While Disney Channel viral videos promise to be, "So Random," 2011's "Ketchup on Everything" is anything but. I read it as targeted exploration of menstration fear in pre-teen girls. The visualization of a girl spraying her peers with red liquid may relieve unconscious fears in teenage viewers; or, it is the sick under-age period fantasies of a Disney viral videographer. You decide: watch the video.
Did you catch it? A group of older teens, dressed in all white formal attire at an "adult" meal, are drinking "milk". They exist in a highly saturated world of whiteness (purity). Then, a pre-teen girl with red liquid "ketchup" matted in her hair, carrying ketchup shooters, and spraying their body and clothes with ketchup bursts in to humiliate them--or liberate them? At the 0:40 mark, a boy touches the ketchup and comically puts it to his lips (a la Tim and Eric), to taste the blood/condiment. At 0:45, the girl aims her ketchup at the crotches of the dinner guests. Then, the girl is picked up by two muscle boys and proceeds to put close-ups of ketchup on strange foods. The girls seem disgusted, the boys seem surprised, as our ketchup queen slides down the dining table, covered in red, like a fetus sloshing out of the womb. As the girl screams proudly, "Ketchup on my lady fingers!" she holds back the face of another girl and sprays the ketchup from her bottled phallus directly into her nostrils. That girl, who looks like the video's oldest, soon firmly grasps a glass ketchup, yet cannot eject her condiment. Our ketchup vixen shows her three jostling's to the bottle's bottom will free the tomato paste from its capsule. The girl shakes the bottle up and down, ketchup coming out all over her plate. She puts some ketchup to her mouth, smiles a coy, baby smile, and flaps her hands like a child. But in the end, the guests embrace the ketchup at the end, in choreographed dance. The teens spray one another with the red liquid, gleefully unembarrassed about their childish food waste.
A friend showed me this video expecting I'd find it funny. Of course I do. But I also find it creepy, especially considering adults created it. Someone pitched the trite childhood premise, "Little Kids LOVE Ketchup" but executed it in such a way that a cast of teens are running around playing "grab ass" despite probably outgrowing this phase of culinary-taste development years ago. No teen likes ketchup this much! I just imagine some creepy old dude standing off screen and shouting at confused young people, "Yes! Shake the ketchup! Get ketchup all over the girl's face and clothes!"
Is this a subliminal attempt at shaping pre-teen sexuality? A cursory Google search reveals, I am alone in this reading. Maybe it's not insidious: this video could be a safe space to alleviate menstrual fear. The end shows a revolt into female menstruation acceptance...sorta? Or, is this strange abstraction too crude to do anything but register confusion in young viewers--making them sexually aroused, but offering no release or explanation for their arousal? Disney has enormous power in shaping the standard of sexual desire in America's youth--countless pop idols are former Mouseketeers, including Britney Spears, Christina Agularia, Lindsey Lohan. Disney instructs young people on what "looks" normal for sexuality.
Now let me ask you: does "Ketchup On Everything" look normal to you?
No comments:
Post a Comment