I don’t know if anyone’s seen this commercial. I was watching football a few weeks ago—a rare occurrence nowadays—and this aired frequently in between the crunching and smashing.
What do you think? Recently on social media I’ve heard rumblings about a rehabilitation of Medusa (I confess I do not know the origin of this trend). She gets a bad rap, so influencers tell us.
Then there’s this type of tweet:
Which, to me, is fair, although it is kind of cool that the sunglasses are such a product that they don’t eliminate Medusa’s original superpower.
That said, I hope you don’t mind me breaking down this commercial in terms of American and Greek Mythology.
British accents
The first thing I noticed about this commercial was the voiceover. In typical Greek Mythology fashion, it seems as if it’s still de rigueur to use the elite form of the English language whenever you’re dealing with the classics.
But there’s a twist: the narrator here isn’t reading high-culture copy, nor is she doing a high-culture British accent.
I mean, the whole turning-people-to-stone thing was a bit of a buzzkill, right?
That’s a very “now” way of talking about a three-thousand-year old motif, but the kicker is how the narrator pronounces “right.” It’s not Received Pronunciation, which is as close to standard British English as you can get. “Roight” is more characteristic of a working-class London accent.
And that makes sense, because Medusa just wants to go out with friends, not get her D.Phil. in Greats.
Greek Mythology for the rest of us.
Nicki Minaj
The song that is playing in the background as Medusa steps out with that lovely gown is called “Chun-Li,” it’s from 2018, and it’s by rapper Nicki Minaj, a well-known promoter of women’s empowerment. Nicki Minaj also happened to title a song of hers “Medusa,” so there’s another connection.
I don’t have much else to say about this except that if you have snakes for hair and you have a petrifying gaze, entering a nightclub to the strains of Nicki Minaj seems particularly appropriate.
The guy who winks
Medusa is having a great time with her new friends in the club. “People realize,” the narrator explains, “she is actually hilarious once you get to know her.”
And all thanks to Amazon Prime’s one-day delivery.
Then there’s the unwanted intrusion of the bartender, who has taken a shine to Medusa and company.
They don’t like him, although he’s quite the chiseled demigod, and otherwise seemingly harmless.
But “he was asking for it,” according to our narrator, and so his fate is sealed.
Does this mean that Amazon condones the murder of men attempting to do what is utterly acceptable in this “meet market” venue?
Twitter wants to know.
My opinion? The key to this question is in what happens to the man after he is turned to stone: his false teeth (I’m pretty sure those are false teeth), already made of some kind of non-fleshy substance, fall out of his petrified mouth.
In other words, the man is a buffoon.
This is a long-lived trope in American commercial mythology: for decades, it has been okay to make men into buffoons.
I remember a very long time ago—this is not exactly the same thing, mind you—there was a commercial for a cereal like Cheerios. A mom prepares the cereal for her children and her husband, all of whom dutifully eat the same breakfast and then dutifully all at the same time leave the house.
The man was identical to the children, a buffoon not deserving to be treated as an adult.
Then there’s the Klondike Bar commercial, not so very old, where the husband is challenged to listen to his wife for 5 seconds in order to win a hunk of chocolate-covered ice cream. This one explains itself.
You can think of your own examples.
So, to me, this is not an example of 21st-century #MeToo vengeance, but the continuation of a theme that has gone on for a very long time.
Goddesses and women in ancient Greece
A similar powerful-female dynamic is at work in the original Greek myths, a dynamic that Medusa embodies.
It’s true that in the ancient world, men ran the show—or rather, fathers did. Women had power, but it had to be carefully managed and used in the proper setting. Holding property, voting, leading in public forums, all of this was off-limits to women.
But in myths, female characters exhibited immense power. Goddesses such as Artemis, Athena, and Demeter routinely ran the show within their spheres of influence. Demeter, in the Persephone story, brought the whole world to its knees when she stopped plants from growing. Athena regularly told great heroes what to do. Artemis had them killed for offending her.
Medusa, similarly, had a terrifying power, one strong enough that it required a male hero to stop it.
Women also could be powerful—Medea is an example—but much less frequent. Goddesses and monsters could be powerful in Greek myths precisely because they weren’t women. There was no sense of threat to the power of the father in stories about females that effectively weren’t real.
The same is true in American commercial mythology.
Men can be buffoons in that setting precisely because everyone accepts that the commercial world isn’t real. It’s an exaggeration, perhaps of a real world in which men are sometimes harmless buffoons. But it denies the reality that men are actually aggressive and violent toward women at times, and that they always have the potential to be so, regardless of how buffoonish they may seem.
What Medusa means to this culture/generation
This tweet, finally, asks a relevant question:
I don’t exactly know what Medusa means to this culture/generation, but the idea that she could be a female culture hero for today makes pretty good sense. Male mythmakers made her out to be a horrible monster who must be killed by a male teenage hero as a coming-of-age rite, all at the behest of a sinister father figure.
Maybe she has gotten a bad rap.
The Amazon commercial, leaning on an old trope, doesn’t seem to have helped Medusa’s cause that much.