The ad I chose for this research essay is Nintendo’s infamous crossdressing advertisement for the Nintendo 64 game console (ad released in 1998). The ad is shocking and controversial even by today’s standards, and it fared no better at the time of its release, especially given the target audience – children. This essay will deconstruct the ad in the context of Communication Design Theory – specifically the semiotics of Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce and Stuart Hall, in an effort to find the relationships between stereotypes and societal biases.
Firstly, what makes this ad controversial? The message is to position the N64 as the console you’d accept as a bribe. A bribe to what, you might ask? To keep quiet about your father’s crossdressing secret. And your grandfathers.
The “stereotype” this ad makes use of is that of the child who knows too much. There’s two main taboo elements that contribute to the shocking nature of this ad. The first is the child now being made aware of his father’s (and grandfather’s) sexual behaviors. The second is the sexual behavior in question – the crossdressing.
Crossdressing is already a strange theme for a children-aimed act. As far as I can tell, this was intended to be a metaphor for a blackmail-worthy secret a child would know about their parents. I had initially chosen this video due to the crossdressing itself, but after giving it some more thought, I realized that that alone is not the source of discomfort. It might have stereotyped an issue crossdressers may face, but I don’t believe it to be intentionally malicious. The root problem is that this ad is virtually promoting blackmail to children so they get what they want. Considering the intended audience must have been children themselves, and the irony of “rated E for Everyone” at the end. Had the child’s discovery not been an element of the ad, the crossdresser himself would have still been an odd choice, but not nearly as morally reprehensible of a production decision.
Some brief historical context is needed for the coming arguments. LGBT rights were only just gaining considerable support from the American populace in the 90s. Freddy Mercury’s tragic demise, the end of the AIDS epidemic, the U.S Military’s recently implemented “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy, and DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) made LGBT rights a hotly-debated topic amongst the masses. Howard University describes the era as such: ”While it would take another 20 years or so for those rights to be realized, the 90’s were a time when gay rights began to be on the forefront of political conversations.”
By virtue of my chosen ad being a video (the channel of the ad, as Roland Barthes would call it), it is a challenge to apply a lot of de Saussure’s and Barthes’ theory to it. Video doesn’t rely on visual elements for the sake of encoding and decoding a message as strongly as print, but more so to tell a story, especially here. The few that are present include the logo, a symbol signifying the product itself, and the linguistic message for the super shot at the end, but I was unable to find a high-enough resolution capture that would enable me to read it.
I’m willing to bet Nintendo’s entire net-worth that this ad would be received really poorly today, nor would they dare release anything so edgy. The ad itself is, as I’m sure my peers’ ads are, a product of its time. Sensitivity around sexual orientation was still quite high, Nintendo had a much less conservative approach to advertising, and television advertising was much more of a wild-west when compared to today.
When considering Stuart Hall’s reception theory, I had a difficult time placing it neatly in dominant, oppositional or negotiated reading. It was clear this was meant to be shocking at the time, and the shock value is not lost with our modern understanding. The negotiated reading seems to be the one that withstood the test of time, however it isn’t as cut-and-dry as that. It didn’t strike me that Nintendo was trying to make a statement about people who crossdress or anything, although it certainly has unwelcoming homophobic undertones, but rather that this was the hot thing in the American consciousness at the time. I would argue that it would be shocking for any child at that age to find out their father’s crossdressing, especially if it was discovered rather than discussed. Despite them employing the stereotype without really saying anything about it, I believe the use of it as the punchline of the ad is where I took problem with it the most, aside from the familial aspect.
The culturally relevant events of an era inevitably leak into the advertising and media trends that reflect them in this correlational relationship, and often it is not difficult at all to date an ad. Because we know advertising makes a considerable impact on the public perception of stereotypes (as presented in Hall’s representation theory), it is also an important lesson for us designers to be more forward thinking in our representations and how our work may impact the world that sees it, regardless of how small a campaign may be. I see this research essay and the prerequisite knowledge we needed to make it as a quintessential example of this, and I hope gives us the foresight to be more mindful of how or who we choose to represent in the future.
Works Cited
“HUSL Library: A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States: The 1990s, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and DOMA.” Howard University Law Library, Howard Law Library, https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/lgbtq/90s.
“Nintendo 64 – Cross-dressing Commercial.” YouTube, 2 December 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pu_qz3iVAw.
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