with meta humor, such as the sell out scene in Waynes World, not too dissimilar to the New Coke scene in ST3.
Remember that obnoxious Pepsi-Cola sign in Madam's Web, the most meme-able example in recent memory? It's a call back to Superman II, when Supes threw Zod into a Coca-Cola billboard—the turning point for the blatant product placement we have today. So, of course El, the girl who can crush coke cans with her mind, is called "Superman" in ST4.
During ST3, the Soviets and Coca-Cola became giant parodies, satirizing how closely product placement is to propaganda. On the home front, Soviets indoctrinated the next generation into communism using radio, film, etc., to make the "new Soviet man". Overseas, almost every popular anti-American government conspiracy theory was a product of the Cold War and KGB (e.g. AIDS and JFK were inside jobs).
Vulture's article, You Can Blame Soda Brands for the Rise of Product Placement in Entertainment, outlines how bad product placement had gotten in the 80s to the extent Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures, the movie studio that produced Ghostbusters, which is the Halloween costumes the Party wore in ST2.
Branded: Traitor, Sheep, Or Slogan? 😵💫
The creative marketing behind Stranger Things' is called "brand integration," not product placement, explains Netflix:
Product placements are left to the discretion of the Duffer Brothers, the show’s creators, and there are no paid integrations, Netflix told Marketing Brew. To try to get onscreen, BEN works directly with the showrunners and prop masters to identify where there are opportunities for brand integrations, before determining what kinds of resources brands can provide to the set.
In ST3, there were more than 100 brand integrations, especially in Starcourt Mall and scenes of characters sipping New Coke, which overall had an estimated advertising value of > $15 million (Vulture, 2022).
Make no mistake, Netflix heavily profited off these brands in their show, and visa versa. When consumers buy products with Eleven (or Will) on the packaging, like Doritos, the show is being marketed in order to drive subscribers (and these brands donate props to save on budget).
“We needed Doritos, and we needed Stranger Things, to tell this part of the story, and that authentic story is what people really gravitated towards,” Taffet [SVP, Frito-Flay, I mean, -Lay] said. “If you can find that creatively—whatever brand that you manage, with whatever piece of IP it is—that’s the secret.”
This secret of waxing poetics was perfected in modern times by the CCP, as China is the slogan-soaked capital of the word. They use platitudes, or slogans that are poetically engineered, for mass persuasion, social discipline, and international signaling, explained in Wilbur's Words are Weapons:
Slogans have a hidden superpower through the mechanisms of repetition. Research proves that when a person is exposed to false information or propaganda repeatedly, even experts who know better start to accept the messages as being true…Since we have seen that message before, the brain is more likely to process it uncritically…When Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels famously stated, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” he inadvertently discovered this cognitive bias.
Marxist philosophy originally opposed consumerism, but China in recent decades has combined communist political rule with robust consumer economies.
Brands like Coke and Pepsi have slogans like, "bigger, bolder, better" and, "voice of the new generation," which is actually hilarious that Pepsi is straight up using commie satire on Coke, but, ehm, not funny because this use of repetition until becoming a satirical, meme-format is the ultimate resolution to breaking down cognitive defenses. The CCP uses dark humor and satire in slogans too, because memes like lyricism are ultimate forms of propaganda.
Moreover, CCP slogans use high-context communication, where "messages are loaded with unstated assumptions and coded expectations." With a pop culture lens, this is exemplified in the repeated phrase, "there are no such things as coincidences," in ST5, which fans believed to be double meaning for the popular anti-fascist theory conformitygate.
Western propaganda uses low-context slogans, which stems from the anti-intellectualism, working-class campaigns of the Soviet era. It's made up of cliches and stereotypes, rejecting high art like opera and ballet. Low-art, cartoonish Russian Soviet spies in ST3 are one example of this anti-intellectualist style.
Tone is a key factor in order for this propaganda to be effective. If your point is too message-heavy the masses, or in this case mass-market consumers, will turn away—that was this Soviet ideology. Having El say simple catchphrases like "bitchin'" or "friends don't lie" ends up on packaging, they're examples of both low-context and "authentic" platitudes.
Communist consumerism uses illusion of truth and capitalist consumerism uses the illusion of choice, and I argue Stranger Things uses both on it's audience, contributing to a tone and style of humor that is deeply inconsistent.
Stranger Things' creative marketing focuses heavily on 80s nostalgia bait to "make older viewers think fondly of all the times—and brands—they enjoyed in the good old days" (Sutton, Marketing Brew).
This idea is extremely similar to the "socialist utopia" concept in old Soviet propaganda, which was future-focused on space exploration, while Stranger Things' 80s nostalgia is focused on the past. The psychology is the same, using "better times" for market success and to get fans involved in helping promote your brand goals.
The Orange Comparison: Josie and the Pussycats 🐱
That being said, I do think Josie and the Pussycats is the perfect prototype to what Stranger Things hoped for but failed to do by using brand integration. The Pussycats satirized consumerist nostalgia-bait better, first, and the "right" way.
Josie and the Pussycats is self-aware in being a part of the nostalgia-cash-grab-90s-sitcom-reboot craze that spawn a bunch of post-modernist satires, like The Brady Bunch Movie (my fav), and takes it to it's most meta-extent, satirizing the engine running this system.
First off, none of the companies featured in this 2001 live-action adaption paid for their product placement. Directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont inserted about 73 real-world brands completely for free as a voluntary, meta-running joke to serve the movie's plot.
The plot revolves around an evil record label executive who uses teen pop stars to plant subliminal brainwashing messages into music, forcing teenagers to mindlessly buy consumer goods. Their creative vision was to have advertising suffocate every frame of the film. In order to pull this off, the production team approached companies simply asking for legal permission to use their likenesses.
This was a groundbreaking parody that suffered a box office failure but achieve a cult following because of being ahead-of-its-time. It was the first major motion picture that wasn't hypocritical for preaching an anti-consumerism message while cashing in on the very brands it mocked with their logos on screen. This is yet another example of why the Duffer's voice was so inconsistent, because using brand integration made their creative vision convoluted.
These are three clips that are great examples of the ways in which the film satirizes all types of consumerism, exposing all of the propaganda mimicry in creative marketing I outlined previously (down to the CCP): Slipping it, Subliminal Music, and the Orange track.
Yup, it even has the orange symbolizes conformity gag, although, in fact, it's a reference to A Clockwork Orange, where music strips teens of free will and the color orange signals who's been subjugated (this video explains it really well, plus the film has an alternate ending).
Nevertheless, credit goes to Elfont and Kaplan, who recognized that A Clockwork Orange's dystopia became a reality when nostalgic IP consumerism made brands poetic, and did so with total creative control.
The Pussycats end with the line, "I'm not what I wear," where the moral of story is that happiness and freedom is not conforming to brands; meanwhile, Dustin rips off the orange jumpsuit (the color of the radio tower) to wear a brand, the ST brand—the true horror.
Go ahead a play a game of Guess Who in my recent posts, this is the last key.
