The Eyes of Dr. M.C. Trachtenberg
The familiar comfort of repetition seen through the eyes of Harriet the Spy and the staring siblings in the infamous 2009 Folger's ad
The other day I found myself lost in a pair of familiar icy blue eyes while scrolling through my Instagram explore page. It was a post from Buffy and Gossip Girl alum/inventor of the smokey eye Michelle Trachtenberg, an old press shot of her on some red carpet, screenshotted from her phone and posted with the website title still attached to it. I love when celebrities do things like this, like the time in 2018 when Toni Braxton tried to memorialize Aretha Franklin after her death by frantically googling a photo of her, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and Clive Davis at a Grammy party, screenshotting her google search and posting it to Twitter with every single name spelled wrong. “athrea franklin toni bracton whitney hoiston clivrs dsvis party,” read Braxton’s google search. As a sausage-thumbed human myself, I very much related to Toni Braxton’s egregiously lousy typo. Stars really are just like us!
But Michelle’s lack of a proper crop wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye. “Hi,” began the post’s caption, “This is a friendly reminder. Stay safe. Stay home. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Be grateful. Be kind. Life is precious. This is a #throwback, but. If you follow the rules. And love your loved ones from a distance. You'll be together again. We can go back to all of the everything you love doing. Thank you again to everyone who is an essential worker. You have all of my gratitude. Also. I tripped and fell about 5 mins before this photo 😹 Please #staysafe.” The screenshot and bad crop job of a red-carpet photo, the earnest but strangely punctuated caption, the kicker that she tripped and fell just before the photo was taken – all of it rolled into one had the perfect energy that was just leaning into bonkers territory.
Naturally, I had to see what else she was up to. One glance at Michelle’s grid was like a scene from an animated film where all the bats in a dark cave open their eyes at once. Staring back at me were no less than 12 sets of piercing eyes, each one accompanied by a caption about staying safe, wearing a mask, staying home, and being in sweatpants. Maybe it was Michelle Trachtenberg’s eyes boring into my soul. maybe it’s that she’s using her 607,000-strong following to advocating for pandemic safety – whatever it was, I found myself charmed, the way I was as a kid who wore out the bright orange VHS copy of Harriet the Spy.
There’s something very sweet about Trachtenberg grabbing a photo of herself from google and captioning “What are you wearing to the couch tomorrow?” (even though the rest of us stopped captions like those in April). It feels genuine - like she wants to take a new selfie of herself just about as much as I do right now. She’s less like an actress trying to appeal to the masses and more like a person slightly spiraling in lockdown and trying to keep it together, just like the rest of us. I found comfort in Trachtenberg’s repetition, her frequent little bits of encouragement to the world. With so much uncertainty lingering around every single day of this year, I love knowing that Michelle is going to be here, posting her glamorous throwback pics, and advocating for social distancing until most of the world has an all-clear.
In a post from last week, Trachtenberg chose an old magazine cover from 2009. “I don’t want a lot for Christmas, all I want is for you to wear a mask,” it read. As if the stars aligned, the combination of the 2009-relic magazine cover combined with Trachtenberg’s lingering gaze and the festive caption reminded me of something else with all those qualities, one that has been burned into my brain since the first time I saw it: the 2009 Folgers holiday ad.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about or can’t watch the video, let me paint you a picture: one cold winter’s morn, a son arrives home in a taxi to his all-American family, returning from some vague pilgrimage to West Africa. His sister greets him at the door, to which the brother playfully remarks, “I must have the wrong house!” She looks back at him with a smirk. “Sister!” she says incredulously, pointing to herself. Already we’re a little off the rails here, there’s no way he was gone for so long that his fully adult sister looks that different than she did when he left. The sister leads the brother inside and over to a freshly brewed pot of coffee. The brother sees the carafe of steaming hot java and breathes in the scent. “Ugh, real coffee!” It’s a strange thing to say for someone who has just returned from West Africa, one of the world’s biggest coffee exporters, but I digress. While catching up over their piping hot mugs of Folgers, brother tells sister that he’s brought her something “from far away” and pulls out a small present with a bow. But instead of opening it, she sticks the bow on his sexy, stacked delt and shyly admits to him: “you’re my present this year.” The music cuts. They stare at each other for about three beats too long. The brother is smiling in a way that almost looks like he’s biting his lip. Their stares continue to linger until their parents come in the kitchen to break up the moment and everyone reunites while the Folgers jingle plays, trying to convince you that this moment is joyous and not like you almost just watched something that’s illegal in 48 states.
