The Yes Men Fix the World

The Yes Men’s critique of the media is that the large corporations that run the media are surely destroying the world, whether in a slow or quick fashion. These guys pose as representatives of these various corporations and twist their goals to fit what they should be doing, which is the right thing. Instead these corporation will do seemingly anything to turn a profit. This is especially well used in their prank where they used Gilda the Golden Skeleton, talking about deals that a big company can make and those deals being one of two types of skeletons in the closet: a normal skeleton in the closet where the things that happened were bad and they are just a monkey on the company’s back or a golden skeleton where bad things happened but at least some money was made.

Their pranks break down the ridiculous methods of how the media will promote equally ridiculous products and subversive concepts or ideas. For example, the “vivoleum” candles were marketed as being made from 80% of the remains of a terminally-ill Exxon employee, who was in reality a comedian, went with what they called the “gross” approach to marketing how the media works. The media will often get you to buy or endorse something, no matter how ridiculous it may be, by attaching a sob story to it that will make people leap out of their chairs and go buy something. Another great example, which was actually the most famous one from the movie, was the Halliburton Survivaball where a person could put themselves in this stupid-looking inflatable costume and protect themselves from anything. The best part about it was that they presented it at a conference with many people in the insurance business and, after the ridiculous marketing strategy that the Yes Men showed these people, they actually took it seriously and talked to the Yes Men afterwards about ways to apply it to certain situations, including terrorist attacks. This just goes to show that the media can make you believe just about anything.

The term that aligns with the Yes Men best is Antonio Gramsci’s “hegemony,” the means by which a people are party to their own oppression where control is achieved by consensus, not force. Their work shows that we the people are so immersed and pummeled day after day by the media that we just believe whatever they say out of self-preservation. The Yes Men’s mission, however, is to try and break us out of our hegemony and take back the government and, in turn, the world by trying to get us to rise up by showing what the companies really do and also what the world could be, as was done in their The New York Times: Special Edition.