Carl’s Jr. Promotes All-Natural Women (2024)

American fast-food restaurant Carl’s Jr. made the decision to promote their new “All-Natural Burger” with a commercial in the 2015 Superbowl featuring Charlotte McKinney. Yet, the commercial went on to promote more than just their new product by also subliminally promoting traditional notions of gender. The commercial depicts McKinney fully nude as she walks through a crowded farmer’s market, causing her to receive a lot of attention from the men at the market. The way in which McKinney is commodified and stared at within the Carl’s Jr. commercial demonstrates the way modern media harnesses traditional notions of gender to objectify women and ultimately sell a product.

The commodification of Charlotte McKinney can be observed by considering how the commercial uses food to conceal parts of her nude body from view of the audience. This is first seen when McKinney’s backside is concealed by a buttocks-shaped tomato strategically placed in the foreground of the shot. When a man’s hand enters the frame and pinches the tomato with two fingers, she turns her head toward the camera and displays a shocked expression. Given that McKinney had been walking away from the camera when the tomato was pinched, her reaction insinuates that the tomato is not merely concealing her, but rather is a part of her. The way McKinney physically embodies part of the burger in this shot reveals how women are “assigned the place of object” in traditional notions of gender(1). McKinney is put in the position of object as she becomes regarded as a signifier for the burger rather than signifier for a real woman(2).

This food concealment technique is seen again when McKinney’s breasts are concealed by two large melons being placed on a scale in the foreground of the shot. This particular shot reveals even more about traditional notions of gender than that of the tomato shot due to the added component of the scale. The commercial cuts from a tight shot of McKinney’s face and cleavage to a wider shot of the melons concealing her breasts as they are placed on the scale. During this shot sequence, McKinney’s voice-over states, “Nothing between me and my 100% all natural…” before the commercial cuts to the next shot of a man staring. By cutting to the shot of the scale exactly at the point which she says the word “me,” this sequence communicates that in a patriarchal society obsessed with policing the physical appearance of women, a scale is viewed as an extension of them. Further, weighing the melons signifies how society views women with larger breasts as having higher social value, just as larger melons are given a higher price at a farmer’s market. Overall, this shot contributes to the commodification of McKinney and in doing so, subliminally reveals traditional notions of gender.

It is important to notice that although the commercial aims to entice viewers to purchase the new Carl’s Jr. burger, there is no mentioning or showing of the actual burger until the very end. Instead, viewers are made to watch Charlotte McKinney walk through a farmer’s market fully nude. The decision to center the commercial around McKinney’s nude body rather than the burger itself shifts the focus of desire from being on the food to being on her. Thus, in making McKinney the recipient of desire, the commercial represents how women are forced into the position of an object to be looked at for the pleasure of the male viewer(3). The voyeuristic position that the audience then takes is rooted in what Freud considered to be the natural scopophilic instinct of men, which is the desire to derive pleasure from looking(4). By withholding from showing the burger and placing McKinney’s nude body in front of the viewer, voyeurism is used as a mechanism to construct media so as to communicate to the audience the expectations of their gaze in accordance with patriarchal society’s beliefs.

Throughout the commercial, each shot that focuses on McKinney is immediately countered by a shot of a man voyeuristically staring at her. According to Garland-Thomson, people naturally and impulsively react to disturbances in the visual status quo5. McKinney’s nudity serves as a disturbance in the visual status quo for the men she walks by, and thus causes them to naturally stare at her. Garland-Thomson also states that a key difference between gazing and staring is that people gaze at what they desire, but they stare at what astonishes them(6). That said, due to McKinney being the central recipient of desire in the commercial, she receives both the desiring gaze of the viewers watching the commercial and the astonished stares of the men in the commercial alongside her. This directly ties into Mulvey’s ideas about the three different looks in cinema that are associated with eroticizing women(7) and again reinforces traditional gender notions. Additionally, the first man shown staring is hosing down vegetables, yet becomes so distracted that he turns completely to face McKinney and point the hose at her. This is another instance in which McKinney becomes commodified as she is given the same attention by the man as he gave the vegetables before. Beyond that, the hose in this scenario can be considered phallic, and indicates the power he holds as a male in society that which permits him to stare at a nude woman(8).

All in all, the Carl’s Jr. commercial harnesses traditional notions of gender to commodify Charlotte McKinney and allow her to be made an erotic spectacle in order to sell a product. This commercial leans directly into the voyeuristic tendencies of viewers by explicitly constructing a male gaze to be imitated, and her position as the object of desire in this commercial ultimately reveals the way in which modern media calls viewers to engage in the objectification of women.

Sources

(1) E. Ann Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119-138.

(2) Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male,” 119-138.

(3) Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male,” 125-126.

(4) Sigmund Freud, “Lecutre XXXIII: Femininty,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965), 112-135.

(5) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “What is Staring?” from Staring: How We Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3-11, 13-15.

(6) Garland-Thomson, “What is Staring?”, 13.

(7) Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory & Criticism, seventh edition, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 711-722.

(8) Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male,” 119-138.