The Coca-Cola Phenomeon

Old School by Jennifer Diehl

Earlier this year, I read R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. It was an okay book, but the thing that really stuck out to me was not the author's message about the role of racial minorities in publishing, nor was it the actual plot of the book, but rather the way that Kuang inserted references to the real world to an excessive degree.

It went a little something like this: Today, my sister and I drove my Nissan Leaf to go to work. On the way, we both drank Starbucks Strawberry Cream Frappuccinos and put on our Summer Fridays Lip Butter Balm. Then, Blank Space by Taylor Swift came on the radio, and we were happy. 

Do you see how annoying that is? It's only a slight exaggeration from some of the scenes in the book. The whole thing reminds me of that scene from The Truman Show when Truman's wife starts placing advertisements in their argument, and it makes Truman feel that something is out of place. In the same way, when writers of any kind, be it songs, novels, or films, include too many specific real-world references, it pushes the audience out of the world of the story and back into the real world. I wanted to call this the Coca-Cola Phenomenon, thinking I was cool and original, then realized the Coca-Cola Phenomenon already exists and is entirely unrelated. I'm going to call it the Coca-Cola Phenomenon anyway, for lack of a better name, but know that I am abusing that term. 

If you were to see a bottle of Coca-Cola at Mr. Tumnus's house in Narnia, it would be cause to pause the movie or close the book, would it not? It would be jarring to see such a blatantly real thing in such an obviously fictional place. The same principle applies even for real-world narratives like Yellowface. Even when set in the present world, these references give us a little bit of a shock and pull us out of the flow of the passage. So if they never work right, why do artists keep including them?

"Even great TV could never be good art, because it was tainted by definition. It was there to sell." -- "The Price is Right" by Emily Nussbaum

When it comes to film, it's usually a financial thing. Even when consumers pay for entertainment without ads, it's pretty likely that some will still be snuck into the scene by way of product placement. Instead of overtly pausing your show or movie to run a thirty-second ad, companies will pay filmmakers to include their products in the film, like Elle Woods's Clamshell iBook in Legally Blonde. There was no advertisement for the laptop, but its appearance in the film still gained it publicity and traction. When it's subtle, like in Legally Blonde, product placement isn't really much of an issue. It doesn't break up the story or distract from the plot. Instead, it's just a subliminal message. 

In books, on the other hand, there's really no way to do it subtly. If it's in the text, it's in the text. If it's in italics, it's extra in the text. There's no way to put things just slightly in the text. And real-world references aren't usually for advertising in books. (Product placement does happen in the literary world, but far less frequently than on TV.) Instead, the reasoning is usually for the development of either setting or character. 

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." -- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In a piece set in another time period, whether it's the Victorian era or the 1990s, the placement of specific cultural references can help engage the audience in the story's setting. When they start talking about corsets in The Pirates of the Caribbean, it helps us forget that Kiara Knightley is a real person in the modern world. The same concept applies to books, in which the presence of items that we associate with the past helps place the story and characters in the past. 

Using past cultural references and icons to imply a specific setting works. It's when authors attempt to do this in contemporary works that the strategy begins to fall apart. We already live in the modern world. We're familiar with it and all of its brainrot slang and culture. To attempt to place the reader into a world they already exist in, therefore, feels forced and awkward. It's unnecessary and simply weighs down the story with references that can't be guaranteed to last or stay recognizable, creating an incredibly dated book just a few years after publication. 

"You're old, mother, and we're young." -- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

If not to reveal the setting, authors may attempt to use pop culture to showcase aspects of a main character. However, while it's normal for authors to link activities, hobbies, and personality traits with a character to solidify and showcase them, linking that same character to pop culture has the same issues as a pop culture setting. We don't know which modern jokes, slang, and products are going to be around ten years from now. If we say a character is 6'7, middle school boys might find that funny, but ten years from now, everyone's just going to think that character is weirdly tall. The point is, it's not a smart way to characterize, because it's not a consistent way to characterize. 

We know that pop culture references don't work. They may be fun or silly, but they inhibit an author's ability to create interesting, lasting art. So why not stop using them? It isn't impossible. Books from the 1800s quite literally left out the names of whole towns for the sake of the reader creating their own familiar setting. We don't have to go to such extremes, but would it have been that hard for Colleen Hoover to leave out Ellen DeGeneres in It Ends With Us, or R. F. Kuang to leave out Starbucks in Yellowface? I'd argue that, to authors, lasting, accessible stories should be far more important than vainly inserting your own favorite Taylor Swift song.

"Don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." -- Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger