Sugar and (old) Spice
These aren’t exactly new, but the Bruce Campbell spots for Old Spice are pretty interesting. In one, Campbell lures a bevy of mod beauties by playing a lounge version of “Hungry Like the Wolf” in a room filled with mantiques. In the other, he’s clad in a double-breasted blazer, pacing around an equally retro-butch study. The rhetoric of the ads seems to be something like, “This isn’t your grandfather’s Old Spice. Ok, well, maybe it is your grandfather’s Old Spice, but, when you think about it, your grandfather was pretty rad, what with his paintings of ships and his Naugahyde chairs. In fact, we should be more like him, but with a level of self-awareness.”
The result, I would say, is a sort of camp masculinity which draws attention to itself by ironically appropriating the accoutrements of the (white, heterosexual, upper-middle class) men of another era. Of course, there is little subversive in this particular performance; while the masculinity being performed is being pointed to as a performance, it is still being projected as desirable, and its position in the matrix of heteropatriarchal normativity isn’t questioned. We can poke fun at the manhood presented here, but we can’t unsettle it, really. The true revelation of the ads may be that (white, heterosexual, upper-middle class) men aren’t all that different than they were 40 or 50 years ago.