In practice, this is my first post on here. I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I will try to get new ones up more regularly from now on. Anyway, here are my thoughts on a recent Bangkok experience that I’ve been wanting to write about for a while…
About halfway through the ‘Caves’ episode of BBC’s Planet Earth—just after we see the giant pile of bat guano writhing with beetles and peppered with the occasional fallen bat—David Attenborough brings us to a cave in Borneo, loud with swarms of swallow-like birds called Cave Swiftlets. The unique thing about these birds, David tells us, is that they make their tiny cup-shaped nests entirely out of their own saliva. We see them weave their delicate houses on the cave wall gob by gob. Next we see precarious rope ladders being hoisted up into the dark upper reaches of the cave and we learn that local people harvest the nests in order to sell them to connoisseurs of “Bird’s Nest Soup.” Plucking the nests is dangerous, but the practice comes with a huge payoff because the soup is as gourmet as it gets, and “gram for gram the nests are worth as much as silver.” David explains that a swiftlet begins to build a new nest as soon as its old one is taken, which means that, with proper industry controls, the species is not threatened. He leaves it at that, and so do we, since we are whisked immediately to a stalactite/stalagmite montage and the contemplation of time, calcite drops, and cathedrals comes urgently upon us.
That was the extent of my Cave Swiftlet Nest experience until a few weeks ago when, while watching the advertising screen on the BTS (the monorail I take to and from work), I saw a tiny cup-shaped nest float up gently from a red velvet bed, disassemble itself into luminous strands, and slide into a glowing bottle of something called Brand’s Premium Golden Bird’s Nest Beverage. As soon as the drink’s mystical origins have been established, the ad cuts to a carefully coiffed daughter (in a red dress and gold earrings) and mother (in a nondescript beige dress-suit, a pearl necklace, and red lipstick) sitting on an ornate couch (presumably made from the same fabric as the mother’s dress). They give off the air of high society soap opera characters with copious amounts of money and spare time. The red, beige, and gold colour scheme of the room and its occupants exactly mirrors the packaging (you buy six bottles in a sort of gift basket thing) of Brand’s Premium Golden Bird’s Nest Beverage. Presumably the unflinchingly consistent palette is meant to make the viewer think “Luxury, luxury, luxury!” but to me it suggests that these women are trapped in some lurid one-dimensional universe with Brand’s Premium Golden Bird’s Nest Beverage as its first and only principle; a sort of Horton Hears a Who situation, except that we’re not glimpsing a universe within a snowflake or on a grain of pollen, but suspended in a single drop of overpriced bird mucus. Regardless of her existential situation, the daughter quickly produces a bottle of the good stuff and a spoon, slides along the couch until she’s right next to mum, and proceeds to steer a spoonful into the red old-lady-lips that wait. A little bulge appears in the mother’s cheek as she slowly savours what she has been fed. Fond looks are exchanged, the older woman chews slightly, and her daughter pats her on the back.
That’s how the commercial ends—as far as I know, since Morgan and I usually turn away as soon as the cheek bulge appears—but that is not the end of Brand’s Premium Golden Bird’s Nest Beverage, which is being heavily marketed throughout Bangkok. Aside from my many run-ins with the initial BTS ad, I have encountered a variety of posters, billboards, wall-wraps, promotional supermarket booths, a special Mother’s Day commercial (same mother and daughter, same spoon-feeding at the end, but this version features a black-and-white flashback to the day the mother birthed the daughter, as if to emphasize the current role reversal), and a giant sculpture of the bottle surrounded by large plastic nests. This last one took me by surprise, rearing up like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, one day when I decided to take a different route home. The Brand’s team (and yes, the brand is called Brand’s) is certainly thorough.
Perhaps the “throw everything at ‘em” advertising campaign is what irks me so much about Brand’s Premium Golden Bird’s Nest Beverage; I automatically resent the fact that they are trying to insert—or ram, rather—their bottle of luxury into the city’s consciousness by plastering it all over Bangkok. That’s one of the reasons why I automatically cringe every time I see the red, beige and gold, but it’s not the only one. There is the bizarre cognitive dissonance produced by the fact that the drink is being marketed as both an aphrodisiac (one billboard depicts a young couple cuddling next to “his ‘n’ hers” bottles as they look off into the distance) and a tonic for the elderly (the BTS ad makes it seem like Gerber’s for Granny). In fact, if you look up Bird’s Nest Soup, you will find that there is nothing it is not believed to do. All I see is bird spit, which is composed mainly of the insects that the swiftlets eat, and that simply does not sit well with my expectation that drinks professing to somehow increase my strength, stamina, and/or wakefulness contain at least one impressive sounding chemical (Taurine, Recaldent, Guarana). There is also the weird, sterile, plastic-covers-on-all-the-chairs luxury that the ad expects us to idealize. I find it more laughable than appealing, but it occurs to me that after a lifetime of watching Western T.V. commercials I have been trained to have a taste for a certain set of advertised lifestyles. The fact that I don’t like what I see in the Bird’s Nest ad tells me that I inherit a finely tuned sense of what a good ad should be like (Canadian commercials are hyper-ironic, Thai ads are more earnest, or at least more direct). I am contrasting what I see on the BTS screens here to what I have seen on T.V. at home, but not to any non-televised reality.
In the end, though, I think I dislike seeing Brand’s Premium Golden Bird’s Nest Beverage everywhere because of the transition it represents. Something has changed since I first came to know of cave swiftlets and the drinking of their nests through images of slender ladders pulled up through steam, everything dappled by the dark, moving in and out of sight. Now there is just a red and gold bottle, soft lighting, and a spoon.
