Henry’s Paperweight: The Banks and TV Advertising

Abstract

The homeless and the bootless; what is their place in the high-consumption, self-serving, money-oriented, property-owning democracy of late corporate capitalism? The easy answer is none, they have no place and no place can be made for them in a non-society where each member stands or fails by his or her own efforts. So perhaps it should be a surprise to see just those homeless^l and the bootless² parade across the television screen promoting a bank’s services. It is not only these disenfranchised that are pressed into promotion of the financial institutions; monsters snap and guzzle a path across a desolate landscape;³ paranoiac visions crash and threaten their way across the corner of our living rooms;⁴ a game of amusement arcade skill and dexterity is played across the façade of a high street bank.⁵ All these are linked by a curious relation of borrowing and exchange, of money and imagery.