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“Clever” artists are fucking retarded.
Take note of the keyword “clever” artists here. I have no problem with just regular artists who do their shit, create their art, and then ship it.
But this has nothing to do with them.
My cousin is a clever artist, and we had to write a slogan for a surrogacy agency that said “this is why we’re unique. This is why you should do business with us instead of competing agencies”.
Surrogacy is a weird fucking business where parents who can’t have kids get Tina Fey to have their baby for them.
Apparently, it’s really hard to get a woman to rip her vagina open to give birth to a baby that isn’t even theirs – can you believe women aren’t lining up for THAT opportunity!? But we took on the challenge anyway to try to encourage surrogates to sign up instead of wasting away their fat miserable lives eating Cheetos and tripping on the welfare office curb.
Clever cousin comes up with the be all end all slogan for our clients:
“Make Life Worth It”.
If you’re anything like me, you can smell padded bullshit anywhere. That slogan is the most boring corporate shit that you could ever think of. It could apply to literally any business whatsoever:
- McDonald’s: Make Life Worth It!
- Disneyland: Make Life Worth It!
- Your local shitdive brothel: Make Life Worth It! (you know…because of the prostitutes)
I tried explaining this, only to receive the biggest line of bullshit I’ve ever been served (and I grew up in the farmlands):
“No, it’s actually perfect for them! Look at how much meaning is imbued in this slogan:
- Make life = because the surrogates are MAKING a life!
- Make life = because the surrogates are taking these couples, who are basically dead inside because they can’t have a baby, and they’re breathing life back into them with a baby!
- Worth it = because the surrogates get paid a bit of money for their service, making it worth it for them.
How the fuck is anyone reading the line “make life worth it” going to think any of that shit? It’s not even a clever sort of clever: it’s a dumb ass sort of clever.
It turns out that you can be as clever as you want, but if you’re not good at translating that cleverness over to your audience, then it’s all just bullshit in your own fantasy mind where everyone can understand you.
This is what makes the original predator so great
Idiot sci-fi writers tend to just cram as much dumb future technology into their stories as they can, and it always ends up in the same result: no one fucking cares. That’s because it’s too alienating (pun fucking intended) for the audience, so your brain just kind of rejects it all.
See Valerian or Ready Player One for an in-depth breakdown of this phenomenon.
But predator knew better than that. In the original Predator, the predator just has a few pieces of futuristic, but rusty-looking tech. He’s got:
- some heat vision
- a cool laser
That’s mostly it. The rest of his tech is swords and shit, which is really easy for a general audience to take in.
The new predator, on the other hand, is just full of extra dumb shit:
- predator dogs
- predator ships with complex force field generators
- giant predators
- the predator killer (some dumb space suit that wraps around a human and turns them into a weapon)
- predator invisibility balls (for just anyone to use!)
- a bunch of other rat semen inventions that no one can even remember
This all adds up to something that’s the equivalent of “Make Life Worth It” – the writers think it’s genius, but no one on the outside has any idea what the fuck is going on.
Instead of watching “The Predator”, just pull out your copy of the original Predator and watch it twice. You’ll thank me now.