Advertising Babel: Film Review of “Generation P”

The new Russian film “Generation P,” based on a novel by Victor Pelevin (one of Russia’s most important contemporary writers), follows the picaresque adventures of Babilen Tatarsky through the booming world of advertising in the early years of post-Soviet Russia. Named after Babi Yar and Lenin, our hero is first seen sporting a sweet mullet and working at a Moscow kiosk run by Chechen gangsters, spending his time reading and studying the hands of his clients as a means of predicting their consumer habits. A failed poet and graduate of the Literary Institute of Moscow, Babilen begins his ascent to the top of the sociopolitical pyramid when a former classmate and current advertising mogul fortuitously reappears in his life and offers him work in the industry. A gifted if somewhat abstruse copywriter, he is constantly told by employers and clients to keep it simple even while garnering positive notices from higher-ups and various Movers San Diego  and shakers in the intricately related worlds of business and media. Between the squalor of the streets, the opulence of the oligarchs, an oddly egalitarian nightlife, and the images of Yeltsin on television alternately dancing like a drunken bear and ordering the dissolution of parliament, director Victor Ginzburg expertly captures the disheartening chaos and thrilling possibilities of life in Russia during its first decade as a democratic country.

A work of perfectly modulated satire from beginning to end, much of the film’s humor comes from the fictional advertisements pitched and marketed throughout; as with its commentary on media (especially television) as the primary landscaper of the nation’s political terrain, we laugh while groaning at how terribly close this fictional world is to our own. The deadly military assault on the Russian White House during Yeltsin’s standoff with parliament gives Babilen an idea for marketing Parliament cigarettes, while Malyuta, a fervent nationalist whose a priori anti-Semitism inspires all his copy, creates a Harley-Davidson commercial where indignant Russian soldiers ask, “How long will the sons of David ride our Harleys?” after seeing a hulking Orthodox Jew walk out of a synagogue and confidently ride off on his motorcycle, leaving them in the dust. The latter example functions as a facetious critique of the barely concealed chauvinism of Russia’s official and media rhetoric, and both reveal Pelevin’s view that the tragedy of Russian history and the darkest depths of its soul have been reduced to nothing more than fodder for advertising campaigns.

As Babilen’s success and responsibilities increase, he begins to realize that the pyramid of success is really the Tower of Babel presided over by the servants of Ishtar. The vortex of power is guided by and expressed through Mesopotamian mythology, and as he (whose name is meant to evoke Babylon) moves towards its apex, he comes to understand that those who control Russia are but players in the Game with No Name. This game, a metaphor for life as a crapshoot whose only stakes are fortune and death, was a riddle to be solved by mortals seeking Ishtar’s hand in marriage: those who failed were thrown from the summit of her temple pyramid, while those who succeeded became her omnipotent earthly consorts. Alluding to various ancient mythologies throughout, Pelevin argues that television is the idolatrous fire of Moloch that must be constantly stoked by the sacrifice of innocence, and Babilen (as an adman forever alienated from atman) is one its high priests. He is a capitalist propagandist just as his boss was a former communist propagandist, Russia simply having exchanged one totalitarian ideology for another.

A metaphysical “Mad Men” for the Pepsi Generation, Babilen reads the unhelpful work of all the major American advertising gurus before striking psychological gold by communicating with Che Guevara through an Ouija board. Guevara’s spirit lectures him on Oranus, the spirit of consumerism driven by the oral (envy) and anal (consumption) wow-factors. He is later approached by a client nicknamed “the Nietzschean” who complains of feeling humiliated whenever he travels abroad because foreigners look down upon Russians as uncouth barbarians for consuming their products and culture without creating anything of their own. He hires Babilen to create a “Russian idea” that will inspire foreigners with the same kind of awe they felt for the nation and its people during the Battle of Stalingrad. Experiencing writer’s block despite Che’s advice, he uses the Ouija board to ask Fyodor Dostoevsky for help, who responds with passionately bestowed yet indecipherable squiggly lines.

If often indistinguishable mafiosi, terrorists, and oligarchs perform functions traditionally ascribed to the government, it is because the behavior of the latter vis-a-vis their policies and the enforcement of their authority so closely resembles that of the former. And yet Pelevin’s firmly anti-Chechen stance speaks to an ongoing national crisis whose moral implications the film considers in earnest, perhaps more so than any of the work’s other targets. The Chechens are portrayed as perpetually opiated gangster-terrorists whose cruelty and aptitude for violence is unmatched even by standard Russian business practices. Babilen’s former boss keeps his banker caged in his office like a tamed beast, though the Nietzschean says that he would treat him even worse, so perhaps the treatment of bankers is irrelevant when gauging another’s humanity.

“Generation P” understands that modern politics is a spectacle striving to appeal to society’s and our own lowest common denominator, a perpetual verbal (and often physical) battle-royal of politicians and talking heads advertising their oversimplified ideas like commercial products rather than developing viable policies that take the complexity of the world and its manifold problems into thoughtful consideration. An important object lesson during an election year, the film was shown on Russia’s largest television station on the eve of its recent presidential elections. As Pelevin argues, when advertising companies (literally) write the political discourse, an ostensible democracy in a capitalist society becomes a one-party system because business interests now shape government policy. With television as people’s primary source of news and analysis, the medium has become the message; politicians are both the product and the commercial campaign engineered by advertising agencies, a fact only slightly exaggerated by the film’s alarmingly believable conspiracy theory. This state of affairs is palpably true in Russia, where President Putin proudly upholds the “dictatorship of law,” but is America so very different? American voters who read the book or see the film will likely bring an altered perspective to the polls with them in November, if they still choose to go. As Babilen says, “The world is where business meets money,” a motto increasingly applicable to our government.

by Oleg Ivanov

Oleg Ivanov is a film and theater critic who is excited to begin his PhD in Comparative Literature this fall.