Run that by me again

A bookish young girl, 'Molly',  is interrupted from her homework of a rainy evening to take out the trash.  The annoyance gets her creative juices flowing and inspires her to devise an automated process for the chore: conveyance by clothes line of the bag to the trash can.  Her success with this inspires her to devise other automations -- for cleaning the goldfish bowl,  making the bed, dusting the floor, mowing the lawn, selling girl scout cookies, and ultimately even for an elaborate ruse to make it appear she's paying attention in biology class when she's actually devising more inventions. The punchline: from this humble origin of applied cleverness, Molly has grown up to be an innovative developer of Robotics for GE.   And cut.  So goes GE's latest corporate PR campaign, another in a series that ostensibly advertises the company's laudable commitment to providing careers for women engineers.

The first thing I noticed was the cheesy but compelling Michel LeGrand score.  It leant a kind of zany energy to the proceedings which on one viewing were both amusing and empowering.  The second was the style of the filmmaking -- somewhat busy and breathless, while managing to be enigmatic and whimsical.  You can't help but be charmed by the whirlwind progress of this wonder girl.  Brava, Molly!  Bravo, GE!

It's the rare commercial you actually look forward to seeing again.  At first.  But after repeated viewings, little moments of troubling doubt start to creep in.  For me the first was the self-propelled lawn mower tethered to a pole.  Hadn't I seen that schtick before?  No matter, Molly surely hadn't!  But wait, was the pole already there in the middle of the yard?  Ok, let's say it was.  Good on you, Molly for adapting the existing infrastructure.  But are you telling me Dad really did not notice that the corners of the yard didn't get done?  And while we're examining things, the insight that sets the whole thing in motion-- that a clothes line can be used as a conveyance for objects-- solves only the most trivial aspect of the garbage bag to trash can problem.  How does the clothes line device retrieve and attach the garbage bag, open the trash can, release the bag and seal up the can again?   And was it really easier to set up a contraption that brings cookies to the cardboard kiosk on the sidewalk than to sit out there at a cookie stand with a book herself?  And hold on, when did she get the opportunity to set up her page turning ruse in class?

While the girl inventor scenes are contrived and fanciful and take more shortcuts with narrative than Molly herself with her chores, let's make an allowance for them as the stylish and stylized origin story of adult Molly, the GE engineer.  There's nothing contrived about the payoff, right?  But actually the ending of the commercial is as far-fetched as the beginning.  In what workplace would someone be given the time, freedom and resources to develop a robotic inspection system and deploy it by herself without the foreknowledge of her boss.  In what world would the boss's reaction be, "That's amazing, Molly." and not "Who the hell gave you permission to create an inspection robot, Molly?  What budget did this come out of?"  And whose jobs are being taken away by this invention?  How will they get along in this new world that doesn't need their services?  And who benefits?  And, what the hell is that thing that's being inspected anyway?  Is Molly a cool genius, or is she just a clever and educated stooge, another trained monkey of the military industrial complex?

Ok thank you, I can now go back to hating GE.