Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1478289
8.9.2022 11 COMMERCIAL also that we are willing to adhere to a value system and a series of behaviours dictated by an ex- terior entity' , chiefly the United States. As the world has changed since, however, and flags and crosses have increasingly gone out of fashion, arches remain in place across the landscape, giv- ing no sign of going anywhere. ere is a particular power in selling hyperreality, as Russell W. Belk describes it, 'a sani- tized version of reality, cleansed of strife, world problems, dirt, prejudice, exploitation, or other problems of everyday life' . While most visible in the foam latex and paint-fume fever dream of a McDonaldsland commercial, we too see it at work in restaurants around the world; the foreign-fa- miliar of ritualised food prac- tices exported on a global scale. omas L. Friedman teased out a golden arches theory in 1996, claiming that no two countries with a McDonald's had waged war against one another since doing so, but Belk takes the idea like a bag from a bank and runs with it, writing that 'with Ron- ald McDonald leading the way, multinational consumer goods corporations are now breaking down international barriers that have withstood armies, mission- aries, crusaders, and politicians of the past' . However, while Ronald's unique positioning as a leader is significant, it is not more so than his role as a clown. It's through this unique place of overlapping authority and jester-dom that we might begin to understand why the world no longer has room for Ronald. As David M. Boje and Carl Rhodes write, 'although he is orchestrated by the cor- poration to deliver a corporate message, he can also mock and criticize McDonald's itself ' . is function they refer to as double narration, and explain it as 'how when an author (the cor- poration) represents the words of a character (Ronald) what that character says is never under the full control of the author' . is stems in particular from the real- ity that Ronald was always multi- ple figures, in multiple countries, speaking 25 languages, as much a cultural ambassador as he was cartoon character. e ability to control such a figure grew in- creasingly limited the wider Mc- Donald's' reach extended, and a one-size-fits-all cog has no room in a meticulous behemoth. Whereas mascots have be- come increasingly popular for brands due to their ability to be curated and controlled—Kevin Lane Keller, professor of mar- keting at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, notes that 'companies are turning to fictitious spokespeople because the real ones are getting thrown in jail'—Ronald found a way out from under the crushing weight of binders of trade secrets, full to bursting with exactly how he meant to speak, act and think, and yet failing to predict this shift. Maybe it was inevitable. roughout history, clowns have spun plates on the knife edge of power, and have remained both aware of and beyond the pull of it. ough to look at this figure now is to place him in a peerless category. When we start at the recent Ronald and draw a line back through the greasepaint of history, it is straighter than one might expect. While the sad man with the painted smile is no longer an ob- ject of curiosity, far more likely to attract parody or subversion in the horrific or haunted, or sim- ply to be pawned off as cliché in bad Batman reboots, this wasn't always the case. e lineage of clowns extends back through time, the role consistently one of subverting expectation for comedic turn or alarming effect, the gaudy adornment going a long way to inform us that not everything will be as it seems. To see Ronald today is to see him stand alone, but that he exists at all is solely on the shoulders of one of the greatest performers to have lived: the great clown Jo- seph Grimaldi. Until the nineteenth century, clowns formed a largely diverse brethren, a 'harmless, sentimen- tal' cohort loosely grouped by conduct, but Grimaldi changed everything. Born in London to a dysfunctional family of dancers and harlequins, Grimaldi was groomed practically from birth to be a performer, receiving praise in the press for his turns and tumbles at six years of age. As he worked on and off stage in a number of London theatres, recognition of his natural ability grew, coming to a head in 1800 in a play by Charles Dibdin that required he wear a 'garishly col- ourful' outfit, an attire quickly copied throughout the city. Vic- torian journalist Andrew Hal- liday wrote of Grimaldi's new costume, and its function in his appearance as a 'great lubberly loutish boy, irrevocably alter- ing the clown's persona from an identifiable (though outdated) servant into some kind of tem- porally nonspecific man-child he called "Joey"' . In his article on the period, 'Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' , An- drew Stott writes: Grimaldi oversaw the transi- tion from the red-haired 'rustic booby' that had remained more or less unaltered since its pop- ularization by