Tarsem Singh, dir., Medieval Fighting for Pepsi (TV Commercial)

Director: Tarsem Singh

Brand: Pepsi

Agency: CLM & BBDO

Producer: Radical Media

Year: 2004, international

Reviewed by Claudiu Mesaroș (claudiumesaros@gmail.com)

Warrior leather clothing, dark and heavy metal armors, grocery markets, large glasses of wine, brutal manners, marginalized individuals, wooden but also mysterious artifacts, impressive castles, abusive church power, romantic knights and princesses, pure unaltered nature, wondrous monks, brute stupidity, magic and witchcraft. All these elements meet when medieval imagery is involved in films, computer games or commercials, sometimes giving the impression that the Middle Ages was nothing more than the mundus imaginalis of urban freestylers who can only place their ludic productions in one single space: that of medieval times.
  

Commercials and advertisements, with their ability to reach wide audiences, are by far the most significant medium accommodating this imagery. In an attractive television commercial produced by CLM & BBDO Agency in 2004 for Pepsi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=AYWAq0AbU-E&feature=endscreen&list=PL32B08521FB3168F8), one can easily see an entire list of selling representations on medieval warfare and urban life. The commercial, featuring VIP football players Beckham, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos and Totti, is based on a rebel teens creation concept brilliantly turned into a medieval fighting scene. Pepsi-Cola’s advertisement thus introduces its blue Pepsi cans as the magical items desired in a medieval spoliation.
     

There is a series of statements which may be connected to the sections of the commercial. The list of ludic sentences may start with “Assault is imminent!” Once the commercial opens, viewers are instantly introduced to the medieval world: Knights on horses and individuals on foot are caught in the middle of a rash attack against a poorly defended citadel. It is true, isn’t it, that medieval life was permanently threatened by unpredictable violent harassments by hostile neighboring lords or foreign kings? 
     

This medieval tale continues with a second implicit statement: “There is always something secret in the medieval town square.” Warriors enter the open gates of the town and seem to be searching for something valuable, but hidden. They bring down all the tables of the market – the stereotypes about magic and vegetables in the Middle Ages can be confirmed by spotting, among beans and fruits, the most clear and shiny-looking garlic ever!
    

In the third sequence we are allowed to understand why the warriors were invading the city: They were either collecting a tax to be paid in nature (which the inhabitants were presumably refusing to pay) or just robbing the town looking for a particular resource. In either case, this is the point where the viewer can notice what the product is: Pepsi blue cans. Having conquered the town, the leader of the invaders is sitting on a huge load of cans and his soldiers are getting more and more cans from the most unexpected places: from a well, from under a hatching hen, from a wool container. In other words, water, food and clothing, i.e., everything, is symbolically convertible to Pepsi-Cola cans. Thus, the third sentence of the commercial should read like this: “Nothing is what it seems in the Middle Ages.”
    

Suddenly, a child’s leather ball (well, maybe not medieval, but old fashioned-looking anyway) is crossing the screen and the magic is actualized: The invading soldiers see the ball and have a bad feeling about it. Or, maybe, they are well aware of its meaning! They empty the market, regroup and get ready for an imminent attack. A group of heroes can be noticed in the opposite corner of the town, waiting to be provoked. They are Beckham, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos and Totti, a magic team that would make any teenager’s day. 
    

The regrouped attackers start an assault, but Beckham sends the ball in the opposite direction, scaring the invaders to death. The other football players take positions and pass the ball to each other using skillful head-striking and doubles. Ronaldinho starts his well-known chest-take and head-holding, while the music turns from European to Samba. 
    

The invaders’ stupidity dims when Carlos sets the ball for a penalty execution: They organize themselves quite efficiently to form a defensive row. Their organization proves inefficient, however, because Carlos’s shot hits the immense Pepsi can container under the upper bar locker, and so the entire war booty is spilled out. The invaders ironically accept the non-violent defeat, and everybody bursts into the square for a final Pepsi feast. Beckham gives an autograph on a parchment for the child with the leather ball, and it seems that the child is receiving some recognition for actually starting the entire fight. 

