First there was Rosie the Riveter. Then came Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog. The friendly propaganda known as public-service announcements (PSAs) has been around for more than 60 years, shaping the way we think about important issues. The best of them have earned a special place within our cultural consciousness. Who could forget the anti-drug message eloquently illustrated by two eggs sizzling in a frying pan? Or the (profoundly incorrect) Native American in 1971 , shedding a tear by the side of the road as some schmuck drops a bag of trash out the window of a Pontiac?
To these is now added another memorable image: that of an exploding 14-year-old girl. The image is from a new television PSA called “Kickoff”, which was produced for the United Nations by a New York public-relations firm to raise awareness about the global land-mine crisis, in which an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people are killed or injured each year.
In the ad, a youth soccer game in the United States is violently interrupted when one of the players, a young girl, steps on a land mine. Havoc ensues as grief-stricken parents rush onto the field. The tag line reads: “If there were landmines here, would you stand for them anywhere? Help the UN eradicate landmines everywhere.” The ad has provoked a backlash against the UN over the past several weeks among online forums, and networks have refused to run it on the grounds that it is too graphic and might frighten children. The UN, meanwhile, stands behind the spot, saying that it's up to stations to decide if they want to run it.
Is the spot too graphic? The scene is overly familiar: the parents arriving at the field with their kids, the girl bouncing the soccer ball on her head, even the parents rushing onto the field. Of course, the injury is usually shin-related, not land-mine-related. But it's this blending of the familiar and the monstrous that gives the ad the feel of a horror movie.
The spot is certainly more graphic than any previous PSA. There's a domestic-violence PSA from 1994 that's fairly grisly, but all of the violence occurs offscreen. Then again, the explosion itself in the land-mine PSA is a mild affair, a mere puff of dirt and smoke. There's no blood, no flame, no catapulting bodies or squishy sound effects, none of the explicit violence that decorates many TV programs these days. Perhaps it's the shortness of the ad that's so disturbing. TV shows may have more gore, but they at least give you time to contextualize the gore, to develop a sense of who's right and who's wrong before someone gets blown away.
Of course, land mines don't work that way, and that's the point. They're indiscriminate. Enemy combatants, friendly peasants, or girls on a soccer field -- it's all the same to a mine that gets stepped on. It's the suddenness, the utter senselessness of land mines that the PSA is trying to communicate. “I think people don't know the violence that these land mines cause,” said Guy Barnett, the creative director of The Brooklyn Brothers, the firm that produced the spot, “and they're not aware of the damage they do or the nature of the explosions. That's why we felt that we had to put it onscreen.”
The hope, he said, was to “shock people out of their complacency.” The problem is that the spot feels less like a shock than an attack. Who, the viewer asks, would go so far as dramatize an attack on our own children for the sake of making a political point? A second later the answer arrives with the tag line: the UN. Nor does it help that the tag line, with its insinuation of American hypocrisy, is itself a kind of attack. “You wouldn't be so indifferent to this issue if it was happening in your country,” it seems to be saying. And this may be true, as it is probably also true for just about every other issue. But even so, if someone ever did sow our soccer fields with land mines, the response would probably be less about rallying behind UN de-mining programs than locating the culprit -- and bombing that person or group into oblivion.
Oliver Broudy is the managing editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York.