Richard Tarlton in the sixteenth century to the heavily made-up and colorfully attired clowns that we are famil- iar with today. Unlike clowns preceding him, Grimaldi transformed every inch of himself, from the white foundation covering his face, neck and hands, to a wide red-painted mouth and vault- ed brows, leaving no part of his body unadorned. Stott writes of this new creation, and how it 'implied a much stricter divi- sion between character and per- former than had been presented before. Grimaldi was literally subsumed … and subsequently, "Joey" and "Grimaldi" came to be perceived as distinct entities, even opposites engaged in a bat- tling but reciprocal relationship.' Central to this metamorphosis is that his off-stage predilections and character were as present in the tellings of his life as his performance-derived persona, '[affording] him a legitimacy that was otherwise denied by his pro- fession' . at he could be present on stage for a courageous feat or a 'Grimaldi's leap' ('any manoeu- vre, literal or conceptual, per- formed at great personal risk') only furthered the fascination with the tortured and moribund man who performed them, fans flipping between the arts section and the tabloids, equally enter- tained by both. It's in this 'branded identity' of two distinct entities that we find the modern clown's home, suc- cessful due to being 'easily recog- nizable in the crowded market- place, continually developing to offer new satisfactions but remaining reassuringly familiar' . Stott writes, 'With the clown's "slap" as a constant reminder of self-division, Grimaldi's carefully calibrated economy of pleasure and pain becomes not only the defining feature of his career but also the mysterious source of his talent.' Grimaldi pioneered a modern form of clowning that contin- ues to this day, and yet Ronald bucks the trend once more. Un- like Grimaldi's Joey and his per- sisting brotherhood, to peel the mask off this corporate cipher reveals no inner workings or personhood, only a careful Chi- nese Room of jargon and frying oil. While he cashes in on the le- gitimacy that a painted face af- fords, implying its grease-free counterpart by default, we know that he is an artifice and respond accordingly. Many factors led to the modern coulrophobic turn: the increas- ing use of clowns as fictional figures of horror and perversity, the public favour slowly shifting away from the anonymous per- former, let alone a couple of mid- night sightings of creepy clowns across the United States a few years back not helping their cul- tural cachet one bit. But it many ways it came down to trust. ere was a time in which it felt like magic for a clown to pull a coin from behind your ear, but these days it just feels like you're being shown a dollar menu. at Ronald was to be retired came as a surprise, but lobby groups had been openly calling for the dismissal for the better part of a decade. McDonald's CEOs stepped in each time the campaign raised its voice, including in 2014 when Don ompson defended Ronald against claims that he encour- aged unhealthy eating for chil- dren, and instead 'only spreads joy and smiles' . And yet we now know this isn't strictly true. McDonald's has al- ways implemented a degree of positive spin, with no example more emblematic than paint- ing Stella Liebeck's 'hot coffee' lawsuit in the early 1990s as the number one scapegoat of legal frivolity, carefully brushing over the fact that her compensation was commensurate with having suffered third-degree burns over 16 per cent of her body, which required two years of recovery after the incident. I think Ronald was on the way out well before anyone could ad- mit it was happening, a charac- ter so beholden to the bacchanal orgy of symbolism that clowns now evoke that he grew insep- arable from the balloon-laden suburban nightstalker or the haunting id of It. I think at his peak Ronald represented the world's most famous act of ar- tifice; a friendly facade, but a facade none the less, and we now live in a world that is only interested in the real. I think that Ronald just got old, the corollary of a capitalist success story. Just as there is no beef burg- er without the felled tree, the chemical runoff or the stagnant minimum wage, time too has its natural by-products. Still, it feels like Ronald McDonald deserves a more honest eulogy than this, not just of wiping the slate clean for a new day's specials, of a bur- densome silence into the sweet and sour night, but maybe this is part of the master plan. As we hunger for something more authentic, more organ- ic, more real, perhaps Ronald is best left buried, a product to project our nostalgia upon, to salivate over not the Cheese- burger, but the memory of the Cheeseburger we ate as a child, and the clown that took a bite before offering it to us like it held the secret of knowledge itself. Maybe not, and the day has set on our hero. A clown fades from history and we continue on nes- cient, the only headstone a pair of yellow arches on the dark ho- rizon.