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TCN: The commercial network will haunt your waking dreams

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Paradise viewed from the couch

This short film created by a collective of film makers, writers, and actors in Boise, Idaho may be the best horror movie of 2011. It’s certainly one of the most intelligent.

Three sad couch potatoes find comfort in the familiar commercials they watch every day of their boring lives. Their reality comes at them in 30 second bursts of hypnotic, frantic and indelible visual and audio propaganda. In the Television Commercial Network, they have found their perfect drug: a station where non-stop jingles, slogans and catch-phrases, assault the viewer with promises of better things to come while reminding us of just how shitty things are right now. They have pills that will make you feel better if they don’t kill you. They have food that will satisfy your cravings for instant gratification while filling your body with the same kind of toxic sludge that the commercials are injecting into your brain matter. The whole fucking thing is insidious.

How many Americans diagnose themselves as having physical and mental problems as a result of seeing countless upon countless commercials pitching drugs for depression and erectile dysfunction? Suddenly millions of perfectly healthy men are suffering from performance anxiety and taking mood elevators to deal with it. As women are made to feel neurotic about their weight, age and beauty. We’re being sold products that pit us against nature and if we’re not winning we’re not fully human.

As TCN reveals, the commercials are a drug, which eventually need to be countered by another drug in order to cope and feel better.  And if you don’t leave the room or medicate yourself to a far off island, today’s quick cut frantic back to back commercials of corporate snuff, pill popping propaganda and padded butt panties, will easily leave you suffering from similar effects to that of a horrible acid trip.

You can read more about the folks who made this video at their website: American Films. They’re part of a group of absurdist video artists who are keeping it real and unreal in Idaho.

The Commercial Network exists right now. Turn on your TV set late at night. What do you see? And how long can you watch it before you lose all sense of who you are?
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.29.2011
03:23 am
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