years ago I watched “Crazy Ex Girlfriend,” a show in which every episode has musical numbers, often with lyrics about how various characters’ messed-up behavior is ruining their lives in some way

and in one episode a character sang about his alcoholism, and had a verse where he mentioned how he’d gotten himself “banned from Southwest Airlines”

and at first, this felt like fairly natural wording just to communicate the character’s problems, even though it went a little bit off the song’s rhythm

but then, at the end of the song, the name “Southwest” was mentioned again, in a line where it would (in my view) have flowed MUCH more smoothly just to say “a plane”

to the point that I started feeling that there must be a specific, deliberate choice behind emphasizing the airline name here

and the explanation I came up with, at the time, was that they were trying to make that detail about being banned from Southwest Airlines stick in our minds so that it could come up later in the plot

like. in a later episode the character does get on a plane to leave. and while watching that, I was almost convinced that he was gonna get stuck at the gate, and have to come back and rethink his whole travel plan, because this was the “banned from Southwest Airlines” Chekov’s Gun going off.

and when it didn’t go off like that, I still believed for a while that the point of the wording in that song was chosen because at the time of that episode it hadn’t yet been decided whether the character was gonna leave, and they wanted to foreshadow a way he might not end up leaving

and it wasn’t until much later that Occam’s Razor finally sawed off the Chekov’s Gun in my brain and went “that was fucking product placement, idiot”

anyway.

I think we need another meta-layer of media analysis beyond Watsonian and Doylist.

we need (goes and looks up the name of the publisher who had to do the job of marketing Doyle’s work) Strandian analysis.

(or maybe Wardlockian, if you wanna talk about the marketing choices of a particularly bad publisher taking advantage of a writer’s early career)

that’s the level of literary analysis where shit like product placement lives. probably a lot of censorship too.