About all those feel-good festive videos? Bah, humbug!

 

I love our Malaysian festivities. Every community in Malaysia has its own festivals, many of which are religious in nature. The major ones come with public holidays, too, so what’s not to love?

Some of these festivities follow the regular solar calendar, so they stay pretty much fixed on certain dates every year.

Some follow the lunar calendar, and prowl throughout the solar year, periodically overlapping with another festivity. Then the orgy of celebrating, shopping and especially eating goes into overdrive, if not actually overboard.

Some festivities on the lunar calendar get adjusted every few years to be in sync with the solar calendar. This helps to keep a spring festival, such as the Chinese New Year, in the spring rather than visiting all four seasons!

What would be a much anticipated event before such festivities? No, not balik kampung. The kids may like it, but the parents who have to spend many exhausting and expensive hours on crowded roads would be dreading it instead.

Cashing in

Shopping? Shops used to be crammed with people buying clothes for festivities. New clothes always help to make the actual celebration itself more fun for kids of all ages. But shopping, by and large, has been overtaken by technology and new business models. Many now buy their clothes and gifts online and year-round. Traditional shops and malls aren’t as popular as they used to be.

The online merchants themselves have come up with all kinds of artificial celebrations to encourage people to buy stuff. And people do buy, religiously and in prodigious quantities!

Malaysians don’t really have a gift-giving culture during festivities, except for Christmas. Many prefer to give cold hard cash. Here, for Malaysian parents (and politicians), cash is still king.

Festive-season videos

One thing much anticipated though are the festive-season videos by big corporations. Yes the government puts them out too, but those usually suck and are often very forgettable, assuming anybody bothered to watch them in the first place.

The festive videos are put out by oil companies, banks, mobile phone operators, airlines, car companies, online merchants and platforms and large conglomerates with their fingers in many business areas that require constant “branding” to compete for our attention.

Petronas has done many memorable ones over the decades. Their big budgets allow for slick, professional productions that showcase the best creative brains of the country.

Banks and mobile companies aren’t far behind in joining the celebration of the important days in their customers’ lives, as well as subtly, and often not-so-subtly, promoting their wares too.

Cloying sentimentality

Apart from their slickness and glamour, these videos share another thing in common – they tug at our heart strings. They cloyingly remind us of our better nature and ideals and aspirations, and quite often, of the current government slogans too.

(The government-produced ones just go straight to the current government slogans, making no pretence about subtlety or creativity).

The commercial festive videos are truly some of the best you can see. Cost doesn’t seem to be an issue. The big companies that pay for them compete to see who can make the most memorable, viral videos.

I hate those videos.

I hate the sheer hypocrisy of many of them. I hate the annoying “we’re all the same” sentiment, the reminders about the innate justice and fairness in all of us, and the sacrifices of the “heroes” of yore, when things were supposedly better than today.

Facing reality

If I were to judge the organisations purely by their videos, I’d say all are upstanding corporate citizens who care about all the good things and toil constantly to deliver what their videos claim, and who have a heart of gold and probably choke every time they watch their own videos – especially when they know some of their audience will actually shed real tears in watching them.

You and I know that’s not the case.

The good things the videos celebrate or promote don’t happen very often, and if they do, it’s not because of the companies, but perhaps even in spite of them.

The videos try to achieve two things – show that their sponsors are upstanding corporate citizens answering the nation’s call for unity and patriotism and all the good stuff, and more subtly that they’re smart commercial hacks “branding” themselves appropriately during these auspicious times.

Feel-good hypocrisy

I don’t have much sympathy for either. There’s just too much hypocrisy in the former, and too much calculative greed in the latter.

These videos are mostly feel-good fluff that are not really meant to change anything, because the status quo is perfectly fine for the sponsoring companies.

It’s just some light entertainment while they conduct business as usual, which is to gouge as much wealth through whatever advantages or privileges they already have.

The GLCs are of course guilty of the stuff, we all know that they are beneficiaries of a lot of the unfairness they preach against, and that they crowd out the ordinary people they’re supposed to help.

The non-GLCs aren’t much better either by the way. They’re often also beneficiaries too, albeit more indirectly, though possibly in more insidious ways.

Hold them to account

Perhaps you can argue that in a democratic, capitalistic society, it’s not the job of companies to push for social and economic justice. We have parliaments and elections for that.

Fair enough, in which case companies should just pay their taxes and shut up. But nowadays, and rightly so, we hold companies responsible for their actions – from supporting oppression in a foreign land to something as silly as producing stuff that insults people, whether in reality or only in petty minds.

So, we should hold such organisations to what they preach. We should call out hypocrisy, or at least do not lend them our support.

I sound like such a killjoy. I’d love nothing more than to laugh or even cry at a piece of creative genius produced by an organisation with deep pockets.

The indie touch

I’d love to see old traditions reinterpreted for the modern days. I’d love to see some sense of humour and irreverence. For those with the courage, I’d love to see some honest appraisals of where we are, and where we need to be.

But these sentiments would probably be truer and more honest if they came from independent filmmakers who’re passionate about their own causes and not beholden to power and money wielded by powerful companies.

As it is, just spare me glossy videos produced to please their political patrons or to meet their KPIs on CSR or ESG or DEI or SDG or any of the three-letter acronyms.

I’d rather choke on our great local food than on such hypocrisy. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.