The lonely grandeur of Stand-Apart advertising not only sells companies’ products, then. It manages brilliantly to ensure — even in commercials that television gets paid to run — that ultimately it’s TV, and not any specific product or service, that will be regarded by Joe B. as the ultimate arbiter of human worth. An oracle, to be consulted a lot. Advertising scholar Mark C. Miller puts it succinctly: “TV has gone beyond the explicit celebration of commodities to the implicit reinforcement of that spectatorial posture which TV requires of us.” 21 Solipsistic ads are another way television ends up pointing at itself, keeping the viewer’s relation to his furniture at once alienated and anaclitic.
Maybe, though, the relation of contemporary viewer to contemporary television is less a paradigm of infantilism and addiction than it is of the U.S.A.’s familiar relation to all the technology we equate at once with freedom and power and slavery and chaos. For, as with television, whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause — see e.g. catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for nuclear missiles, transplants for assorted rot.
And as with tech, so the gestalt of television expands to absorb all problems associated with it. The pseudo-communities of prime-time soaps like Knots Landing and thirtysomething are viewer-soothing products of the very medium whose ambivalence about the Group helps erode people’s sense of connection. The staccato editing, sound bites, and summary treatment of knotty issues is network news’ accommodation of an Audience whose attention span and appetite for complexity have naturally withered a bit after years of high-dose spectation. Etc.
But TV has technology-bred problems of its own. The advent of consumer cable, often with packages of over 40 channels, threatens networks and local affiliates alike. This is particularly true when the viewer is armed with a remote-control gizmo: Joe B. is still getting his six total hours of daily TV, but the amount of his retinal time devoted to any one option shrinks as he remote-scans a much wider band. Worse, the VCR, with its dreaded fast-forward and zap functions, threatens the very viability of commercials. Television advertisers’ entirely sensible solution? Make the ads as appealing as the programs. Or at any rate try to keep Joe B. from disliking the commercials enough that he’s willing to move his thumb to check out 2½ minutes of Hazel on the Superstation while NBC sells lip balm. Make the ads prettier, livelier, full of enough rapidly juxtaposed visual quanta so that Joe’s attention just doesn’t get to wander, even if he remote-kills the volume. As one ad executive underputs it, “Commercials are becoming more like entertaining films.” 22
There’s an obverse way, of course, to make commercials resemble programs. Have programs start to resemble commercials. That way the ads seem less like interruptions than like pace-setters, metronomes, commentaries on the shows’ theory. Invent a Miami Vice, where there’s little annoying plot to interrupt but an unprecedented emphasis on appearances, visuals, attitude, a certain “look.” 23 Make music videos with the same amphetaminic pace and dreamy archetypal associations as ads — it doesn’t hurt that videos are basically long music-commercials anyway. Or introduce the sponsor-supplied Infomercial that poses, in a lighthearted way, as a soft-news show, like Amazing Discoveries or those Robert Vaughn-hosted Hair-Loss Reports that haunt TV’s wee cheap hours. Blur — just as postmodern lit did — the lines between genres, agendas, commercial art and arty commercials.
Still, television and its sponsors had a bigger long-term worry, and that was their shaky détente with the individual viewer’s psyche. Given that television must revolve off basic antinomies about being and watching, about escape from daily life, the averagely intelligent viewer can’t be all that happy about his daily life of high-dose watching. Joe Briefcase might have been happy enough when watching, but it was hard to think he could be too terribly happy about watching so much. Surely, deep down, Joe was uncomfortable with being one part of the biggest crowd in human history watching images that suggest that life’s meaning consists in standing visibly apart from the crowd. TV’s guilt/indulgence/reassurance cycle addresses these concerns on one level. But might there not be some deeper way to keep Joe Briefcase firmly in the crowd of watchers, by somehow associating his very viewership with transcendence of watching crowds? But that would be absurd. Enter irony.
I’ve claimed — so far sort of vaguely — that what makes television s hegemony so resistant to critique by the new Fiction of Image is that TV has coopted the distinctive forms of the same cynical, irreverent, ironic, absurdist post-WWII literature that the new Imagists use as touchstones. The fact is that TV’s re-use of postmodern cool has actually evolved as an inspired solution to the keep-Joe-at-once-alienated-from-and-part-of-the-million-eyed-crowd problem. The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the Big Face that TV shows us. This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values. And this wider shift, in its turn, paralleled both the development of the postmodern aesthetic and some deep and serious changes in how Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our willingness to be pleased. Not only are sincerity and passion now “out,” TV-wise, but the very idea of pleasure has been undercut. As Mark C. Miller puts it, contemporary television “no longer solicits our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but — like the ads that subsidize it — actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust it inspires in us.” 24
Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works. It concerns a 1985-86 ad that won Clio Awards and still occasionally runs. It’s that Pepsi commercial where a special Pepsi sound-van pulls up to a packed sweltering beach and the impish young guy in the van activates a lavish PA system and opens up a Pepsi and pours it into a cup up next to the microphone. And the dense glittered sound of much carbonation goes out over the beach’s heat-wrinkled air, and heads turn vanward as if pulled with strings as his gulp and refreshed-sounding spirants and gasps are broadcast. And the final shot reveals that the sound-van is also a concession truck, and the whole beach’s pretty population has now collapsed to a clamoring mass around the truck, everybody hopping up and down and pleading to be served first, as the cameras view retreats to an overhead crowd-shot and the slogan is flatly intoned: “Pepsi: the Choice of a New Generation.” Truly a stunning commercial. But need one point out — as Miller’s essay does in some detail — that the final slogan is here tongue-in-cheek? There’s about as much “choice” at work in this commercial as there was in Pavlov’s bell-kennel. The use of the word “choice” here is a dark joke. In fact the whole 30-second spot is tongue-in-cheek, ironic, self-mocking. As Miller argues, it’s not really choice that the commercial is selling Joe Briefcase on, “but the total negation of choices. Indeed, the product itself is finally incidental to the pitch. The ad does not so much extol Pepsi per se as recommend it by implying that a lot of people have been fooled into buying it. In other words, the point of this successful bit of advertising is that Pepsi has been advertised successfully.” 25