A coffin manufacturing company specializing in watertight caskets advertises its macabre merchandise by contending: “There’s deep consolation … for those who know the casket of a dear one is protected against water in the ground …” This unfathomable statement is borne out by two pictures: a technical drawing demonstrating the casket’s impermeability and the photo of a girl serene in the knowledge that her loved one will not suffer from the rain to which she is actually exposing herself. The whole is on a level with Evelyn Waugh’s satire of American funeral rites.
And this nightmarish ad appeared in a weekly that reaches many millions of readers. Strange things are going on in our immediate surroundings. Let us, for once, take a look at them.
All popular advertisements try to engage us totally. Not content with interesting us in this or that product and for the rest leaving us in peace, they insatiably encroach on our thought processes and behavior patterns in general. To this end they more often than not cook up stories entirely unconnected with the articles they promote. It is as if the advertising agencies were guided by the conviction that the average individual will buy coffee or sanitary napkins only if he has such and such a personality structure. Hence their overwhelming desire for psychological domination. American ads sneak, octopus-like, into the remotest recesses of our minds, in a continuous effort to expand their hold on us.
Ours is a competitive society. It would therefore seem natural that the general views which, for instance, a soap manufacturer attempts to put over to us differ to some extent from those of a car manufacturer. Yet actually the contrary holds true: economic rivalry goes hand in hand with a complete consensus in the ideological field. The dream of the soap and the car manufacturer are strictly identical. However different their products, a1l advertisers propagandize one and the same Weltanschauung, one and the same outlook on life.
And in spreading this uniform message. (which will be discussed shorty), all of them urge us to accept it unreservedly. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of ads is their insistence on conformity. They aim at eliminating social diverseness and unconventional characters; and they ruthlessly regiment taste and manner down to the smallest detail. A popular hair tonic ad has it that a boy with disheveled hair may well estrange his girl from him.” How can a man as clever as he,” the girl asks gloomily, “be so blind about his appearance?” Fortunately, the worst is averted. Upon her advice he uses the tonic and thus turns from a maladjusted individual into a regular fellow who reconquers the sympathies he was on the point of losing. In this way numerous ads threaten any freakish dissenter with the loss of love or social status.
Evidently this persistent plea for conformity is bound up with the requirements of mass production. Highly standardized goods cannot find sufficient outlets unless they satisfy highly standardized needs. The souls must come from the assembly line also, or else they may not absorb what really comes from it. As the world is shrinking and supply is apt to surpass demand, this tendency to condition—or, rather, precondition—the buying public psychologically is likely to increase. We are living in an era in which psychological imperialism supersedes political imperialism for the sake of a more intensive market policy.
And what kind of life do the ads hold out to us? It is a life of, by, and for the young. Most ad characters, I should guess, are below 30, if not plain ‘teen-agers, including many married couples whom no one would credit with being married at so adolescent a stage was it not for the lovely children bestowed upon them by the commercial designers. The sight of these boys and girls is somewhat confusing because all of them look alike—pictorial testimonies to the urge for conformity behind ads. That they are glad to conform can be inferred from the boy in the above-mentioned hair tonic ad who begins to smile immediately after having normalized his disheveled hair. He is heretic returned to the fold. Like him everybody smiles—it is as if the Cheshire Cat had left behind its smile for general distribution. And the present owners of the smile, all these beautiful and healthy young people, radiate a confidence which reveals their ignorance of its weird origins.
They smile for good reasons.
First, life, as it were, offers them plenty of gratifications. Even the drudging housewives and gas station attendants manifest a cheerfulness which marks their seeming chores as veritable Pleasures. And most people are never seen drudging. If they are not kept busy by such outdoor activities as sports and travels, they usually indulge in the more intimate charms of nature. The scene is crowded with loving couples in closeup, after the manner of Hollywood films. A radio-television unit sets them dancing, and a dental cream stimulates them to a tête-à-tête as tender as it is hygienic. But perhaps the greatest enjoyment is family life, what with snapshots being taken of baby, homely fireplaces, folksy Main Street views, and nationally reputed beverages in the garden. Between porch and airliner, motionless well-being and utter speed, nothing is omitted in this itinerary of pastimes and diversions.
