The Subversive Message Hiding in a New TB Ad

Taco Bell’s surreal new Routine Republic ad seems to take aim at McDonald’s with imagery taken from Animal Farm, but look closer -- there is a deeper story, one George Orwell would approve of. 

Let's read this ad like we went to college, as people who made an ad like that surely did. The ad’s protagonist wakes up in a drab, dystopian future, one marred by the ravages of unchecked industrialization into a constant palate of early morning cold and grey. Here, happiness is equated with consumption and shoved on every citizen; advertisement and state communiqué are one. The overarching message is familiar: Routine is good. Stay in line. Eat your happiness.

The enforcers of this Soviet-nightmare state are dressed as clowns even creepier-looking than the real Ronald McDonald logo. The militarized, prison-like state enforces sameness via 1. routine and 2. industrialized, perfectly round pucks meant to resemble breakfast sandwiches.

(It reminds me of every crack-of-dawn work day I’ve had as an adult. Get up too early. Wear drab clothes. “Choose” an “option” for “food.” The only thing they forgot is the compulsory coffee to make you look and sound like you’re a real human at the 8 AM meeting in San Jose.)

We know what to expect from such a set-up: our hero must escape his wage-slave routine. He will reject the unfulfilling opiate of the masses, the sandwich whose unnaturalness is visible in its odd, perfectly round shape. Perhaps he will discover a place with fruits and vegetables, with fresh bread and artisan cheeses, and will live happily ever after.

In fact, our hero is led to doubt by his own Eve, who evidently has tasted the octagonal sandwich of knowledge, and together the two of them make a break for it. After a high-speed clown chase, they find passage to another world – a world with crops growing, and regular, day-time sunlight.

But wait -- this world has no vegetables. To our horror, he has emerged into a world of more sameness, and more unnatural food in unnatural shapes. The advertisers seem to insult the viewer with this false dichotomy of icons. Happiness is still based on the consumption of an icon with no more claim to reality than in Circle Breakfast country?

But is it reasonable that the creators of this ad do not see the falseness of what they have created? That the people who made this ad – many of whom no doubt went to college and were inspired by great literature and film – would not strive to create more apparent difference, if sharing the Good Word of Hexagonal Breakfasts were their true intent?

In fact, the hexagonal item being "advertised" is not even shown, except in its wrapper; the superficiality of its difference from the round breakfast is in fact a part of the Orwellian joke, shown even in the propaganda.

Circle shaped sandwiches are inherently fundamentally different from hexagonal ones.

The item we are being asked to lust for is not even shown; it is what Baudrillard would call a hyperreal simulacrum of a breakfast sandwich. In fact, this ad's storyline is also described by Baudrillard: when the map has come to cover the entire territory, and one lifts up a corner to discover what is underneath, but finds that the map has obliterated that which used to be "real." Our hero lives in a hyperreal world, one in which there is no expectation of anything not-processed. “Good food” is merely a concept; “choice” merely an illusion.

The artistic decision is clear: although this second world is brighter, with apparently happier people, “sameness” and a noticeable lack of empathy is still being expressed in the bizarre repetition of Taco Bell bags. Each puck-shaped “food-style item” is the result of an industrialized, alienated process, meant to take more money from wage-slaves and rent-slaves (who are, for the most part, obliged to get up entirely too early in the morning to be forced to look at any images of clowns at all). The idea that the rebels simply want hexagonal processed foods is more than a joke; it is a cry for help. 

No; the ad is not a simple story of escape from blandness. The references to Orwell, Baudrillard, and others cannot be without irony. This ad must be a subversive appeal to recognize that no escape is possible through the channels we know.

The ad is a clever sign, passed to us careful readers, asking us to defect:

But to defect in this way does not mean to switch from round-shaped industrial food to industrial food with angles added. This is a call to arms—or to art—for those who can see past the endless churning of large companies spending money to make more money, to take inspiration from those authors and artists under other authoritarian regimes who spoke out against their tyranny through subtlety in art. For us to recognize that we, the wage-slave creative class of the internet age, must be the new freedom fighters. Our patrons may be ad agencies, but that can’t stop us from using the media available to us to speak out, rise up, use our brains, think outside the bun™!

I mean--the box. Think outside the box.