The difficulty with any intellectual binary is its capacity to mask complexity, to hide nuance, and depth of meaning, and even to obscure bigger issues which may be hiding behind the hysterics of whose camp a cultural object belongs to. This is almost certainly the case with Gillette’s latest campaign. Unless we understand that this advert is not really about men, but is instead superficially about marketing, and fundamentally about meaning, then we are focussing on the wrong part of the playing field. 

It seems that in our present cultural moment many, if not most, things are filtered by ‘left’ and right’, and then hotly contested on those grounds. These categories can transcend other potential allegiances and differences such as ethnicity, social class, and creed, so that many people are operating on binary assumptions in terms of what they approve of and what they abominate. The recent advert from razor manufacturer Gillette, has been passed through the machinery of each side of this debate, finding a home in the world of the left, and finding a measure of hatred in the world of the right.

The difficulty with any intellectual binary is its capacity to mask complexity, to hide nuance, and depth of meaning, and even to obscure bigger issues which may be hiding behind the hysterics of whose camp a cultural object belongs to. This is almost certainly the case with Gillette’s latest campaign. Unless we understand that this advert is not really about men, but is instead superficially about marketing, and fundamentally about meaning, then we are focussing on the wrong part of the playing field. In this short post I want to highlight some of the bigger issues behind ‘The Best a Man Can Be’, in the hope of demonstrating what it says about society, and more specifically what it says about the church’s voice in that realm.

Marketing has subtly moved from ‘get’ to ‘be’: the marketing executives at Gillette clearly had their heads screwed on when they came up with this ad. They have managed to subsume so many cultural issues into a 90 second sample that one can only stand back in astonishment at the creativity and ingenuity involved. Male identity (the actors are looking at themselves in the mirror, with the gaze of those poised for soliloquy), the aftermath of ‘Me Too’ with its insistence on clearing up the moral wreckage of male chauvinism, the profound needs of fatherless boys, and society as a leaderless realm, the intersection of moral absolutes like courage with the disaffection of lost boys – all of these issues are powerfully woven into the narrative. The most telling frame in the whole sequence, however, is when the old ad banner of ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ is flashed on the screen only to be replaced with ‘The Best a Man Can Be’. The swapping out of those concluding verbs in the strap line reveal to us a world of ideology, epistemology, and even theology.

Marketing has seized the moment, it has recognised that in the post-postmodern void there is a generation of middle aged people (in this case men) who are crying out for meaning, for moral direction, for some kind of social and personal fibre on which to build their decisions, and with which to equip their young. The old bastions of meaning are gone – government, the church, aesthetic depth, agreed social morals – and so our eyes have wandered to the screen, to the flashing image, to the emotive story. Marketers have come to understand that our value judgements are almost entirely sensory now, that we are more vulnerable to banners than previous generations, and that we are desperate for someone to give us identity. Ultimately Gillette want to sell razors, but if the gateway to doing this is to sell reason, then so be it. This is an astonishing display of what has been quietly taking place in Western culture for a generation, a final affirmation that morals can be commercialised and that commercials can be moralised, and we will follow the company who most affectively taps into this vein. We can now purchase our existential *raison d’etre*along with our razors.

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