A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (13 page)

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.

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