The crumbs of the West are dropping like tears from decayed, blind eyes. Few are those who realized that the war was not won, namely, people like William S. Burroughs or John Fante, whose words are drenched in the screaming disappointment with modernity. The atomic age, along with its microwave ovens and intelligent cars is far from gone, if it ever really existed, and that is what Logorama, with its contemptuous style and form, is trying to say.
It’s easy to understand that the setting for this short film, made out of well known brands, is a metaphor that stands for the world carefully planned by the visionaries in control of the Western fairy tale. The city depicted in the film is a simile of Los Angeles, a constant symbol of the American dream with its California-style homes and its cosmopolite sense of space throughout which different people from different backgrounds coexist in a chaos regulated by the fist of the institutions.
The story is fairly simple as it follows a society composed of corporate mascots like Michelin’s Bibendum, Ronald McDonald, Big Boy, and the Esso Girl, who go about their lives acting in ways unexpected to the viewers, that is, in manners that only characters cradled by postmodernity would; their language is a filthy vomit made out of bitterness and a desire to strangle everyday life, so crude words flow just like they do in the verbal sewage most urban neurotics are drowned in.
Coarse language is just one of many elements that detail an atmosphere of hedonism and nihilism that’s eventually confronted by the proximity of death: Sexual advances are made by Julius Pringles while there’s some seriously vulgar misbehaving at the zoo by Haribo and Big Boy; a couple of Bibendums define the caging of rotten nature as either an act of altruism or a selfish and depressing consequence of the limitlessness of consumerist desire, a scene followed by a car chase with the objective of catching an evil Ronald McDonald, whose apparent deprecation for life causes a tragic hostage situation. It seems like nobody likes or cares for life until the sight of a flying bullet puts it in danger.
As the chase progresses through a violent and adrenaline-pumped evening, the world around the characters seems to have been pushed to the limit; it explodes in a desperate arm-stroke willing to obliterate all the parasites off its raped surface. An earthquake swings the buildings and swallows this superficial algorithm into the toothless vacuum of exhaustion, and as a final metaphor, oil, the Western symbol of greed and wealth, sprouts from the earth like an antediluvian punishment to finally convert this fanaticism of gold into the ruins of a self-loathing empire.
After the destruction, some of the characters survive and the “camera” pulls back into an image of a galaxy made of other logos. This ending certainly has an unclear message that seems to favor hope, but overall it is the context of the recent economical crisis and the environmental decay that makes this short film more meaningful, in the end attracting the audience’s attention not just to the screen full of astounding cell-shading visuals and detail, but also to the reflection on the electric jungle outside: the advertisements that throughout a daily injection of the blood of commerce have become an invisible and harmless artifice while a natural cheetah in the zoo, as discussed by the Bibendums, is still a spectacle worthy of attention. Nature, in the end, conquers its oppressor through its flawless, endless, raging beauty.