Barbeques Galore

The scene: A backyard barbecue. A man chats with the (dead) chicken he will soon grill and eat. The two share an easy rapport, and each carries on in full awareness of the nature of their relationship.

The conversation involves such mundanity as a child's need for orthodontia and the courtship procedures known to all modern American humans and (dead) chickens.

We learn that the (dead) chicken is an accountant.

The vignette concludes with the man brushing barbecue sauce on the breast of the (dead) chicken.

The world shown here is a shadow world to our own. It is a world in which the dead—the dead, beheaded, and disemboweled—yet live! A world in which chickens speaking to us from prolapsed neckholes fail to send us gibbering into the night. A world in which we listen and engage when plucked corpses share their inner lives with us.

What we have witnessed is a commercial from a manufacturer of barbecue grills. Their improbable tagline is "Your meat isn't going to grill itself." Oh, that the Shangri-La envisioned by the slavering suicidefoodists were real! To live in an Eden where our friends and acquaintances would so willingly sacrifice themselves to ensure the success of our backyard get-togethers!








Addendum: Barbeques Galore also has a commercial featuring a pig bent on vengeance. This one is played for laughs by casting it as a horror film à la The Sixth Sense or Black Christmas. "The calls are coming from inside the house! Get out!" (Yes, a similar line can be found in When a Stranger Calls from five years later. Hey, when did this turn into a course in lowbrow film history?) A pig who objects to people grilling him? An absurdity only to a suicidefoodist.