Cool Enchantment
November 26, 2025 at 10:50PMAnother editor might’ve titled M.P. Kennedy’s essay “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Hamm’s Beer Ad.” Fortunately, better minds prevailed. Inside a pizzeria in southern California, a decades-old lightbox repeatedly scrolls through a series of natural images beside a defunct brewery’s logo and a slogan: “Born in the land of sky blue waters.” Kennedy’s critique of advertisements as kitsch and “imaginal pollution” isn’t a new take, but that’s hardly the pleasure of his expansive, playful essay. The real pleasure is watching Kennedy’s mind make its savvy, nimble moves—seeing his own wheels turn as the idyllic scene endlessly winds its way through the box.
The light box is part symbol. Its incandescent water resembles the fluid in a glow stick more than it does the Great Lakes. It suggests the bare idea of a stream and allows us to imagine it, even if we only see a cartoon resemblance. The canoe and “laughing” waters evoke enough of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha to make us think of Minnehaha. Or they might remind us of Disney’s cartoon Little Hiawatha from the 1930s—a better match to Hamm’s commercial with its animated dancing bear. The canoe could make us think of E. B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake” or our own tripping outdoors. These associations are personal and innumerable. But the designer intended us to supply our own images—to share with it something of our own life.
Most of the things we surround ourselves with are mute. It is our memories and imaginations that give them voice and meaning. Meaning is elective. We choose the objects to invest with life as much as they choose us. We can either attend to images or ignore them. As kitsch, Hamm’s advertising doesn’t show us a vital experience of the world but a fleeting escape from it, and it distorts even this sense of escape because we see its insincerity. But advertising surrounds us—on screens, sidewalks, and receipts. It has only gotten more invasive since the era of our harmless light box. For most of us, this means not paying advertising any attention. Others treat it with detachment or irony. A few may try to dissociate the product from its images. Most of us don’t think of advertising at all. But given how much it now shapes us—how our brave new world is an “attention economy” whose only motivation is to captivate us long enough to sell something—we should.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/26/advertising-kitsch-hamms-beer/
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