     

There are several contradictions within this scenario: Football does not mean fighting but rather represents a burlesque confrontation; Pepsi is the object of strong fighting; Pepsi is important but somehow not priceless since the viewer can see how many cans of Pepsi can be found along with common goods in the market: four cans in the well’s water bucket; one under the hatching hen; three more in a wool box. 
     

The factual contradiction of all these characteristics is not problematic since imagery allows the intermingling of the empirical world with fiction: Pepsi-Cola’s mundus imaginalis is permissive with every possible stereotype that is able to sell. The Middle Ages is recreated using contemporary cultural elements such as football and black drinks. What Ernst Gellner [1] called a false collective memory, i.e., that national identity has been retro-actively recreated by nineteenth-century ideologies, proves to work similarly for cultural identities in a large sense, as individuals find this conversion acceptable. It is not historical truth that matters because historical truth is a construct. Imagology, as a critical study of cultural characteristics, can be realized only after abandoning our beliefs in the reality of cultural phenomena features [2].

   
The three sentences formulated to describe the stereotypes in the Pepsi commercial come to conclude on the contemporary public perception of the medieval period and prove that the public representation of the Middle Ages can be summarized as follows:

- Brutality: danger and insecurity was a daily routine;

- Stupidity: mystery was one of the main ingredients of life, probably human beings had no cognitive experience;

- Ludic world: everything was convertible into something else, more or less like in a (computer) game.

Claudiu Mesaroș

West University of Timișoara

 

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[1] Ernest Gellner, Nations and nationalisms (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 [1983]).

[2] Imagology. The cultural reconstruction and literary representation of national  characters, A critical Theory, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

"I see medievalism as a pretty promiscuous thing": an Interview with Louise D'Arcens

Associate Professor Louise D’Arcens works in the English Literatures Program at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published widely on medievalism and medieval women’s writing. Louise has recently begun a four-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for her project “Comic Medievalism and the Modern World” (2013-2017).  Louise spoke with Medievally Speaking Assistant Editor Helen Young at the Australia and New Zealand Medieval and Early Modern Society Conference in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year.

Helen: To begin at the beginning, what first got you interested in the Middle Ages?

Louise: I got interested as soon as I started studying the Middle Ages.  I was interested in doing it because when I was a high school student, I couldn't do it, it wasn't something that was available. I did medieval history and medieval literature [at university], and, particularly with the literature, it was just that whole experience, that so many of us who work in medievalism write about, of being simultaneously drawn by its strangeness and its difference from all the other literature that I'd been reading.  Also that sense of its familiarity as well.  I had a really nice tutor, a really good tutor when I was doing the prologue to The Canterbury Tales which is what we studied in the first year English at Sydney Uni as our medieval text. 

I think there was just something about the kind of pleasure attached to conquering the language and drawing it into a zone of familiarity just grabbed me.  I love literature across the board but I think there was something about that sense that behind this divide, there was something really familiar and really funny as well.         

Helen: What about the going from being a student and enjoying it to taking it up as a profession?

Louise: Right, well I think again it was about pleasure.  I did honours in medieval literature and I really, really loved it and I had continued with it. Then I got to the end of my degree and thought ‘oh well I have to go and do something, you know, proper’.  I went and studied law and then I decided that you really need to pursue what matters to you.

Helen: Your work has moved from fairly traditional medieval studies to being mostly in medievalism. Could you talk about how medievalism became important to you?

Louise: I think it started with my PhD. It was on authority in medieval women's writing, that is, the use of authority, but also on the actual conception of authority.  When I was framing chapters for it, what I was trying to track down was this question: when did this topic of authority become so interesting to medievalists? Why do we keep returning to this question of authority, because there had been all of these fantastic scholarly books written on it.  When I started doing a little mini-genealogy, as it were, I noticed was that the topic of authority became interesting to medievalists right at the point that their authority - the authority for the discipline - came under quite serious questioning. That was particularly due to the emergence of postructuralism. So I became really interested in the way that what people work on reflects or connects with what they're actually experiencing at the moment. 

