La Biblia en la era audiovisual

Nuevas formas de contar lo sagrado

Pablo López Raso

• Editorial: Editorial UFV
• Año: 2019
• ISBN del libro electrónico: 9788418360183
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Arte general

Además de libro sagrado que inspira fe, la Biblia es también un escrito que recoge la apasionante historia de las vicisitudes del hombre que busca respuestas al misterio de la existencia más allá de sí mismo. Es el compendio histórico de unos testimonios humanos tocados por lo sobrenatural, un reflejo de la identidad de un hombre que no se resigna a ser accidente, que intuye la cercanía de lo sagrado y persevera en comunicarse con lo transcendente.Este libro invita a reflexionar sobre las formas y los formatos en los que la civilización audiovisual contemporánea hace visible en la actualidad lo narrado en la Biblia.

The Bread of Angels (and the Cream Cheese)

Representations of the afterlife in TV programs have often included the presence —or absence— of food and drink as part of a comforting —or discomforting— image of what sort of existence we might lead after death. Thus, for example, in the 2005 Simpsons’ episode «The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star», Marge imagines a Catholic heaven where the Irish drink stout, the Mexicans tequila, and Italian families share pasta and wine around a red-checked tableclothed table; on the other hand, food is conspicuously absent from the snobbish, aseptic Protestant heaven of her destiny. In the 1999 «Bible Stories» episode, on the other hand, the wonderful smell of barbecue covers for the lack of hotdogs in hell and the presence instead of pineapple in the coleslaw.¹ The unlimited number of flavours of frozen yogurt and the unavailability of real ice cream are part of a running joke in the Netflix’s series The Good Place (2016-).

This very human hope of maintaining the comfort of food and the conviviality of family in the afterlife has been exploited in the last several decades in many TV food and drink commercials as well. In heaven, the best of food and drink will be easy to obtain, wonderful to taste, and will add no fat to our newly resurrected bodies. But the central message of all these afterlife TV commercials is that such heavenly food and drink are already available here and now; they are nonfattening, excellent tasting, and for sale in all good supermarkets. Why wait for paradise when we can have heavenly cream cheese and celestial coffee every day, today, now?

In this article I will look at how the traditional realms and inhabitants of the Christian afterlife —heaven, purgatory and hell— have been depicted in selected international TV commercials for food and drink. I will discuss in particular several advertising campaigns set in heaven: «Paradiso» of Lavazza coffee, broadcast in Italy in several formats since 1995; international ads for Philadelphia Cream Cheese; US commercials for Halo Top ice-cream and Snickers chocolate bars; and international commercials for the Nespresso coffee machine. I will make a further brief reference to purgatory and hell (or their inhabitants) which appear in commercials again for Lavazza coffee, Halo Top ice cream and Philadelphia Cream Cheese, but also for milk, Segafredo coffee, and McDonald’s hamburgers. After analysing the ways in which these commercials represent the afterlife and their residents, and identifying the biblical roots of their representations, I will then discuss in what form the advertisements take advantage of national or cultural stereotypes to create a version of the afterlife which may attract the specific consumers they are targeting. My contention is that the varied representations of the afterlife in all these commercials are of interest not as much for the way they commercialise biblical sources, but rather or what they reveal about ourselves, our traditions, wishes and aspirations.

IMAGES OF HEAVEN IN CHRISTIANITY AND IN TV COMMERCIALS

What happens when we die? Do heaven and hell exist? Does purgatory? And if they do, where are they? What do they look like? Who gets there? What will happen to our bodies? What will we do for eternity? These are questions for which many religions have attempted to provide answers. They are «human questions, time-old questions», which Jesus’ disciples also asked him, said Pope Francis in his general audience of 26 November 2014. In that same audience, Pope Francis declared that heaven, more than an actual place, is «a ‘state’ of soul in which our deepest hopes are fulfilled in superabundance and our beings […] reach their full maturity» and where, as stated in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, «we will come face to face with [God]» (Francis, 2014). More recently, on 27 October 2017, the pope described paradise as «the embrace of God, infinite love […] the most beautiful place in existence», but not, as some may believe, «a fairy tale or an enchanted garden» (Catholic News Service, 2017).

