Apologies to Keats.
Ad-Crack? It's wodplay, a bit of the ol' intertextual, a riff on an unofficial e-term, i. e. a word you'll see peppered throughout online geek-film reviewers--"movie-crack."
MOVIE CRACK--a film you just can't get enough of, even though you know it's probably not good for you in light of so-called "high-cinema"--think Citizen Kane's progeny. Think, too, of Spiderman, The Terminator, the current Grindhouse, and just about every 007 flick you'd rather not admit you've seen. Movie-crack, all.
AD-CRACK--all-pervasive advertisements adorning billboards, web pop-ups, tv, films, and the rolling edifices of public transportation. You can't get away from it. You don't even realize your dependence on it. What if it suddenly disappeared? Cultural detox?
(Here I'd like to link this to a story out of Sao Paolo, Brazil, where the city leaders have stripped the billboards free of ads. Eerie pics. Unfortunately, I'm tapping this out on someone else's computer with a dial-up connection that doesn't want to link--terrible truth is I've temporarily time-warped back to the e-Pleistocene. I'll fix this on my laptop, hopefully.)
And what a cultural detox! Ad-Crack--you can't get enough of it. You can't get enough as so much of it is hawking beauty. Ad-Crack defines beauty. And who can't get enough beauty?
Who can't get enough Penelope Cruz, Andie McDowall, or Beyonce? Ryan Seacrest or Justin Timberlake? Rogaine and Botox and fill-in-the-blanks-oplasty, oh my!
Who can't get enough coded messages shrieking the heights of gendered appearances?
Is Ad-Crack so pervasive it accomplishes gendered "cross-wiring?" Is Ad-Crack mediated gender-programming? Does it orient the idea, put forth in the "Spare Parts" essay, of "core gender identities?"--if you're male and you find more beauty, more identity, in feminine ads, or if you're female, and you find more beauty, more identity, in masculine ads. . .
As signs, can ads re-engineer, reverse, the binary significations of male and female? Signs steering signs?
Alcohol and dope alter thoughts. Ads do, too.
And Transamerica? I think the film's title alludes to more than just Felicity Huffman's character's desire to surgically "gender-swap" to ease his/her gender dysphoria and find an identity. Transamerica, the title, alludes to a culture anchored in Ad-Crack to the point where gender is in constant shift, in a constant state of "crossing."
Gender has a destabilized future. Ads say so.
Ad-Crack is truth, truth Ad-Crack.
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