Even though anybody who knows anything about it knows Medieval Studies is actually quite a recent discipline, it would often be seen as synecdoche of traditional disciplines.  Medievalists and medieval studies were having to respond to being the target of this narrative about academia, and the way it responded was this meditation on authority.  So I think it was really from that time that I started thinking about the whole question of the relationship between the scholar, and the context of the interpreter and what it is they're working on.  That led to the book that I edited with Juanita [Ruys] in which we were getting people to meditate on their relationship to working on medieval women writers and how it altered their methodologies [Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, eds. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Rhys, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004]. 

That question of the relationship between the position of the interpreter and the thing that they're interpreting became the basis of early work that I was doing in medievalism studies which was looking at early scholars in Australia.  I was thinking about the way in which their particular contexts led them to make decisions about what they work on and how they present it in particular to the Australian public.  So I suppose that was the little story that took me into it.

Helen: Is there anything distinct about Australian medievalism?

Louise:   I think there are some elements of it that are distinctive.  I think there are lots that aren't, but it depends on what you're looking at.  If you are going to pick out a set of tropes, let's say, then the fact is a lot of the major tropes that are used in Australian medievalism were used elsewhere.  They were tropes that were used in imperial centres, Britain, and also used in former colonial societies: New Zealand, Canada, America et cetera. When I wrote the book on the 19^th Century Australian material [Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Brepols/ University of Western Australia Press, 2011], really what I was writing about was colonial medievalism but in its Australian  iteration. 

 I suppose I see medievalism as a pretty promiscuous thing, something that attaches itself to all sorts of other different discourses. It's something really difficult to find in a very pure form. I would want to say Australian medievalism is a quintessential medievalism, which is what I argue in my book. In some respects its very promiscuity sums up everything about medievalism.

Having said that, there are a couple of things that I was thinking about.  For a start, one of the things that's interesting, that distinguishes Australian medievalism from New Zealand medievalism or even North American medievalisms if we're thinking about colonial contexts, is that medievalist discourses in Australia were only directed at the settler population. If you look at somewhere like New Zealand, there were all sorts of Viking mythologies that were used to describe the Maori. When you look at North American, at its cultural imaginary, the settler populations were prepared to grant some sort of heroic or warrior status through those medieval discourses to indigenous populations. But Australians made them utterly unavailable to indigenous people.  There was no discursive sharing.  Discursive sharing I know is deeply problematic and not the same as equality, actual sharing.  But it's interesting the way in which there is a really very clear cordoning off of that discourse from any kind of intercultural acknowledgement. So I would say that's one thing, to our shame, that distinguishes us.

The other thing is to do with Australian settlement history and the fact that we've never had, say, something like a War of Independence. To this day we're still a constitutional monarchy.  I think that because of that, nostalgia works quite differently in Australia.  I'm never quite sure that I think Australian medievalism is quite nostalgic. If you go with the idea that nostalgia works on an acknowledgement of loss, then I think a lot of at least colonial medievalism in Australia was never actually fully prepared to acknowledge loss. It was so invested in continuity that there are times when it's actually more aggressive than melancholy.  The Australian gothic idiom definitely has a melancholic tone to it, but I'm never quite sure whether I think it fits the way one usually thinks about nostalgia. It doesn’t work like the way I can see it operating in places where there has been a clearer cultural severance. 

I've been trying to think about whether it's nostalgic or whether it's something else but I don't actually have a name for what that other thing might be. I'm all for extending terms and looking for nuances that allow you to talk about things in intelligible ways, but I don't think you have to make up a new word so I'm quite happy with nostalgia as a place holder term, but there's some part of me that feels as though there needs to be a full acknowledgement of loss at least in the colonial setting.  A lot of the time there was quite strident assertion of continuity that is of course an unconscious acknowledgement of loss, but it doesn't sit at the surface of the discourse in the same way. 

