The Greatest Anti-Debt Collector Video Ever

Hey, debt collectors!  Do you know what all the cool kids in West Virginia will be doing tonight at 7pm?  (Yes, I mean besides finally realizing their lifelong dream of finding Mountaineers’ coach Bob Huggins in some Morgantown roadhouse and joining him on stage for a stirring yet boozy karaoke rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”)

According to a story in this week’s West Virginia Record, they’ll be attending a long-anticipated rock-and-or-roll music video premiere party hosted by the dopest politician in the state, DJ AG (aka WV Attorney General Darrell McGraw).  And what fresh mad beats will DJ AG be spinning tonight at Bruno’s Restaurant and Bar in Charleston?  Yo yo, check it: a Consumer Protection Division original joint titled “Who Ya Gonna Call?”

Cinematic in scope and, according to AG McGraw (aka Popeye Doyle), an “entertaining spoof of 1970s cop shows and chase scenes wrapped around a song,” the video is more accurately a ripoff of Spike Jonze’s 1994 video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.”

Believe me, you have to see this:

Behind “Quick Draw” McGraw’s righteous, dual intention to acquaint the youth of West Virginia (“college students, online video enthusiasts, regular Internet users”) about the services his office provides while at the same time pumping up the jam (“get your booty on the floor tonight, make my day…”)—what’s really going on in “Who Ya Gonna Call?” is indeed sabotage.  Its target: credit grantors and collection agencies.

If you’re reading this sentence, then at least McGraw’s musically theatrical idea of “putting WV taxpayer dollars to work” didn’t completely burn out your retinas.  That’s good.  But let’s do a quick recap of the video.  The Art of Subtlety, as you know, can be tricky.

The cast of stereotypes is all there in black and white.  The good guys: The Badge and The AG.  The bad guys: The Collector and Daddy Bigbucks.

The plot is simple.  An airplane lands.  Some sweet music plays. Clandestine payments change hands.  Innocent consumers are victimized.  $$$ is burned to light cigars.  Chases ensue.  Papers get served.  More chasing happens.  Clowns are referenced.  An airplane takes off.  The end.

Subtle.  In case you missed it, The Collector is a slimy debt collector.  And evidently one who spends the fruits of his FDCPA-violating labor hopping planes to some indeterminate banana republic, perhaps to collect what Crockett and Tubbs used to call “nose whiskey—100 proof.”  As for Daddy Bigbucks (aka Chase, Citi, Bank of America, CapitalOne, AMEX, etc.)—he’s somewhere between Harvey Keitel’s Sport Matthew character in Taxi Driver and Gregg Allman’s Gaines in Rush.

That’s right. I think WV Attorney General McGraw just implied that some the largest companies in the financial services industry are pimps and drug pushers.

Mr. McGraw, you’re doing it wrong.

But wait a minute.  I get it.  Even though identity theft, for example, is a much more pervasive threat to consumers (because, well, it’s an intentional crime), there really aren’t any good examples in American pop culture that play upon the theme of “secret identity” or “masks” or “impersonation” from which McGraw might have drawn his inspiration.  (Pipe down, Batman—no one asked your opinion.) Instead McGraw traffics in stereotype and hyperbole—mediums that are, it must be admitted, well understood by the easily persuaded.

Yes, you’re doing it wrong, Mr. McGraw.  But perhaps you’re just setting your sights on a life after politics.  A life in Hollywood.  In that respect, you’re on your way.  Your love of 1970s police melodramas and flair for stereotype kind of reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s grindhouse hankering.  Granted, Tarantino is largely self-aware, but no matter.  Even the man who brought us Reservoir Dogs and the vastly underappreciated Jackie Brown has his petty obsessions.  For QT, it’s feet.  It seems that for you, it’s debt collectors.  But you know what they say: one man’s trash is another man’s fetish.