David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

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.” 21Solipsistic 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.” 23Make 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