I don't know whether I would stake my life on that being entirely distinctive of Australian medievalism though.  I think in the end, what makes things distinctive is their context, and that context was utterly distinctive.  At one level it was standard colonial but it was the way in which those micro-stories have attached themselves to medievalism is what makes it infinitely distinct.

Helen: Could you tell us about the comic medievalism project you’re working on now?

Louise: It's a project I've been chipping away at for a while and I'm just coming toward the end of a book now on it.  Then I've got the big fellowship so that I'll be able to work on it for the next few years (an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship).  Look, it's a really simple premise. When I was working on the Australian book [Old Songs in the Timeless Land], one of the things that really struck me was how often, at least in the colonial Australian material, people were laughing, how often people were satirising.  Not just the Middle Ages but also satirising medievalism.  I thought, there actually is a really strong comic vein in a lot of this stuff, and in other contexts, a strong satiric vein in it as well. 

I thought, we talk quite a lot about melancholy and we talk about those kinds of emotions around nostalgia and loss etc, and it seemed to me that part of assessing the whole emotional complement of medievalism was to spend a bit of time on some of the funny stuff. 

There are so many brilliant comic medieval texts, and a lot of really awful ones as well, I'm coming to learn, and not funny ones; but there are lots of brilliant texts and people are really aware of them and people love them. I was trying to think about the \ different ways in which comedy is being used or comic technique is being used.  What does the medieval period also allow us, via medievalism, to laugh at in our own time? I was thinking about that satiric dimension of it. 

So I just felt like it was work to be done.  It was something that was sitting there to be done and hadn't really been done in a concentrated way until now.  It seemed like a great opportunity to work on some texts that I was keen on and address an area in the field for which  I can just see so many possibilities.  Beyond my own work, I think there's a lot to be said about why we find this period so funny.  I think we do find lots of periods in the past funny, in different ways, but I would want to actually make a special case for the Middle Ages as being the most laughed at period [laughs] of the past, in a really joyful way as well as in a ridiculing way. 

I don't think the classical period attracts the same kind of comic reaction.  I'm saying that at the start of the project so I guess that remains to be investigated, but my intuition at this point is that the medieval period attracts a really significant amount of comic response in a way that other periods don't.

I found that when I started talking about it, people are going ‘yeah, wow, because there's this text and that text’.’ There are all of these great texts, and lots of them I didn't know, and people have very kindly told me about them.

I think it's something we all carry around as part of the pleasure - again coming back to that question of pleasure, the pleasure that we take in the Middle Ages.  It's about having a real genuine warmth for the period, and one of the ways in which that warmth has been expressed has been through comedy.  A lot of the time, even in the humour that's challenging the Middle Ages or attacking the Middle Ages, there's still residual warmth that comes through. 

So it's trying to put together a taxonomy. I have no intention of that taxonomy being something I arrive at alone because the whole point is if you think something's worth doing, you want it to catch fire.  You want other people to join and put their ten cents’ worth in and develop it together. .  You know you can come and talk and try to develop that together because you get to a point where when you're working alone, you need a brains trust to help you fathom your way through such a massive undertaking.  So that's where it's at.

Louise's newest book, Laughing at the Middle Ages: Comic Medievalism, is forthcoming with Boydell and Brewer in 2013. A collection she has edited with Associate Professor Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia), titled International Medievalism in Popular Culture, is also forthcoming this year.

Helen Young
University of Sydney

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Diane Paulus, dir., Pippin

Pippin directed for the American Repertory Theater by Diane Paulus with scenic design by Scott Pask, lighting design by Kenneth Posner, costume design by Dominque Lemieux, sound design by Jonathan Deans and Garth Helm, orchestrations by Larry Hochman, and choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse” by Chet Walker.