Secondly, wealth, prestige and power seem just around the corner. Here is where the middle-aged and old come in, who naturally keep on smiling. A few less privileged among them, it is true, have grown old only to tell us that a particular car tire lasts ten years and longer, or that the traditional ice cream Dixies are still the best. But the rest of them figure in the social register and the high income brackets—a choice tribe of presidents, vice-presidents and other business leaders. They thrive in the rarefied air of country clubs and Pullman suites, put in a shining appearance on social occasions, and surround themselves with de luxe secretaries, lords, prominent stars and expensive paintings. This display of glamor is obviously intended to suggest that it lies in the order of things for the young to become, in due time, big executives also. Everybody is predestined, to success. It may sound paradoxical, but even those, who, by an unexplainable whim of fate, do not precisely get to the top, are in a certain sense as successful as are the chosen ones. This is demonstrated by the many ads which show vice-presidents and genuine aristocrats reveling in some commonplace article, thus giving Tom, Dick and Harry the pleasant feeling that they are actually on a par with the upper crust. Any bottle of beer does the trick.
Thirdly, all these characters smile, it appears, because they are confident that nothing will ever interfere with their enjoyments and achievements. They live in an atmosphere of complete security, inaccessible to rumors of unemployment and failure. One may object here that, for instance, life insurance ads are bound to spread this atmosphere in the interest of their sponsors; that it is indeed their very business to exercise the nightmare of lean years to come by glowing pictures of middle-aged policy holders who, in a state of perfect contentment, are whiling their time away on the inevitable porch. But other ads with no such obligations follow exactly the same pattern. Whenever they conjure up the old frontier spirit—a giant truck meeting a ghost caravan of covered wagons, a mail coach stopping at a Wells-Fargo station—they usually do so with definite pride in present-day safety. And they invariably convey the impression that is the business enterprises they portray resemble our Constitution in their aloofness from the ugly vicissitudes of cycles and crises. Occasionally, this impression is deepened by a glorying in successful laboratory research which implies that such trials never entail errors. Ad characters need not even fear.
And finally, they are justified in believing that their blissful lives are going to continue forever. The ads create this illusion of a heaven on earth by omitting death and all that leads up to it. To be sure, undertakers and casket manufacturers want to have their say also. But they interfere only in isolated cases; and the ad for impermeable caskets, mentioned at the outset of my article, proves conclusively that their discretion is as waterproof as are their caskets. For even though this ad does not conceal the fact that our dear ones sometimes disappear, it so insistently dwells upon the technical perfection of their future abodes that we are led to think of their disappearance as a removal to just another and more comfortable place. It is merely a change of domicile after all. Like the characters in old epics, those in ads live eternally.
Much as they are privileged, however, they should not be mistaken for Fortuna’s favorites who reap a harvest they never sowed. Rather, they get what they get by deliberately reaching out for it. From the moment at which the first snap-shots of them are taken until such time as they depart for an unmentioned destination, they leave nothing to chance in their pursuit of happiness.
Ad characters are born planners. Here again I do not refer to their conduct in insurance ads which of course urge them to be prudent and farsighted, but to the way they scheme and act under less exacting circumstances. An ad for Pullman lounge cars lays bare the taut aspirations behind their effortless smile. In that car a gentleman of distinction and a college boy engage in a conversation which sets the latter raving soberly: “You meet regular people—your kind—in the lounge car. Me, I’m on good terms already with this Big Executive who’s suggested I see him about a job next June: “ These characters never relish an enjoyable situation without speculating on how to improve further their chances. Not even the ecstasy of love makes them forget the future in the present. It would seem natural for a boy to fall into incoherent stammer while embracing his girl before moonlit birch trees; instead, he voices in well-set words his dream of the home they will have and the chests or silver spoons they will buy.
Yet in being so preoccupied with their own future, these charming go-getters fulfil a mission transcending them.
They are not satisfied unless they get better refrigerators, milder cigarettes, smoother cars. Since for obvious reasons ads never mention the less recommendable refrigerators, cigarettes and cars to which they compare the praised ones, the words “better,” “milder” and “smoother” are left hanging in midair—comparative which, for being grammatically impossible, all the more connote the idea of technological progress. In many ads explanatory statements reveling in improvements achieved, corroborate this implication of the fragmentary comparatives. All ad characters are progressive-minded. And they seem convinced that anything milder or smoother adds something invaluable to life in general; that technical progress infallibly results in human progress. Their conviction of a pre-established harmony between better machinery and better humanity gives their smile an ideal quality.
