It feels like just yesterday we were being told to stop singing Too Many Cooks or else (mostly because it was yesterday and it’s still stuck in our heads). But fortunately, Adult Swim has offered a reprieve in the form of another infomercial this week – one that will leave you nothing short of disturbed in a newer, bleaker sense of the word.
To start, Unedited Footage of a Bear delivers exactly what it promises: a large, wet, chilled-out bear – until it breaks for a decongestant commercial 30 seconds in. Even that seems standard until we learn that “Claridryl” causes “severe reactions”. Sure. But I don’t think any of us really predicted just how severe they’d be. Be warned: it gets pretty graphic, quickly.
See? One minute you’re a mom trying to juggle clear sinuses and two kids, and the next you’re being run over by a van driven by an alternative version of yourself (who might be a body snatcher).
Ultimately, without getting too philosophical, this piece sends a pretty clear message: trust nothing and trust no one. Which is something you’ll also take from a visit to the official Claridryl page, accessed by the fake “skip ad” button. And more importantly: don’t trust pharmaceutical companies, whose so-called quick fixes can be the catalyst for serious side-effects. (Not that I’m reading into anything.)
Which, for the record, is genius. The last thing any of us want is to be on the receiving end of a lecture. We know that a lot of prescription drugs are new and that long-term effects have yet to be mapped and studied. We also know that we’re living in a highly doped-up culture, with everything from decongestants to opiates being available with only a quickly written doctor’s note. We know that risking side-effects is the price of modern medicine. (In addition to an actual price if you don’t have insurance.) If you want to send a message about the corruption of a billion-dollar industry, you do it in a way that sticks with those who receive it. And Adult Swim has done just that.
So in that way, it works. But on the flip side, we’re also living amid a strong anti-vaccination movement which has brought back curable (albeit potentially deadly) diseases like measles, and there’s a huge stigma in terms of mental health and medication, too: going and staying on something (that helps) isn’t an easy feat, and it can take a long time to convince someone to try meds that will keep their symptoms at bay. Why? Because it seems scary, and a fear of side-effects has been pretty ingrained in our society. Does Unedited Footage of a Bear add fuel to that fire?
Not these specific flames, no. Claridryl isn’t an anti-depressant or a mood stabilizer – it’s not a drug that somebody may need to be on for the rest of their lives, or use to fight off a deadly infection. It’s an anti-allergen and/or a decongestant; a prescription for something you shouldn’t be willing to risk your health and sanity for. Adult Swim is not commenting on the errors of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole; it’s commenting on our support for medications of convenience – and holding us accountable, too. We’re providing the market for drugs we would be fine without (Claridryl isn’t an antibiotic; it’s a drug spurred by a “be a good mom and take it” campaign), and whose side-effects don’t matter because we crave instant gratification.
What Unedited Footage of a Bear does – albeit very, very upsettingly – is confront our willingness not to look past immediacy. And at the very least, they encourage us to ask some pretty detailed questions the next time we need allergy meds.
Now which mom did Lars Von Trier play?
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