unknown filmmaker | Safe in My Hands / 2014 [commercial avertisement]

the heavy-handed ad

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown Safe in My Hands / 2014 [1.37 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

All-State Insurance Company’s 2014 ad campaign, “Out Holding Hands,” created a specific ad for

gays featuring a new song by Eli Lieb, “Safe in My Hands.”

      The ad features a young boy who feels different and stands outside of the other boys playing baseball (Oh, I know those feelings! having had to play right field for an entire summer on a junior baseball team, fearing the ball might be hit to me). “Always standing outside of the circle, and no one lets you in. Blame in on yourself…,” the song begins.

     But, alas, the visual metaphor for difference here is represented by an oversized hand, which the animated figure continues to attempt to hide, suggesting unfortunately that instead of being a gay ad, this might be an ad for individuals with such a physical deformity. I understand that in just a little over a moment it is difficult to delineate what precisely is this young’s man’s reason for feeling “different.” And perhaps a visual metaphor was sought as a solution. But an outsized right hand seems to me to confuse matters.

     Of course, our young man finds another boy with an equally outsized left hand, the two meeting up and, finally, holding hands, establishing the couple as gay—or perhaps as being gay with physical deformities.

     I’m all for ads that might embrace the physically disabled, but to attach that, even unintentionally, to being queer seems to me rather perverse.  For being gay here, compared with an elephantine hand, seems more than secondary; it seems be beside the point.

     This ad, however, was cheered by many who saw it as a “poignant” and sensitive response to the LGBT community.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).