Pantene Commercial Metaphors

            

            

Pantene’s four-minute long commercial is rich with metaphors and meaning.  The deaf girl’s broken violin, the tattered old street performer, and the butterfly free from its cocoon all stand for more than their literal properties.  The violin was the deaf girl’s pride and joy; it represents her passion, her personality, and her life struggles.  When the group of rough-housers takes her instrument from her hands and smashes it on the ground, the girl feels as if her very life is being smashed along with it.  We see that she manages to fix up her shattered violin by the time of the music show; the tape holding it together represents the overall life struggles the girl has had to endure being a deaf musician and having been seen as an object of envy by her peers.

            

           Another metaphor is the old man who inspires the girl to continue her dreams as a violinist.  The man partly acts as a father figure and partly as a teacher.  He is the glimmer of hope for the girl’s problems; the man communicates that she doesn’t have to feel any lesser than her peers just because of her disability.  He says that music is a visible thing – interestingly he then tells the girl to close her eyes.  As soon as she does we get a glimpse into the “field” featured at the end of the commercial.  This can mean that music isn’t all about what you hear; it’s what you feel and how you evoke emotion in people.  Because the girl was deaf and dealt with so many hardships, that in turn made her music even better.  The old man was in a sense the “gateway” into her “field”, casting the character in a somewhat religious light.

            

          One of the most glaring metaphors in the extended advertisement is the blossoming butterfly.  The butterfly emerges from its cocoon during the deaf girl’s performance at the music contest, accentuating how liberated the girl feels at this climactic moment; to have overcome the torment of her peers, to have overcome the stress of playing in front of a large audience, and to have overcome her hearing disability is a huge stepping stone in her life. This one moment is her rite of passage into adulthood.   Her mind by the end of the mini-movie is as free as the butterfly that flies around in the field.  Also, the butterfly represents maturity in that now the girl has taken the street performer’s advice and has embraced the fact that she is not like ‘others.’ 

Materials of Writing: Questions & Responses

1.    In your notebook or on your blog, write a “first thoughts” response:  What felt different as you prepared your assignment while writing with crayon?  Did you find yourself thinking differently?  Did you come up with ideas you might not have had otherwise, or did you drop out ideas because the physical, actual writing was tedious or uncomfortable?

My writing didn’t change at all from what I usually produce because I first typed out my three paragraphs on the computer, then I wrote out the entire assignment on the large paper in pencil to afterwards trace over the letters in crayon.  Had I began the assignment first thing with crayons I’m sure the end product would have been totally different (and probably more messy than it is).  The work I put into it felt pretty tedious at the time (especially because the crayons I used were not very sharp and tracing the words was time-consuming and difficult), but I did find it interesting how by looking extremely close at the different posters you could tell a lot about the person from how they implemented the crayon “tool” into their work.  My “first thoughts” on the crayon project was that it was a little more work than it was worth, but by the end analysis of the posters I found it to be a unique exercise.

2.  Look at the different pages of your colleagues.  Make a list of the adjectives you apply to the way various pages look.  What qualities of the pages suggest the adjectives you attribute to them?  Why do you respond to these pages in these ways?

      Nearly every poster I encountered depicted the adjective ‘colorful.’  For the most part, the students in the class used the crayons to their full potential, making each paragraph stand out in their own color, using the color to emphasize certain words, and/or using the crayons to create a picture or design.  Another recurring adjective on my list was ‘neat.’  Although we were given crayons – a writing implement mostly used by elementary school children – the class still knew that this was a college-level course and the projects still needed to be treated as college-level material.  Proper grammar, nicely positioned paragraphs, and sometimes even subject headings adorned the pages along the classroom walls.

3.  Imagine a culture with only crayons as writing implements.  How would that culture differ from ours?  What would that culture be most proud of, or would consider to be signs of intellectual prowess?

A culture that used only crayons would, if anything, be a lot “brighter” than ours.  I’m sure writers would use color much more to their advantage (using reds for angry pieces, and blue for relaxing ones). The standard grey and black would probably still be used for government documents and legal papers, but overall everything would pop-out a lot more.  The crayon-only culture would most likely prize positivity and creativity. It would be considered intellectual in that culture to employ all the uses of color and the emotions they evoke in a literary work.

4.     What general observations about writing implements and bodies do you want to venture, based on your experience of this crayon exercise?  What general observations about writing implements and thinking do you want to venture?

The interesting thing about the way I prepared my project is that even though I knew that the assignment was to write out three paragraphs in crayon, I first went and wrote it out using a computer keyboard and a pencil.  Because I’m not accustomed to using crayons for school-related assignments (and because there is no eraser on a crayon), I didn’t want to start writing using a writing tool that felt foreign in my environment.  It would be very interesting to see how different cultures of past and present use different methods of writing to communicate, and how it affects their ways of thinking.