the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting — "the spot’s animated adult who we…"
the spot’s animated adult who we see in a recliner ostensibly watching the Canadian cartridge, little spirals going around and around in his eyes as his body sort of melts and his head starts growing and distending until the passive watching adult’s image is just a huge five-o’clock-shadowed head in the recliner, his eyeballs huge and whirling
Context
The state's public-service spot renders the pleasure-death victim as a children's cartoon, and in doing so it draws the theme's central image with perfect clarity: the passive adult in the recliner, watching, his body melting away until nothing's left but an enormous head with spirals whirling in its eyes. This is the attaché — the incontinent, dissolving, reclined viewer — abstracted into an icon simple enough for a six-year-old, the whole apparatus of pleasure-death compressed into a melting cartoon in a chair. That the culture can only warn its children about the Entertainment by drawing it, by making one more entertainment out of it, is the scene's buried irony; the recliner and the whirling eyes are the era's true self-portrait, and here it's rendered in the cheerful visual grammar of the very medium doing the killing.