Doritos are becoming dangerously cheesy...

Hanna Bishop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0nliPWaCvA

In Robert Scholes article, “On Reading a Video Text,” he describes how our American ideology helps us to understand video texts. Scholes suggests that the video texts gives the viewers a sense of cultural reinforcement, which he explains as “the process through which video texts confirm viewers in their ideological positions and reassure them as to their membership as a collective body.” Scholes’ opinion is that because of our ideology as a culture, we are able to understand and relate to the video text like no other culture can.
In a Doritos® commercial I discovered, it shows a young, cultured and educated man who purchases some Doritos®, places a small piece in a mouse trap, and patiently sits in front of the mouse hole waiting for the creature to come out for its unfortunate fate. However, after a while of sitting, the young man finally gives into the temptation of the cheesiness of the Doritos® and takes a large mouthful and begins to eat. While instead of a small mouse he was expecting, a large human sized mouse (obviously someone in a costume) emerges from the other side of the wall and tackles the man, knocking him out for the whole bag of Doritos®.
In this commercial, Doritos® reverses nature to be comical. It is natural, of course, for a small mouse to be tricked by a human and lured to a mouse trap. However, although the young man is well cultured and educated (as you can tell by the way he dresses and the décor of his home) he is tricked by a large mouse that has obviously out smarted him. The way this commercial is reversed is amusing because it’s unexpected. It is not the way of nature, or in real life. When someone sets up a mouse trap, they do not exactly expect a human sized mouse to burst through their living room wall and tackle them for a bag of chips. Doritos® is trying to show their viewers on how deliciously cheesy their chips are. So cheesy that in fact a human sized mouse is willing to break through a solid wall and knock someone out for only one bag. However, Doritos® is also using the ideology of our culture that underdogs should win. Because of this ideology that is placed into our brain through culture we find the commercial satisfying even though a man is being beaten to pieces in the process. America has a strong belief of equality, in a sense that underdogs are more deserving than the people who receive all the glory. When the mouse bursts through the wall and tackles the dumbfounded young man, we are reassured that the underdog is now winning, instead of receiving a small piece of Doritos® and actually being killed before even enjoying it, the mouse traps the man and not only hurts the one who planned on killing him, but receives a whole bag of deliciously cheesy Doritos®. Through this, the mouse who was originally doomed in the beginning of the commercial is now victorious, and we are satisfied to see that the underdog is again triumphant.