I think this is the funniest headline I’ve ever seen.
That’s right folks! Spike Lee, Oscar winner and accidental matchmaker for a future First Couple, has finally made it. He has achieved the one true immortality: being made of non-biodegradable plastic.
Affiliate marketing’s tenuous relationship to journalism I have explored before. These publications, like The Inventory which produced the above, are a newly developed revenue stream for digital media. An affiliate marketer will review products, highlight deals, and if a reader purchases a product after clicking on a link within the article, the affiliate marketer will receive cash. So, if you read the above story and are compelled to purchase Spike Lee’s Funko-little-self, you’ll pass along a buck to G/O Media.
This makes a world where products have to be the occasion, and have to be aggrandized. The publication doesn’t make any money, and the endeavor is for nothing, if the reader doesn’t buy anything.
Since the M.O. is to get marketing cash, these publications can only see culture through sales and products. This presents a quandary for the writers of The Inventory, many of whom trained as journalists. If they want to explore a cultural theme of interest to them, they need to find a product which can excuse writing about it.
Ignacia Fulcher, who has brought Funko Lee to our attention, is a Brooklyn-born Afro-Latina. She easily explains the Lee-lore easter eggs in his new Funko, like how the purple outfit he’s wearing comes from his Oscars acceptance speech. I suspect that she is knowledgeable of Lee’s works, and that potentially the director means a lot to her. The actual article is honestly rather sweet. But, the only time she, or another writer at The Inventory, would be able to wax poetic on a Black director, or any director, is if there is a Criterion collection sale or some strange new merchandising opportunity. As such, her candid tribute to Spike Lee needs a plastic excuse.
I think I am drawn to the headline, at first, because it has an almost childlike wonder for the Funko Pop. It is children, and maybe select visual anthropologists, who believe an action figure or doll defines cultural clout. And there is certainly some truth to the headline: the Funko Pop line has become an encyclopedia of popular culture, with Wikipedia noting, as of 2021, that Funko Pop has more than 1,100 licenses. With Funko’s commitment to producing dolls of every conceivable franchise, it would be more of a snub if Spike Lee were not so immortalized. Given Gerard Way and Harry Styles both have Funkos, it would be insulting if Lee lacked one.
Which is to say that the narrow lens that affiliate marketing sites must adopt has some interesting cultural value. The writers which are forced to adhere to the particular product obsession of these publications are journalists, and are people. Fulcher, for example, has had a long career as a beauty editor, and is an alumna of Buzzfeed, and those two facts likely qualify for her for a number of interesting cultural takes that her platform would not publish without an associated product to hype. At first, I mistook the hyperbolic headline for a candid lack of awareness on the part of the author for Spike Lee’s many accomplishments and his cultural legacy. But now, I know that it is simply another writer recognizing the greatness of a cinematic icon, refracted through the necessary M.O. of the website: to sell you shit. Just as Slate’s The Pick anthropologically picked apart the pandemic through stupid purchases, The Inventory can only touch the world of culture and ideas and cinema through bulbous plastic heads. Learning to see like an affiliate marketer would likely be both jubilant (I would love to be this excited for a Funko Pop) and insightful. Their product-oriented stance reminds me, in a way, of the period eye, a technique from art history. To truly understand the meaning of a Renaissance painting, one must learn to see it like a Renaissance monk might have, immersing oneself in the theological theory of the day, the historical happenings of the 15th century. While exclusively seeing the world through the marketer’s gaze, with an adoration of products, would be no way to live, adopting that lens selectively can produce interesting insights, can highlight how we lived through the pandemic, can highlight a strange vinyl shrine to an American artist.
So, all hail the Spike Lee Funko Pop! With the state of film preservation, he may live longer than his referent’s actual works.