Starring Patina Miller (Leading Player), Charlotte d’Amboise (Fastrada), Andrea Martin (Berthe), Erik Altemus (Lewis), Terrence Mann (Charlemagne), Martin James Thomas (Pippin), Rachel Bay Jones (Catherine), and Andrew Cekala and Ashton Woerz (Theo). 

Review of the April 26, 2013 matinee performance, by Kevin J. Harty (harty@lasalle.edu)

Pippin comes to Broadway by way of Cambridge, Mass., where the production was first developed for the American Repertory Theater and ran from December 5, 2012, to January 20, 2013.  The Broadway production opened on April 25 at The Music Box on West 45th Street.  Both the Cambridge and New York productions were directed by Diane Paulus, known for her previous Broadway revivals of Hair (originally for the Public Theatre in Central Park) and The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

The original Broadway production of Pippin, directed by Bob Fosse (who also choreographed and contributed to the libretto) with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Roger O. Hirson, ran for almost 2000 performances from 1972 to 1977 and spawned a several-year long road tour.  The Fosse production garnered eleven Tony nominations (winning five) and five Drama Desk nominations (winning them all), and launched Ben Vereen’s stage career as he won the Tony for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for the role of the Leading Player.  A 1973 London transfer ran, however, for fewer than 90 performances.  

Subsequently, Pippin was licensed for production only in a highly sanitized version, and became a staple on the high school and community theater circuits.  The musical was revived for a signed production in Los Angeles in 2009.  A 2011 production in London at the Menier Chocolate Factory reimagined the musical as a video game—the critics were less tolerant of this remake than I was, though the production couldn’t hold a candle to several of the Menier’s previous musical revivals, which transferred to the West End and eventually to Broadway.  A 2012 production in Kansas City turned Pippin into a rock opera.

Pippin tells, with the aid of song and dance, the story of Charlemagne’s son, the eponymous hero, who returns home to court from college in Italy and tries to find himself.  (Historically, Charlemagne’s eldest son was Pépin, or Pippin, le Bossu, “the Hunchback,” who was disinherited by his father after leading a revolt against him and who died in exile as a monk.)  The musical presents a play within a play, as a troupe of actors under the guidance of the Leading Player arrive to put on a magical miracle-mystery play in a circus tent about Pippin’s travails while he searches for meaning and happiness.  

The plot itself is hardly original—a young gifted lad sets out on an adventure to discover the meaning of life—think Candide or Peer Gynt (very) light.  Pippin tries warfare, religion, reform-minded politics, and, of course, sex, but all lead nowhere.  His step-mother Fastrada schemes to replace him as heir to the throne with her dim-witted, muscle-bound hunk of a son, Lewis—in a plot line that eventually evaporates.  A bit of regi-patricide at the end of act one gets Pippin nowhere, and is easily undone thanks to some stage magic by the Leading Player  at the beginning of the second.  

Finally, Pippin does find happiness in the arms of a good widow, Catherine, and resigns himself to finding the extraordinary in the plainly ordinary to the disgust of the Leading Player, who in a moment of pique and further metadrama calls a halt to the production, tells the troupe to strike the set, dismisses the orchestra, and leaves Pippin and spouse and her young son, Theo, alone in the dark on the stage.

The current production, which marries Fosse’s choreography with the acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil, offers up an alternate ending. After Pippin and the widow Catherine leave the stage, her son Theo returns to sing a solo that reinvigorates the Leading Player and the troupe of actors, seemingly to begin the play again, and to continue, in the process, the show’s quest for meaning in life.