These words by Pope Francis contrast with many of the West’s shared traditions regarding the afterlife which TV commercials tend to exploit. Journalist Lisa Miller in her book Heaven: our enduring fascination with the afterlife reveals that 71% of the Americans who believe in heaven imagine it as an actual place, eternal and infinite, set above, a perfect place where the blessed live with God after death (2010). 13% of Americans imagine heaven as a city, and 19% as a garden (Miller, 2010). Such images, which are also found in TV commercials set in the afterlife, of course have biblical roots: in his second letter to the Corinthians (12:1-4), Paul sets paradise somewhere in the sky: he writes that a believer —possibly himself— was «caught up to the third heaven. […] he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter». Sky and clouds appear prominently in all TV commercials set in heaven, from Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Halo Top ice cream to Lavazza and Nespresso coffee.

The image of heaven as a city comes from the book of Revelation, chapter 21: the narrator recounts his vision of the new Jerusalem, «God’s dwelling place […] among the people, a city laid out like a square, as long as it was wide”, which had “a great, high wall with twelve gates […] The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass». From this Bible passage also comes the iconic image of the gates of heaven, which appear in a number of the aforementioned commercials, including Lavazza and Nespresso.² Another biblical source which suggests a city with homes is the gospel according to John (14:2) when Jesus tells his disciples: «My Father’s house has many rooms». In the Lavazza commercials there are several homes, often with no walls.³ (St Peter’s house in particular has the same characteristics of gold and light as the new Jerusalem from Revelation).⁴ The Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercials from different parts of the world do not show actual homes but furniture, beds, kitchens and, of course, refrigerators containing the advertised cream cheese.⁵

The second most popular image of paradise —that of the garden— finds its origin in the root of the word itself, which comes from the ancient Persian pairidaēza, meaning enclosure, park («paradise», 1996). Revelation (2:7) adds that the tree of life is there, thus connecting the image of a future heaven with the ancient garden of Eden. In the German Philadelphia Cream Cheese heaven, a female angel wearing green gardener gloves and gumboots grows the herbs that will be used to season the spread.⁶ In the Lavazza heaven, St Peter is often shown in gardener overalls, cutting tree branches.⁷ The famous tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the snake and the apple (Gen 2-3) also make their appearance.⁸

In TV commercials, heaven and earth —and all space in between— are not completely separated; stairs often join them. Such an image probably refers to the ladder of Jacob’s dream in Gen 28:12, where Isaac’s son saw «a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it». In the Nespresso commercials, George Clooney climbs a flight of steps made of clouds.⁹ In the Halo Top commercials, it is not the angels or blessed souls who ascend and descend on the stairs to heaven, but the devil himself who wishes to complain about the heavenly Halo Top ice-cream, which, thanks to its low calorie count, can be eaten without feelings of guilt or shame.¹⁰ At the end of the commercial, the devil descends the cloud stairway happily carrying with him several tubs of the product.

In all reality, it may be that stairs are not the quickest means to move from heaven to other realms. The protagonist of a 1998 Lavazza commercial uses an old-fashioned elevator to smuggle Lavazza coffee down to purgatory, where celestial coffee is unavailable.¹¹ In a more recent 2018 Lavazza commercial, it is the devil himself who ascends to heaven in an elevator to drink Lavazza coffee, creating dismay among the cherubs.¹² Again, in a 1995 Lavazza commercial, St Peter proudly shows off a remote control very similar to the buttons of an elevator which allows him to move between the different circles of the heavens and earth. The fact that in Italian the ground floor of an apartment building is indicated in th...

Índice

• Portada
• El Autor
• Resumen
• Página de créditos
• Índice
• Introducción
• Mitos bíblicos: ¿contradictio in terminis?
• Hermenéutica de las historias bíblicas de hermanos
• Mito, revelación y arte actual
• La influencia de la religión cristiana en el diseño de personajes de videojuegos
• Stand Inside Your Love: la trascendencia del mito de Salomé en la cultura pop contemporánea
• Arquetipos y símbolos en los mitos bíblicos
• La imagen de Dios en La cabaña, de Stuart Hazeldine
• El silencio de Dios en Tierras de penumbra, C. S. Lewis y el Libro de Job
• La representación religiosa naturalista en la pintura de José Garnelo y Alda
• El apocalipsis por accidente cósmico en Lars von Trier y Éric Pessan
• The Bread of Angels (and the Cream Cheese): the Afterlife in Food and Drink Commercials
• A Century of Golems in Cinema: A Typological Sketch
• Arte, naturaleza y trascendencia. Reflexiones con Chris Drury