This is another sponsored post. I’ll make no bones about it, as it is what it is.
So how would you go about selling an exit sign? It seems just too utilitarian to promote, doesn’t it? Who needs innovation in something so simple? You have an exit, mark it. Is is in a dark hallway or a movie house? Mark it and light it. Done and done. But I suppose I’ve been missing the finer aspects of the craft.
Or maybe the people at exitsigns.net are trying to uplift the practice. At the very least, with their website, they’re doing their level best to do something that shouldn’t be possible. They’re trying to make exit signs sexy.
You read me right. Sexy exits.
When I was in college, I helped a friend of mine with an advertising project for a marketing class. I knew him from theatre and he’d seen me draw every once in awhile, so could I provide him with some storyboards? Sure. The funny thing about it is that even though this was for his class, I picked up an odd lesson from him that has stuck with me ever since. In his proposed commercial, the product for which I can no longer recall, a family on a flying sofa enters their living room by blasting through the wall, just like an out-of-control car might (and a normal sofa wouldn’t). After he described this, he added, “That’s the sex of the commercial.”
The what?
He laughed and explained that every good commercial has one component of it that could be considered the sex. And these components, if I stopped to think about it, would be out-and-out obvious. Something thrusts into the frame from one side or the other? That’s it. Someone bursts through a door? Yep.
I had to stop him here and confirm something. “You mean to say that the Kool-Aid Man bustin’ in on a party of pre-schoolers is the sex of those commercials?” He nodded.
Kind of puts a whole new spin on “Ooooh, yeah!”
So if Kool-Aid Man is subliminally sexy, then there’s hope galore for exit signs, particularly when you decide to rename your styles and colors with vacation spots. That’s not a simple black sign, but something from the “Aspen” line. The photoluminescent exit signs, available in red, are from the “Vail” series. And so on.
Oddly, the self-luminescent exit signs are part of the Tritium line. Tritium is a non-sexy radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Maybe that name change is coming later.
And accompanying the details of each of these models are … well … actual models. I suppose the idea here is to make the aspiring restauranteur or club-owner imagine all of those good-looking, high-paying customers that will soon be beating down their door. Of course, the irony here is that these lovely models are promoting the available means of egress for these potential people. Maybe Exit Signs should expand their business to include sexy, sexy welcome mats.
The models could ride them like magic carpets and blast through brick walls.
Since I got this request a week or so ago, I’ve been thinking about American Psycho. If you know the novel or the film, maybe you’ll see the connection.
This is not an exit.
American Psycho is an unsettling novel. Brilliant, but not for the weak of heart. I read it a couple of years after moving to Atlanta. At the time, I was working downtown, wearing a suit every single day. My job was to look after the comings and goings, the expenses and appointments of other people wearing more expensive suits than I. As such, it took no time at all for me to picture my own version of Patrick Bateman.
Batemans surrounded me.
And when the movie arrived, several years later, the image of Bateman presented by Christian Bale was really no different than what I already knew. The film had problems of its own, but in the end, it served as a suitable companion piece to the source material.
American Psycho might persist in popularity or notoriety for its shock value, or maybe for the absurdly accurate way Bret Easton Ellis has preserved the oblivious black heart of late 80s corporate greed. But for my money, it all comes down to the ending. Rarely does a novel bring everything together in so brilliant a matter. And so simply, too.
The novel and the movie pull together their ending strings in much the same haunting way. As each closes, Bateman persists. This is not an exit, reads a sign on a door. This is to remind us, the readers or the viewers, that while we might be leaving Bateman’s immediate company, he carries on. At that point, perhaps for the first time ever, he does not know what his future holds or what he might do next, but he will do something. He must.
And given what he’s done, what could be worse?