This then is, in one summary sentence, the American dream, as told by the ads in our popular magazines: the happily conforming young aspire to success and manage to attain it, thereby serving the ideal of progress. The dream sounds familiar. In fact, the magazine contents themselves resemble so closely the ads with which they alternate, that we sometimes find it difficult to differentiate between commercial inserts and pictorial or literary contributions. No Life reader will be immune to this delusion. It is a legitimate one, for in effect ads supplement rather than interrupt what popular magazines see fit to print. Commercials and editorials are often interchangeable. Many a Saturday Evening Post story advertises the very ideas which the interspersed ads narrate in true story fashion.
To be sure, the dream is a dream; and we do not depend on wild guesses to reveal it as such. A glance at the nonfiction bestseller list suffices. For a long time, the two books “Peace of Mind” and “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” have succeeded in topping that list. The inevitable conclusion is that the counterparts in real life of the happy housewives and gas station attendants in the ads suffer from a lack of peace and do a great deal of worrying. They must be psychologically dissatisfied, or else they would not be spellbound by the magic of those book titles. That many of them are living under a mental strain is further confirmed by the ever-increasing vogue for psychoanalysis and the widespread concern with psychosomatic medicine—sciences which would hardly have become so popular were it not for a general want of emotional stability. All of this gives the lie to the pretended happiness of ad characters.
What are people worrying about? At first glance it seems hopeless to try to get an answer from the ads themselves, for they naturally deny the existence of any such worries. And yet it pays to question them. The reason is that effective mass propaganda must respond to real mass needs. Even Goebbels at his most fanciful could not manipulate away the vestiges of independent public opinion, but had to cope with them somehow and somewhere, thus enabling us to draw reasonable conclusions as to their nature. The same applies to ads: they cannot afford to pass over reality, however hostile, with a slight of hand, because its complete neglect might interfere with our acceptance of their propaganda messages. Of course, they attempt to camouflage real life by oblique innuendos and powerful suggestions; yet even so it is still present, and its smoldering presence is bound to affect the dream fabric they are weaving. Beneath this manifest dream story there runs another, less glamorous story which can be inferred from two problematic features of the dream itself: the ads’ strange preoccupation with security and their wholesale absorption in the planning of success.
What is strange in their insistence on security is its one-sidedness. Ads are true products of a system rooted in competition with its inherent risks. One should therefore expect them to draw on the thrill of high stakes, on that adventurous spirit which underlies so many of our achievements. Instead, they feature a life in which safety prevails over adventure and the motif of contest emerges only in the field of sports—when some advertiser finds it opportune to refer to a horse race or a baseball champion. But this reluctance to acknowledge the fact of competition is inexplicable unless it is traced to a concern with actually existing mass dispositions. Through their singular bias in favor of security the advertising agencies betray their awareness that people are harassed by the lack of it. And their soothing language seems calculated to allay apprehensions.
In the light of this knowledge a new meaning accrues to a special tyro of ads—the foot ads, with their screaming colors and their giant displays of cuts of meat, tomato slices, and luscious pies. They are suggestive of an infatuation with food which often grows out of a state of anxiety or depression. A Canadian-made documentary film, The Feeling of Hostility, illustrates this familiar experience through the case history of a woman who, at a certain moment of her life, gobbles enormous quantities of sweets to compensate for her frustrations.
To be sure, this shrill and oversized victual cannot sufficiently be explained by culinary excesses in the wake of emotional troubles; but what may once have been a naive expression of bouncing vitality is now, I guess, being upheld by the feeling of insecurity that sweeps the masses.