Paulus’s production has some other notable variations.  In a decidedly sinister instance of gender bending, Vereen’s playful, albeit oleaginous, huckster of a magister ludi becomes Patina Miller’s almost Mephistophelian Leading Player.  The stage antics of the acting troupe are enhanced by the addition of illusions by Paul Kieve and a series of jaw-dropping circus acts created by Gypsy Snider and performed by the Montréal-based troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main.  The most notable of these is a leggy and wonderfully over-the top acrobatic sing-along performance of “No Time at All” by the estimable Andrea Martin as Pippin’s sympathetic grandmother, Berthe, which would do an actor half her age proud.

In the original Broadway production, John Rubenstein’s Pippin was almost Hamlet-like in his indecisiveness.  Here Matthew James Thomas’s Pippin has all the poutiness and frowns of a millennial slacker.  The book’s thinness becomes especially apparent in the second act—the musical can be performed in one act, so the decision as to where to insert an intermission is at times tricky.  Much of the plays oomph and its best staging are foregrounded in the first act, and the account of Pippin’s travels and travails more than drags on and on  in the second act. This production doesn’t quite jump the shark in the second act, but it does offer up a dead duck, a live dog, and an almost-fiery faux ending to keep going.

We have never exactly been inundated with medieval stage musicals—or straight plays, for that matter.  Opera has always been more hospitable to the medieval. Twang!!, a 1965 send-up of the Robin Hood legend with music and lyrics by Lionel Bart,  and a book by Bart, Harvey Orkin and Burt Shevelove, went through several directors before opening in London, received what might charitably be called scathing reviews, closed in less than a month, and cost Bart a fortune, both in terms of his career and of his wallet—according to the review of the original production in the Montréal Gazette, Twang!! was, at the time, “the most expensive flop ever presented” in London (2 April 1966).

Goodtime Charley, with a book by Sidney Michaels, music by Larry Grossman and lyrics by Hal Hackady, offered a less-than-reverential take on Joan of Arc and was intended as a star-vehicle for Joel Grey as the Dauphin and Ann Reinking as the Maid of Orléans.  The musical opened in Boston in early 1975 to tepid reviews and with an ungodly running time of more than three and a half hours (it seemed much, much, much longer when I sat through a preview)—subsequent cuts for the Philadelphia tryouts reduced the running time to 90 minutes and garnered better reviews.  That trimmed-down production subsequently moved to Broadway in March 1975, proved a hit earning seven Tony and seven Drama Desk nominations (although winning none), but was forced to close after fewer than 120 performances because the leads had previous theatrical commitments they had to meet, and no “name” stars could be found to replace them.  Charley has never been fully revived, though there have been occasional one-off staged performances for the benefit of a variety of charities.

King Arthur has fared slightly better than Robin or Joan. Camelot, a musical by Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music) adapted from the T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, opened on Broadway under the direction of Moss Hart in 1960, ran for almost 900 performances, won four Tony Awards, inspired a 1967 film and a 1982 HBO made-for-television version, and has been the subject of numerous foreign productions and revivals (notably a 2010 production by Providence’s Trinity Rep set in an underground station during the Blitz), and continues to have a life as yet another staple for high schools and community theaters. 

Monty Python's Spamalot is a 2005 send-up of the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, itself a send-up of the Arthurian legend and the seriousness with which it is treated in academic and other circles.  The original stage production, directed by Mike Nichols, was nominated for fourteen and won three Tony Awards, including that for Best Musical.  That production ran on Broadway, after an extended preview in Chicago in 2004, for over 1,500 performances, toured the world, played to packed houses for two years on the Las Vegas Strip in a 90-minute one-act version, and has now become a fixture on the bus-and-truck circuit.

Pippin falls somewhere in the middle of these stage musicals.  While markedly better than either Twang!! or Charley, Pippin clearly doesn’t quite have the staying power of either Camelot or Spamalot.  Nonetheless, as Paulus’s production hints every once in a while, there is currently “magic” to be found under the big top tent on the stage of The Music Box Theatre on Broadway, and maybe, just maybe, Pippin deserves still more attention and additional productions to determine just how “extraordinary” it might just be.
 
Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University, Philadelphia