Truth in Advertising Page 0,40

a healthy woman, if her clear eyes and high coloring are any indication.

“You must be very close,” she says.

“Actually, no. I haven’t really seen much of him in twenty-five years.”

“Oh . . .”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” I say. “He left when I was twelve.” I shrug, fake a smile.

“It’s good of you to come.”

We both look at him, not quite sure what to say.

The hospital is quiet, almost no one in the hallways. A machine beeps, then hisses. My mother taught me to dance. She taught me the fox trot, the waltz, the rumba. I got quite good at it, a natural, she said. I could take hold of Margaret right now, sweep her into a nice, long-striding, three-step waltz. Bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum . . .

“They say it helps to talk to them,” Margaret says, looking at my father, arms crossed tight across her chest. “They hear your voice, somewhere inside.”

What about stabbing them?

She looks at me now, the benevolent nurse’s smile. “You could read him a story or a book. Music helps.” Now she shrugs. We’re shruggers. We know nothing, really. We’re all just guessing.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll give it a try.”

“Cafeteria’s open until nine. It’s not much but it’s about the only thing you’ll find open tonight.”

She smiles and walks away.

There is a window that looks out onto the back of the hospital, a small power plant of some kind, steam coming from one of the buildings, hospital vehicles parked, two men, janitors, smoking in the distance. I’m glad that I don’t have to wear a uniform to work.

It seems to me that I must look exactly like a man should look in his dying father’s room, standing by the window, pensively. It’s the never-ending commercial again. You wouldn’t even need to light this room. There’s gorgeous light coming in from the powerful sodium streetlight in the back parking lot, light coming in through the door. I want to share this idea with sturdy Margaret. But what’s the product? How about Hallmark cards? A caring son visiting his douchebag father. Daddy’s in a coma. The caring son reads the card aloud. The father wakes, brought back from the walk toward the light by his loving son’s voice. The son then smothers the helpless father to death with a pillow.

Advertising often attempts the structure and devices of drama and film. And yet for the most part we are, I think, wildly disappointed when, after twenty-three deeply moving seconds of footage showing a grandmother trying to climb the stairs alone with her grocery bags, we see a Hallmark card awaiting her. Happy Thursday, Nana. Just thinking of you. Love, Petey!

I believe that if the story could somehow continue, in thirty-second installments, it would be more interesting. Not merely another Hallmark commercial, but another product. In the next spot, say, we might see Nana open the door and collapse, the victim of a massive heart attack (pharmaceutical industry). Where’s the adorable grandson now?

Imagine it. Several advertisers, we’d never know which one until the end, pooling money, a kind of rolling, continuous TV commercial that never ends. The drama is constant. You don’t ever know what it’s for because it’s constantly changing!

Death. It is one reality we refuse to face head-on in advertising. I think it’s time to change that. The question is, can you move product with it? I broached this very topic with Boeing some years ago, late one evening after a day of shooting interior shots of a mock-up of a new 777-400 (their roomiest passenger jet) on a lot at Universal.

“What do you mean the plane crashes?” the client asked, his drink suddenly frozen midway to his lips. Hal? Herb? I could never remember.

“I mean it crashes, Hal,” I’d said, three-too-many scotches in. “And we see it crash. We see all of it.”

“Let me see if I understand you,” he’d said, rather slowly if memory serves. “You are proposing to make a television commercial wherein you crash one of our planes. One of our $400 million planes. On television.”

“That is exactly what I’m proposing,” I’d said, feeling the rush of the scotch, the heat of the gas fire in the lobby of the elegant Shutters hotel in Santa Monica, that heady feeling of power from talking to the client about an idea that, in this moment, seems to me genuinely brilliant.

“Let’s take the gloves off of advertising. Let’s see the luggage strewn on the runway. Let’s see the random shoe, the eyeglasses that