There is a recent commercial for Wells Fargo, featuring a
girl bringing home her first paycheck, that I think has Major Themes, is rich
with Subtext, and provokes Thought Provoking Questions. This blog will attempt
to explicate and unpack all of those.
To edify you, the commercial features a teenage girl
returning home for dinner after receiving her first paycheck. Her mother
congratulates her but cautions her that her studies come first. This represents
the theme of education being more important than making money, particularly at
such a young age.
The girl uses her smart phone to take a picture of her check
and deposit it into her Wells Fargo account. Her grandmother sees this and
says, “I want a framed copy of that picture, OK?” This is an allusion to the
time-tested ritual of framing one’s first paycheck or first dollar, which
serves as nostalgia for a first job, pride in having earned money, and humility
as one looks back upon youth and realizes how one started out small and made
oneself into something.
But is there more going on here? That little exchange
between grandmother and granddaughter was loaded with subtext and I’d like to
explore that.
Why did the grandmother ask for a framed picture of the
check? Usually people will frame their own first paychecks and I have my first
check somewhere in storage. But I can’t imagine framing someone else’s, no
matter how proud of them I was. It was easier to romanticize the first dollar
you made when people got paid in cash but it’s less romantic now when paychecks
are direct deposit. Who romanticizes a stub or a screen shot of a bank statement?
Is this woman really going to hang a frame in her living
room and gaze at a copy of this check? I think the grandmother can buy her own
frame because the girl’s paycheck can’t be too much money and I’m sure the cost
of the frame would eat into it too much. Let the kid spend it on apps or
whatever they buy these days.
Maybe it’s all just a ruse. Maybe the grandmother is being
snarky and subversive about how all the kids have to take selfies and pictures
of everything that happens to them. Maybe she’s subtly mocking this kind of
narcissism and the idea that every picayune thing that happens to us needs to
be “framed.”
Anyway, food for thought.
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