tv ad for a $6 piece of meat
Is that really the billionaire heiress and home-video porn star Paris Hilton in the highly-criticized and much-watched Carl's Jr. hamburger ad?
Despite an elaborate and informative multi-media web site built by the same creative team ( Mendelsohn Zien Advertising LLC) responsible for the tv commercial for Carl's Jr.'s Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Burger™ featuring a scantily-clad and suds-ed up Paris Hilton, and the testimony, in an exclusive Etopia Media Entertainment News Network interview with Brad Haley, Executive Vice President of Marketing, CKE Restaurants, Carl's Jr.'s holding company, that Paris Hilton was a pleasure to work with during the one-day filming of the raw material that later became this notorious commercial, a rumor has arisen to the effect that it was a "body double," and not the estimable billionaire heiress herself whose nubile form has been arousing millions of "young, hungry guys," crashing Carl's Jr.'s Paris Hilton Commercial web site, and generally causing a big stir, especially among those, like Melissa Caldwell, spokesperson for the Parents Television Council, who have found this exhibitionism, by whomever performed, to be nothing more than a sordid display of televised-and/or-streamed immortality.
This wouldn't be the first time someone else's body caused such a stir
If this unsourced and possibly unfounded rumor proves to be true, it would not be the first time that an almost-naked young woman feverishly dancing around in a moist environment on screen has signaled yet another milestone in the decline of civilization as we have known it.
The last such episode occurred in 1983, when Marine Jahan performed the strenuous dance/fitness routines attributed to Jennifer Beals in the film classic Flashdance, while Ms. Beals, for a time, was thought to have been the frenetic source of what at the time were taken to be sexual images of an "edginess" comparable to the intended transgressiveness of the burger ad images now being credited to Ms. Hilton.
Some "cool" film criticism "that's hot"
In an insightful and incisive piece of film criticism by Armond White appearing in the
New York Press and entitled
"Fleshdance--J-Lo cops out," the author both attacks the original
Flashdance because it, among other failings, "highlighted sequences of impersonal, meaningless materialistic sensation," and then attacks even more vigorously the Jennifer Lopez music video
I'm Glad, an "homage" to the dance sequences in
Flashdance supposedly performed by Jennifer Beals but actually performed by her
"body double," defined on the
dictionary.com web site as: " A movie actor who substitutes for a leading performer, especially in distance shots or scenes not involving the face, such as close-ups of a portion of the body.".
Armond White's criticism of Ms. Lopez' music video is eerily and equally applicable to Ms. Hilton's "work" in
"Paris"—The Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Burger™:
"
I’m Glad suggests that Lopez is intuitively aware that
Flashdance’s narrative was solely in the language of advertisement. Lopez and her music video director David LaChappelle together accept that pop imagery can be endlessly recycled–looking like something new yet having the same old purpose–to sell. That’s why Lopez can’t talk about the movie’s ideas or style; for a pitchwoman it need only be "hot." For today’s non-skeptical audience of consumers, "hot" is anything easily assimilated that can be consumed in its entirety without thought but with the feel of satisfaction."
It would be hard to imagine a more on-target evaluation of the commercial aesthetic underlying the entire project, as originally reported in
"Paris Hilton pretends to have sex with a $6 hamburger for money in public while Parents Television Council objects."
It might not even be a real person in the commercial at all
There's another way, of course, in which the viewer of the Paris Hilton ad may not be getting what he thinks he is. Unasked (and unanswered) in the aforementioned interview with CKE Restaurants, Inc./Carl's Jr. Executive Vice President of Marketing Brad Haley, (
"Brad Haley, EVP at Carl's Jr., says company has no plans to pull the Paris Hilton ad, emphasizing that, "at the end of the day, it's just an ad") is the question of how much digital enhancement was lathered on top of even the "real" Paris Hilton to yield the finished commercial.
Or even if all of Paris Hilton (and the Bentley, and the suds, and the hose, and the spurting stream of water) were generated by CGI ("computer graphics imagery") in the first place, using a digitally-captured facsimile (or even just a digitally-originated version) of Ms. Hilton's face to complete the illusion.
Maybe "young, hungry guys" don't care where the apparent images of Paris Hilton on display in
"Paris"—The Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Burger™ come from, just what they look like. But wouldn't it have been even "edgier" to admit that the whole thing was fake, by way of a body double or digital enhancement, or both?
But, then maybe the web site wouldn't have crashed.
Get in the swing with additional Etopia Media News Network articles and interviews and Google Alerts
Join the "Etopia Media Entertainment News Network™" mailing list (unless you're already on another Etopia Media mailing list)