'ibsen's favorite pub'?

So these are the things that drive me up a wall. Pop culture's general approximations of foreign cultures. I have had hundreds of discussions with people about how images of cultures, people, and cultural identities are created, and how those images come to mean very different things depending on where you are standing.

If you are a member of the group that is described, you often feel slighted. You see a blunt version of your culture presented as if it was the truth. At the same time, if you are not a member of that group, you have no idea that what you are being presented with is a blunt version. You have nothing to compare it to, and you think it's the truth.

The goal in pop culture is rarely to show anything Norwegian, Swedish, Mexican, Black, or Chinese. The goal is to hint at 'exotic' cultures in ways that will be appealing to an American audience. And, of course, that is perfectly understandable. The audience is American, and the context is commercial. Above anything else, it has to be appealing.

What happens, though, is that you alienate people. And you create stereotypes. You alienate the Swedes, the Blacks, the Spanish, the Mexican, the Chinese, the Japanese, or the Norwegian. The list is endless. And you fall back on stereotypes that ring comfortably true only because they are repeated so often.

This commercial (click on the link or on the youtube box above) has been getting on my nerves for a while. It's not a blatant example. The story is kind of cute. But the inaccuracies still irritate me.

The story is that of a father and a son traveling from the US to their ancestral land of Norway to reconnect with their heritage. The voice over goes like this:

So, I asked my dad where he wanted to go for his 60th birthday. Norway, he said, the land of our ancestors. We drank a pint an Ibsen's favorite pub. We sampled the local fare. We got new sweaters. I feel like yodeling. It was the trip of a lifetime, my dad said, until we went to the hall of records and discovered we were actually Swedish. Two tickets to Stockholm please. Whatever your story is, your Citi-card can help you write it. Citi, let's get it done.

The music sounds Anglosaxon to me, rather than Scandinavian. And the father says he feels like yodeling? That's Switzerland, not Norway. Mountains are right, country is not.

Ibsen's favorite pub? Playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), a man of some means, if he drank, he probably went to restaurants, not pubs. A pub, again, is an Anglosaxon concept, not a Scandinavian one.

Quaint Hall of Records? Likely computerized these days.

And the final shot, where the father and son buy tickets for Stockholm? It makes absolutely no sense trying to get from Norway to Stockholm on a ship. Just look at a map.

Does it matter? Yes it does. It matters because those who do not know have no right to say that it doesn't. Ignorance may be bliss, but it should not be the general standard.