Paul from Paris

couverture du magazine Ikea Family Live (hiver 2010)

“Et si vous fixiez vos propres règles?”

Voici la question posée en couverture de Ikea Family Live magazine, publication du magasin suédois éponyme destinée surtout aux consommateurs parents de jeunes enfants en quête d’”idées et inspiration pour la maison”.

Il s’agit d’une question ouverte, un brin provocante tout en gardant le ton bon enfant du magazine et du magasin.

C’est aussi une réponse à l’affirmation de la RATP à bord des bus parisiens : “Si chacun fait ses propres règles, tout se dérègle.”

Il s’agit, pour la RATP, d’un énoncé fermé, vaguement ménaçant, qui n’admet pas de discussion. Bizarrement, c’est aussi un mécanisme à disculper la RATP de dysfonctionnements : l’origine de dérèglements se trouverait auprès des usagers, intempestivement innovateurs.

The Paris transit authority, the RATP, wants to promote civility through a communications campaign aboard its buses.

In a previous post, I joked about the RATP’s seeming inability to see the world through the eyes of its customers, who saw an over-crowded train where the RATP saw an ordinary train.

The RATP’s new campaign is unabashedly philosophical and frankly reactionary, with a tag line that speaks out against making up or living by your own rules.

City buses feature illustrations of this principle. I’d have expected the illustrations to stress the importance of paying when you ride the bus, speaking politely with the driver, abstaining from playing music at loud volumes, or leaving your seat to an infirm passenger.

I was mistaken: the RATP again represents its passengers as problems. In this case, it lashes out against … babies.

The RATP has a point: strollers take up space and end up making a bus crowded.

But the RATP fails at making this point.

Its visuals instead show how babies make life difficult for a working man.

The image that introduced this post shocked me. The four babies are all doing fine, enjoying the bus ride or napping. Their companions –to my eyes, a mother, a father, and a grandmother– are smiling. Everyone is getting on and getting along fine. Then a malcontent enters the scene: a working man. He’s shown to be bothered and inconvenienced.

Bizarrely, the RATP shines its spotlight on and casts its sympathies with this one, solitary traveler; it seems blind to the fact that a bus ride is a happy experience for seven other travelers. The RATP’s tag line reads roughly as: “with strollers, don’t push it”. And the RATP’s solution –strollers subsequent to the second stroller must be folded– doesn’t make life any easier for its youngest passengers or their companions.

Si chacun fait ses propres règles, tout se dérègle

Seen in Paris on 18 December 2010. Photo taken in front of Comédie française.

In an effort to promote civic-spiritedness, has the Paris transit authority lashed out against individual liberties?

Ad seen in the Paris metro, line 3, Villiers stop

The advertisement’s tagline reads, “Wake up your career by posting your résumé on careerbuilder.fr”.

That’s mundane.

What surprised me is that the ad also promotes Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a movie coming out this year that’s a sequel to Wall Street, from 1987.

Careerbuilder.fr is running a contest whose winner will enjoy a trip to New York.

The Wall Street pictures, both directed by Oliver Stone, view players in the financial services industry critically: they’re the other side, the bad guys. The judgment of those who choose Wall Street careers is shown, in the movies, as misguided or villainous or nihilistic. The characters in the movies don’t have careers that you’d want to emulate.

Don’t the people at careerbuilder.fr know this? What were they thinking when they approved this campaign?

I don’t like Renault’s TV ads in France.  I don’t like them because they make me uncomfortable. More to the point, I don’t like that the spots seem to be intended to make me uncomfortable.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Renault’s “picturing families” ad for the Grand Scenic. In that spot, we follow a serial monogamist who has fathered many children, one of whom he learned about only last week.

A new Renault spot, “strawberries”, done by Publicis with music by Sporto Kantes, promotes the Twingo. In the spot, the Twingo belongs to a grandmother, who is driving young Sophie (= sophia, wisdom) to school. The pair are both wearing strawberry-colored seat belts (protection). As the pair reaches Sophie’s school, the girl’s (strawberry-colored) cell phone rings. Sophie fumbles in her handbag, from which spills the cell phone and a plastic wrapper.

The viewers see that the wrapper holds a strawberry-colored condom (protection). We see this before the grandmother, the better to gauge her reaction. “Sophie!”, exclaims the older woman. We see her granddaughter cringe, showing off her strawberry-colored lipstick. “So now you like strawberries?” adds the grandmother, to everyone’s surprise. The young girl is poised to take back her condom, but her grandmother quickly secrets it in her bra. The granddaughter laughs and smiles. The grandmother laughs, too.

As with the Renault spot for the Scenic, this ad could have been titled “taking liberties” or “taking license”. It makes fun of social conventions or expectations, and has a good time doing so.

Am I an Anglo-American puritan at heart? Am I fazed by a bit of French libertinage?

I think not. I hope not.

It’s not the sexual backbeat of these two ads that bothers me, but instead how the campaign works:

• First, the ads try to make me feel uncomfortable, and to laugh at my discomfort; ultimately, the ad wants me to evacuate my discomfort by laughing at it and about it. But I think I’m right to feel unease with a middle-aged man who learned that he fathered a child only last week, and who changes wives as often as one might change … an automobile. And I think I’m right to feel unease with an adolescent girl –too young to go to school alone– who carries with her a supply of flavored condoms. (The spot is broadcast at all hours, and I’m grateful that my children have shown discretion and tact not to ask me to comment on why condoms would be flavored.)
• Second, the ads are titillating. They are filmed to inspire fascination in persons or actions we find repellent. The Renault Scenic spot follows and takes the point of view of the father; when he confides in us details of the many women in his life, I can’t help but think that we’re meant to cheer him on. Likewise, in the Renault Twingo spot, the viewer cringes along with the young girl: we expect the grandmother to admonish Sophie, and we are surprised when she does not. Both ads show people who are not admirable but who succeed in their transgression, in “getting away with it”.