VIRAL

I saw a great commercial about a gun in the theatres the other day.

There was a viral ad going round that was a fake home video of a camper spotting and then shooting Big Foot. There was another viral ad going around about a flying saucer in a field taking off, it leaves something or other behind. Some kind of product.

These commercials were all the talk on chatrooms. People posted the videos on their personal networking sites, to share with their friends and loved ones.

I couldn’t figure it out.

I noticed it years ago. When the commercials came screaming, larger than life into the theatres before the sneak previews. What I noticed was that I was the only one outraged by it. It was a long time before they started interrupting the feature to show more commercials, sell more popcorn. The theatre became just like TV and no one cared, no one gave a damn at all about it.

“It’s great,” my friend Rich said, “now I can go to the washroom without missing anything.”

Great.

When the big religions started to decline in favor of science, there was a gap. The Christian market was no longer an attractive one, wasn’t big enough. Ah, but the theatre going crowd. People’s Sunday mornings were free so the Saturday night theatre crowd grew exponentially. Film. Film was the ticket. People didn’t gather in musty old churches to hear the preacher anymore. People gathered in well circulated, brand spanking new theatres to hear the word. The word of God. The word of Hollywood. Sprinkled through with a few commercials, but nobody minded much about that.

The viral campaigns were the most popular kind of advertising campaigns among companies and consumers alike. They started getting artsy with it. With the fact of commercials interrupting movies in theatres already in place, the next step was to camouflage the commercial itself. People left the theatres really thinking about what they’d seen.

“What was that scene about,” my friend Melanie would say, “where all of a sudden they’re in the woods and they shoot Big Foot?” And then she’d go home and look it up. And then she may or may not go out and buy the product the murder of Big Foot was selling. But it had nothing to do with the ad, of course.

She probably wouldn’t run out and get a gun in that particular instance. She’s not that kind of person. But you know what I mean. I like guns.

Then the stars of the films started to make special guest appearances in the ads that cut into their films. This led to more confusion, more curiosity. Sales of certain products shot skyward.

Skyward.

Something happened in the sky that changed everything. Something in the sky changed our entire concept of life, the universe and our place in it.

A flying saucer.

A real flying saucer that you could see with your own eyes, not just in a viral ad on a screen. It buzzed around for a while, making a big deal about itself, drawing a lot of attention and landing on the White House lawn.

You could imagine what a shock it was for everybody to see a thing like that. Everybody was curious. Everybody was watching.

Aliens came out of the flying saucer. At first communication proved an embarrassing difficulty, but their meaning was clear enough. They were looking for something. They had diagrams and pictures to show what they were looking for. Something valuable to them. They were looking for something in exchange for something else.

It was okay, because they were not hostile.

They were just like us.

It turned out they were looking for fuel to get back home, and were willing to trade for it. They had alien clothing and alien cosmetics, alien jewelry, alien music. You name, they were selling it.

We didn’t have what they were selling so it worked out for them in that regard. But we didn’t have what they wanted either and they were stuck here. Anyway they fit right in. One alien signed on for a three picture deal with Cross Over Studios and was given those most coveted of subsidiary rights: to star in his own commercials.

His first film came out and he played an FBI agent shooting things, looking for something, some product or other. The line between feature film and commercial hadn’t blurred, it was removed completely. Film was the new religion and nothing was sacred anymore.

You know, people say I take these things too seriously. But, I'm starting to like that commercial about the gun more and more.