Our Subways Are Decadent and Depraved

Something is deeply wrong here...

If Nicole Kidman starred in one of those AMC ads but for the subway, it would begin with her walking down the steps and onto the platform, and as she stares at a crackhead stumbling along and almost falling onto the track several times, she’d look at the camera and say, “We come here because we have no other options.” There are many ways you could plump out grim adjectival categories to describe the downside of living in a city, but it is safe to say that heartbreak originates in a place like this. This joke in the abstract isn’t nearly as amusing as living through it, because waiting for a subway involves the benign prickly annoyance of being in the presence of a family of nine, or an alcoholic businessman, or a gaggle of high schoolers who seemingly smoked weed for the first time. The real sketchy people here are white male hipsters reading a Doystevky novel in public except he’s one chapter in and is actually just using the book to cover his iPhone, and meanwhile, he’s sporting a tote bag, a French tuck into pleated vintage trousers, and a grey tank top under an unbuttoned linen collar shirt with the sleeves cuffed just enough to show off the pine tree tattoos on his forearms.

It would be merely amusing enough, or deliriously satisfying, to resign ourselves to the idea that dilapidated subway systems are the nature of things in the endless and brutal end of this particular free market cycle. But I lustily harken back to my time spent in Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam with a fond memory of the possible. With the crass subjectivity of my lived experience, I can qualitatively confirm that public transit in those cities is more sanitary, functional, and convenient. And the people and institutions that run European social democracies aren’t significantly less cretinous, calculating, or brutal than America’s cohort of corporate raider types.

Over in North America, it’s like our cities are actively condemning these subway stops as we stand inside them. Extension cords dangling out from the ceiling, buckets collecting what is assumed to be water. And no matter the subway stop, there is always a piss-filled alleyway located in the bowels of the station, and it is usually desolate. It feels like some hallway out of a late ‘70s horror movie—and if you stand by it long enough, you could be murdered by a gang, a werewolf, or a deranged circus clown. Sometimes, while I’m waiting for the next train, I’ll hear a gravelly voice from the shadows say, “You tryna try me? I’ll put my dick in yo’ mouf!” And it’s coming from a pigeon smoking a Newport.

Despite American public transit being flimsier and cheaper than our European counterparts, we are truly blessed with fizzy and goofy people-watching. One time, I saw a businesswoman eating an ice cream cone, and with one lick, she knocked the top scoop off the waffle cone and onto the floor. While the pure off-white vanilla soon devolved into rocky road, she used her fingers to scoop it off the tile and back into her cone, unaware of an audience of voyeurs anticipating her next move in this grotesque display of unsanitary psychopathy. We all watched in horror as she LICKED THE ICE CREAM. Later that evening, she probably outsourced 3,000 jobs to Trinidad and Tobago.

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People always say we need to clean up the subways, but its griminess shows up downstream. We need to clean up the ads on subways. Advertising at its best is an art, but there is something about these subway posters that feels cheapened—they’re dispiritingly similar in how they are almost poignantly incapable of selling a product. Some have a certain anhedonic artifice and a strange, strained joylessness. Others carry a sort of zesty scuzz and blustering fuckery that passes for a tagline. The worst are the ones that carry an off-vibe antiseptic presentation as to offend the least amount of people possible, but they reflect an obtuseness so wild as to be almost inspiring.

This feeling is especially acute whenever I’m visiting New York City and riding the MTA. It’s like I’m in a simulation. All the ads on the subway look like a Grand Theft Auto parody of NYC ads, and the copy reads as if you ran English through Google Translate into English and then back again.

These ads fall into a few categories:

1. A college that doesn’t seem like it exists. There’s a guy in a suit and it’s not entirely clear how he factors in—maybe he’s the dean, maybe he’s a guy at a Men’s Wearhouse and the production team snapped a candid. The text will read, Do you want to change your career tomorrow? Sign up for classes at The New New School of Technology, Fine Arts, and Higher Learning. Classes start tomorrow. The courses are listed in bullet points: Entrepreneurship, NFT Asset Management, Audio Engineering, Video Game Design.

2. Silicon Valley app that no one will ever use. Are you sick of running your own HR department? Download Stffr today because we get your staff. I’m not entirely sure who the target demo was for this ad placement: Two seats over from me is a man clipping his toenails and at the end of the card, two homeless people are fighting over a dollar bill that landed on the floor. This train car isn’t exactly giving off CEO energy.

3. A new dating app that pushes a little too far. There are ads for dating apps that are clearly pandering to career strivers: Match with someone whose professional goals make you want to ovulate. Let’s make your romance scale. The more heavy-handed ones will say, When your foursome becomes a moresome, and there’s a bunch of cartoon muppets in bed, which only can insinuate they just had a filthy muppet orgy. Next to me is a kid on an iPad trying to watch Bluey.

4. A subscription delivery service that absolutely no one will purchase. Imagine a bedsheet subscription service and whoever got suckered into a 30-day trial is immediately drowning in pillowcases.

5. Injury attornies who market themselves like Saul Goodman. I saw one that was boasting about a big ass payout for a client whose 4-year-old child was hit and killed by a bus.

6. Obnoxious jewelry ads. I saw one the other day that said Size Does Matter, and the woman is covering her eyes from what I assume is her boyfriend’s massively oversized credit card.

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