It’s not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in enormous doses affects people’s values and self-perception in deep ways. Nor that televisual conditioning influences the whole psychology of one’s relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes. No one’s going to claim that a culture all about watching and appearing is fatally compromised by unreal standards of beauty and fitness. But other facets of TV-training reveal themselves as more rapacious, more serious, than any irreverent fiction writer would want to take seriously.
irony’s aura
It’s widely recognized that television, with its horn-rimmed battery of statisticians and pollsters, is awfully good at discerning patterns in the flux of popular ideologies, absorbing those patterns, processing them, and then re-presenting them as persuasions to watch and to buy. Commercials targeted at the ’80s’ upscale Boomers, for example, are notorious for using processed versions of tunes from the rock culture of the ’60s and ’70s both to elicit the yearning that accompanies nostalgia and to yoke purchase of products with what for yuppies is a lost era of genuine conviction. Ford sport-vans are advertised with “This is the dawning of the age of the Aerostar”; Ford recently litigates with Bette Midler over the theft of her old vocals on “Do You Wanna Dance”; the CA Raisin Board’s claymation raisins dance to “Heard It Through the Grapevine”; etc. If the cynical re-use of songs and the ideals they used to symbolize seems distasteful, it’s not like pop musicians are paragons of noncommercialism themselves, and anyway nobody ever said selling was pretty. The effects of any one instance of TV absorbing and pablumizing cultural tokens seem innocuous enough. The recycling of whole cultural trends, and the ideologies that inform them, is a different story.
U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging. For its first twenty or so years, it seemed as though television sought to appeal mostly to the Group-Belonging side of the equation. Communities and bonding were extolled on early TV, even though TV itself, and especially its advertising, has from the outset projected itself at the lone viewer, Joe Briefcase, alone. (Television commercials always make their appeals to individuals, not groups, a fact that seems curious in light of the unprecedented size of TV’s Audience, until one hears gifted salesmen explain how people are always most vulnerable, hence frightened, hence persuadable, when they are approached solo.)
Classic television commercials were all about the Group. They took the vulnerability of Joe Briefcase — sitting there, watching his furniture, lonely — and capitalized on it by linking purchase of a given product with Joe B.’s inclusion in some attractive community. This is why those of us over 21 can remember all those interchangeable old commercials featuring groups of pretty people in some ecstatic context, all having just way more fun than anybody has a license to have, and all united as Happy Group by the conspicuous fact that they’re holding a certain bottle of pop or brand of snack — the blatant appeal here is that the relevant product can help Joe Briefcase belong:…”We’re the Pepsi Generation….”
But since at least the ’80s, the Individualist side of the great U.S. conversation has held sway in TV advertising. I’m not sure just why or how this happened. There are probably great connections to be traced — with Vietnam, youth culture, Watergate and recession and the New Right’s rise — but the point is that a lot of the most effective TV commercials now make their appeal to the lone viewer in a terribly different way. Products are now most often pitched as helping the viewer “express himself,” assert his individuality, “stand out from the crowd.” The first instance I ever saw was a perfume vividly billed in the early ’80s as reacting specially with each woman’s “unique body chemistry” and creating “her own individual scent,” the ad depicting a cattle-line of languid models waiting cramped and expressionless to get their wrists squirted one at a time, each smelling her moist individual wrist with a kind of biochemical revelation, then moving off in what a back-pan reveals to be different directions from the squirter. (We can ignore the obvious sexual connotations, squirting and all that; some tactics are changeless.) Or think of that recent series of over-dreary black-and-white Cherry 7-Up ads where the only characters who get to have color and stand out from their surroundings are the pink people who become pink at the exact moment they imbibe good old Cherry 7-Up. Examples of stand-apart ads are pretty much ubiquitous now.
Except for being sillier (e.g. products billed as distinguishing individuals from crowds sell to huge crowds of individuals), these ads aren’t really any more complicated or subtle than the old Join-the-Fulfilling-Group ads that now seem so quaint. But the new Stand-Out-From-the-Pack ads’ relation to their mass of lone viewers is both complex and ingenious. Today’s best ads are still about the Group, but they now present the Group as something fearsome, something that can swallow you up, erase you, keep you from “being noticed.” But noticed by whom? Crowds are still vitally important in the stand-apart ads’ thesis on identity, but now a given ad’s crowd, far from being more appealing, secure, and alive than the individual, functions as a mass of identical featureless eyes. The crowd is now, paradoxically, both (1) the “herd” in contrast to which the viewer’s distinctive identity is to be defined and (2) the witnesses whose sight alone can confer distinctive identity. The lone viewer’s isolation in front of his furniture is implicitly applauded — it’s better, realer, these solipsistic ads imply, to fly solo — and yet it’s also implicated as threatening, confusing, since after all Joe Briefcase is not an idiot, sitting here, and knows himself as a viewer to be guilty of the two big sins the ads decry: being a passive watcher (of TV) and being part of a great herd (of TV-watchers and Stand- Apart-product-buyers). How odd.
The surface of Stand-Out ads still presents a relatively unalloyed Buy This Thing, but the deep message of television w/r/t these ads looks to be that Joe Briefcase’s ontological status as just one in a reactive watching mass is at some basic level shaky, contingent, and that true actualization of self would ultimately consist in Joe’s becoming one of the images that are the objects of this great herd-like watching. That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching.