It's a Miracle! or, Exploding Watermelon Babies

Everyone knows how easy it is to humanize non-human objects. In Castaway Tom Hanks smeared the crude markings of a face into a bloody-hand stain on a volleyball and we all went along with him in loving it.

When Wilson slowly drifts away to his death, it’s one of the strangest, saddest moments in cinema. You probably cried when you saw it happen. I’m getting depressed just thinking about it.

Somewhat less known is just how easy it is to believe that a man is pregnant. If you were to ask me the following question—“What do you have to do to make a man look as if he’s actually pregnant?”—my answer would be, “not much.” That’s because the lumpy baby gut is such a striking shape that we have almost no difficulty believing that even someone as manly as the Governator himself is pregnant, so long as he is wearing a fat suit underneath his maternity-store power suit.

That’s why I can’t help but think the creators of this recent commercial from State Farm insurance misjudged the power of their own fantasy. Or at least they want to appear as if what they’ve done is misjudged. More on that in a bit.

Seconds 0:23 through 0:28 are probably the most tasteless of them all. (Note: I’m not against the untasty. In fact, I prefer it. I’m just saying is all.) First, for about 2 seconds, we see the shape of a probably-real pregger (she could be an impostor, like Arny) right in the middle of the frame. She looks like she’s about to pop. (And yet she never loses her good-natured charm or easy sarcasm. This is how pregnancy usually works, no?)

But then, without apparent transition, we are looking at a similarly-shaped man, framed by the camera in a similar way. We never completely forget that his stomach doesn’t actually contain what will very shortly become a partial-birth abortion (metaphorically speaking), but it’s hard to completely displace our suspended disbelief once he hides the watermelon underneath his shirt, and the fact of the watermelon belly becomes a memory rather than a constant visual reminder. He wants to see what it feels like to lug around a heavy precious cargo for a few hours, and we can’t help but partially enter that fantasy along with him.

But then OH CRAP the watermelon / baby falls out and explodes all over the cement, exposing a shattered, blood-red interior. This image is not meant to mortify, but it does. Since the transition between the mother and father is so quick, and their framing and shape so similar, it is just as easy, if not easier, to experience the similarities in the images more than their differences. And even if we never completely lose sight of the light-hearted humor of it all, never forget that we are meant to laugh at a joke where the line between fantasy and reality is at least intended to be clear (indeed, is part of the joke), it would be hard to say that the commercial doesn’t accidentally blur those lines—that, whatever the intended purpose, the end result is one where the hypothetical horrors of a possible world are forced to overlap with the perception of the actual world. Dude, that’s your baby’s exploded form all over there. Nah, it’s just a watermelon.

There are some other considerations.

For example, if it’s true that this commercial is not actually trying to get you to think about violent baby-breaking and its possible consequences, then it’s certainly an infelicitous coincidence that it tacitly asks you to consider how you would pay for such an accident. Insurance salesmanship depends on highlighting fear in order to sell peace of mind. If the shit hits the fan, or, in this case, if the watermelon bites the motherfucking curb, then we’ll pay for it. That’s what it’s all about. Since this particular insurance commercial only explicitly tries to sell a “plan for the future,” it has to rely on its more implicit dimensions to show you what you are actually buying. And look at that woman’s face—her easy-going placidity exudes, or at least implies, confidence. Her “plan for the future” is not in doubt. That’s why she can laugh pleasantly at her doof of a husband, instead of throwing a fit. (How would most extremely pregnant women react if you created a lookalike pregnant belly and then crapped out an aborted watermelon in front of them? My guess: not well.)

But here’s the rub. This woman’s “plan for the future,” the very thing that the commercial is selling, involves making bank after the “miracle” of birth goes bad. You wonder how much a shattered baby will run the insurance companies. Your guess is as good as mine, but I bet we both think it’s somewhere in the range of: a lot. So now there’s a new miracle! Now we can finally afford to take that Carnival cruise we’ve always talked about, and even get one of the really nice suites. Have you ever popped champagne on a plane? I wanna make love in this club. And so on.

So basically what I’m saying is this commercial kind of freaks me out. The insurance companies are inseminating our minds with little whispering homunculi, little nagging Nancy’s with their little tickly voices—they’re always getting up inside of you, hiding their sinister Easter eggs every which way, only when you open up the prize, instead of money or candy, all you get is fear.

Tell me I’m not alone here.