I remember this ad playing every holiday season for at least three years. Each year in mid-November, its presence would begin to haunt me. I’d be sitting on the couch watching an episode of 30 Rock or, yikes, maybe even Glee, and the familiar guitar strum and fade-in of a cab pulling away would hit me like a punch to the gut that said “this is what you get for watching Glee and enjoying it, you naïve little gay fool.” Each time it seemed as if the brother’s stare would last a second longer than before. The ad’s intricacies felt more and more uncomfortable: the brother showing off his large frame by hunching over to take sips of coffee, the sister looking him up and down before placing the bow on him, the fact that a grown woman would do and say something like this. I shudder to think of what was in the box.
What would’ve happened if their parents hadn’t come in the EXACT next moment? There was one solid second of time between those parents shuffling into the kitchen and their family being torn apart forever. No more secret, incestuous trysts. No more mission trips to Africa. No more secret little gifts. No more Folgers. Mom’s is a Peet’s house and Dad’s apartment only has Café Bustelo. They tried to stay together, but the nagging feeling of the unknown was too great. They stopped sending out Christmas cards two years later for fear of what everyone would say about them. “Oh look, honey,” the Dad’s business associate would say as he brought the mail inside, “we got a Christmas card from…….West Africa!” and oh, how they’d laugh. They’d be glared at buying Thanksgiving turkeys at supermarkets and whispered about in the hallowed pews of Christmas Eve mass. The only thing left to do was split. A family cracked by caffeinated capitalism.
It was only after the ad stopped playing one holiday season (likely due to being lambasted online) that I realized I had looked forward to seeing it every season. Each Christmas, it arrived like an old high school friend you only see once a year. “Oh god, here we go again,” I’d say to myself the first time I’d catch it playing. And then, just like that, it was gone. I felt sad, I genuinely missed this stupid commercial and spending 45 seconds of an ad break wondering how this got past at least 20 ad execs along the way to air. A lot has been said and joked and postulated about growing up and Christmas feeling less like Christmas with each passing year. I think part of the reason for that is because, along the way, traditions change – and we can’t push against it. The comforting repetition of old, familiar ways slowly departs. Things begin to peel away. Older relatives pass, family holidays are shuffled between houses, a favorite cookie stops being made. Over and over the notion of the holiday season as we knew it to be for so long is chipped away until it’s almost gone entirely. I know, this is a weird place to go from the Folgers incest commercial. But just take it from the comments on the Hershey’s Kisses holiday ad that has aired every year since 1989, the joy of the holiday season is extremely potent but especially fragile:
I guess when I was in high school, I found myself unknowingly anticipating the Folgers ad because I knew that when it rolled around it was Christmas. This was my own personal tradition, laughing at this unbelievably uncomfortable television spot for mass-produced coffee. And then, after it was gone, I had to start new traditions - just like I’m doing again this year. Now, instead of the familiar repetition of the years of lingering brother-sister stares, there’s Michelle Trachtenberg staring back at me from my phone, also in isolation and away from her family, doing her routine of grabbing another photo of herself to write something encouraging, just doing what she can to comfort herself and others through some Instagram posts. I wonder if she misses the Folgers ad too. Michelle, it’s online!
Sorry for another essay about Christmas and traditions, I’ve just been a little reminiscent and reflective this year. I promise next Friday’s letter will be very different. I hope you’re all enjoying Taylor Swift’s evermore and Caroline Polachek’s fantastic remixes from her upcoming remix album.
On another note, you simply must catch up on HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant before next week’s finale. It has quickly become one of my favorite shows of the year. And I know, I also thought I wouldn’t want to watch a Kaley Cuoco program. But this is good! Ms. Cuoco made me cry twice! You have my sworn word. Plus Zosia Mamet and Rosie Perez are in it, so what are you waiting for?
If you’re interested in submitting anything for reviewal or contributing your own blurb about something you’re loving, hating, or can’t stop thinking about for Monday’s Top Shelf, Low Brow rating, go ahead and DM or email me! You’ll get full credit and attribution as well as half of any paid subscriptions made in the calendar week of your piece. And also we can strengthen our friendship, which is cute.
One last thing: I have a hot, sexy website now! You can find it at colemanspilde.com. It’s where all of my independent writing (besides this newsletter) will live from now on, with any freelance or future staff writing making their way over there eventually too. Thank you so much for all the love and support you’ve shown Top Shelf, Low Brow so far. I can pay for a website because of you! Your support truly means everything to me in a year where so much has been so uncertain. I love you. See you Monday!