Captivity Billboards - inescapable images

Five days a week, my eight year old son Ezra takes a ride on the billboard express as we drive straight through the heart of Hollywood on our way to his school. We take note of the seasonal changes in the Coca Cola billboard at Franklin and Cahuenga. The Rouge Gentlemen’s Club billboard on Franklin at the 101 has afforded us the opportunity to discuss the purpose of a “gentlemen’s club.”

When Ezra was in kindergarten and not yet reading, he asked me about the billboards. “I know what they are he said, but what are they for, Mommy?” I explained that companies that want to sell something pay for the pictures. It works like this I told him. You see the billboard, you think to yourself, gee would it be nice to drink some Coke, see that movie. He laughed and said, “Ha ha Mommy, who would want to buy something just because they saw an advertisement?” And with perfect timing, his two year old brother sitting next to him caught sight of an enormous Spider Man billboard. “Spiderman!” he exclaimed. “I like that movie. I want to see that movie.” Our little consumer impressed us all the more because he had somehow managed to acquire this desire without ever watching commercial television, attending preschool, or seeing a movie.

I told my friend Lesley this story and she shared one of her own: A few years ago her six year old daughter, newly literate, caught sight of a giant Carney’s billboard with a picture of a hot dog. Under the picture were the words “Better than sex.” She read the slogan out loud and looked at her mom. Sex must not be very good, this six year old, no lover of hot dogs, reasoned.

This week I feel like our drive through Hollywood has turned into an R-rated version of Mr. Toad’s wild ride. As we turned onto Hollywood Boulevard from Normandie, two enormous billboards advertising the new Lionsgate/After Dark Film “Captivity” popped up, treating my kids to a deeply disturbing and terrifying set of images.

When parents despair at the onslaught of advertising aimed at our children we are often told to do our job, just say no, to be the gatekeepers. But this type of advertising would require that we hunker down in our house and not leave, or design and redesign elaborate travel routes that manage to avoid the omnipresent billboards.

Last month, the LA city council approved a controversial settlement with billboard industry giants Clear Channel Outdoor Inc. and CBS Outdoor Inc. which advocates fighting billboards characterized as a capitulation to the industry because it affords amnesty to signs that were erected illegally and allows upgrades to existing signs including second faces, digital fronts and movable slats.In the Los Angeles Times, Gerald Silver, co-founder of the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight called the settlement "an aesthetic and environmental disaster.” But the proliferation of billboards in our community is more than that. It creates the opportunity for corporations to enter our children’s lives without our consent and confront them with inescapable images of violence.

Creating community standards about what is obscene is a tricky business, and I won’t argue with our citizenry’s rights to sit in a dark movie theater and be entertained by sadism and torture. But I would ask that my child’s route home from school not include an inescapable detour into the world these images conjure.

In August of last year, a group of Angelinos were turned down when they tried to buy billboard space for a proposed sign of Mel Gibson’s face with the international sign for “no” over it in red. If the corporations that currently define our community standards are willing to draw the line at their own bottom line and decline an opportunity to denounce Gibson’s anti-Semitism, surely they can forgo a few bucks to keep my kids from having nightmares.