Exploiting 9/11 … and not
Yesterday, Engadget had a scoop that I suspect will be picked up widely over the next few days, and may well lead to boycotts of a major consumer electronics company. The post was about BenQ’s new ad campaign, apparently running in Asia, which includes the image above. That’s right—they’re using a picture of a teenage kid standing among the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in a campaign to sell MP3 players. The misspelled tagline: “I belive, music makes hope.” This is beyond reprehensible. BenQ will inevitably say that the company didn’t know how offensive the image is; those claims should fall on deaf ears. Yes, it’s not unheard of for one culture to inadvertently use images that are considered offensive by others. I’ve seen Nazi imagery used in Asia, and motifs reminiscent of Stalinism and Mao’s Cultural Revolution used to move product in the west (And, according to Consumerist, Wal-Mart is still selling a t-shirt with a Nazi-based graphic). However, in all of those cases, the events being referenced happened at least a generation ago. One can imagine a young, rebellious, clueless designer wanting to appropriate images from the past, without fully grasping what they symbolize to others (that doesn’t make it right, of course—only somewhat comprehensible). But 9/11 wasn’t a generation ago. BenQ’s designer had to have some inkling of how offensive this image is and the reaction it would provoke. I certainly won’t be buying any BenQ products at any time in the near future, and I suspect I won’t be the last person to make that decision.
I should mention that I’m aware that BenQ isn’t the first entity to use 9/11 imagery in a crass and inappropriate manner (that honor would undoubtedly fall to the Bush administration). And, certainly, other companies have profited from the tragedy. In fact, by coincidence, just as Engadget was running this item, I was finally watching “United 93,” a film I couldn’t bring myself to see on the big screen. And the movie may well qualify as the least exploitive film about a national tragedy ever made. It was an incredibly sober and moving portrayal of one aspect of 9/11, and it managed to resist all of the easy memes, from demonizing the hijackers to portraying the UA93 passengers as gung ho, patriotic heroes (the “let’s roll” line, so widely used as a rallying cry by the right, was almost a throwaway, and certainly wasn’t the cri de cœur of the passenger rebellion that it’s been painted as elsewhere). For me, though, the film’s most heart-rending moment actually occurred during the credits, when I saw that several of the air traffic controllers in the film were actually played by themselves. That’s when I lost it. Those “As Himself” credits were a stark reminder that this movie was about a real event, not just some imagined disaster. While watching a movie like “United 93,” it’s almost possible to forget that and get caught up in the narrative. Those credits bring the movie back down to earth, and remind even the most witless viewer that this was real—and is still very real for thousands of people who were directly touched by it, and the millions of others touched indirectly. It should be required viewing for everyone at BenQ.
Update: They’ve apologized and removed the ad. Good for them. Especially since this didn’t gain any real traction with the MSM, so they really did this in response to the blogosphere uproar. Score one for citizen media!