The way ads emphasize the planning of success points to another source of general disquiet. Ad characters organize their lives with such an incomparable smoothness that we feel they have no psychological difficulties to overcome in getting along nicely. Nothing within them resists their upward flight; they seem devoid of unruly instincts and impracticable fancies. And what originality they possess is being used up in the process of climbing. Take the Whiskey ads: most of them appeal merely to the social ambitions of prospective buyers, implying that they are animated not so much by a genuine passion for Whiskey as the burning desire to “belong.” Smiling eagerness for careers consumes the purposeless; love ceases to be an end in itself, as is evidenced by the ad with the two would-be lovers before moonlit birch trees. This indifference to self-sufficient human relations reaches its peak in an amazing ad for a new station wagon model: standing before the shining vehicle, a young man, possibly its owner, chats with a radiant young woman, and the caption, underlined in red, affirms: “The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship:” The delighted reader is led to believe that he has finally come across a commercial which extols tender leanings for their own sake: yet no sooner does he continue reading than he learns that the beautiful friendship is meant to develop between the car owner and his car. Alas, the car’s attractiveness outshines the sex appeal of the young woman.
Ad characters impress us as empty creatures. This impression is intensified by a few exceptional ads which, for whatever reasons, picture the opposite state of mind—emotional fullness. One of them, an ad for watches, shows an elderly couple taking leave of each other at an airport; untouched by the stirring bustle about them, both are visibly under the spell of emotions that evade measurement. They inhabit a universe in which slow growth and inner experience count more than space-devouring speed and surface glamor. It is the universe in which music evolves. This probably accounts for the presence of similarly mellow and cultured people in an isolated radio ad—people who, as they listen to the music from an expensive radio set, seem to defy the hollowness of chronological time. Stray visitors in the world of the ads, they and the elderly couple make us acutely aware of the shortcomings of its permanent residents—their two-dimensional flatness, their futile predilection for time-saving gadgets. What will the industrious housewives do with the time thus saved? The same problem is posed by the declared favorites of life insurance ads, those prematurely retired policy holders on their porches who represent nothing but infinite boredom.
In emphasizing their characters’ unflinching purposefulness, ads reflect a widespread, economically desirable attitude. American mass production is, itself, a matter of methodical planning and calculating; and it naturally works at full steam only if it is supported by people susceptible to its demands. These people exist not only in ads; nor are they emotionally more articulate than ad characters. We know what they are like. Sinclair Lewis has exposed their inner workings, and John Marquand in his novels never tires of elaborating upon the atmosphere of emptiness that pervades our society.
Ads cannot help revealing this emptiness. At the same time, they try hard to minimize it, thus inadvertently admitting that many people currently suffer from the void within and about them. The dream must be cloudless. Hence the advertising agencies’ desperate attempt to pass off technological advance as progress in general, human or otherwise—an equation difficult to maintain in the era of the atomic bomb. That they nevertheless perpetuate such an obvious illusion betrays their (presumably unconscious) desire to make up for the mass frustration from emptiness. The device is simple: people who believe themselves to be the standard-bearers of “progress” will be less aware of their lack of really substantial ideals. The idea of progress serves to ennoble the streamlined efficiency with which they rush ahead of the moment, even the most precious, in which they are actually living.
At this point the omnipresence of the young, in particular the “teen-agers” becomes understandable. The gratifications lavished on them in ads make them appear superficial, if not callous, in comparison with the elderly couple in the watch ad mentioned above. But youth is justified in behaving this way because it is still remote from death and because it can acquire experience only by playing around. A certain emptiness is natural for it. This may strengthen the publicity agents’ determination to concentrate on youth. In doing so, they not only conform to a general trend which is what they want to do anyway, but achieve, probably without intending it, something more specific—they challenge the public to identify itself with an age group which need not feel frustrated for temporarily drifting along in a vacuum. The very emptiness which causes many to look out for books like “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” is thus impressed upon us as a normal, by no means unpleasant state of mind. The whole amounts to an attempt to wheedle adults out of their frustrations by making them adolescents once more.
Here arises the problem of accounting for the tremendous impact of ads. Their flaws show glaringly; and many of their appeals and insinuations are too silly to deceive anyone in his senses. Yet all this does not prevent publicity agents from clinging doggedly to such doubtful patterns. And they certainly have the know-how.
Ads lure the masses for three reasons, the first of which is precisely their dream quality. But why does this particular dream with its boundless optimism, its undiscriminating promise of success and its naive outlook on human affairs prove so attractive? The answer is that it is a left-over from those days which Coolidge epitomized in declaring that the business of America is business. It is an obsolete dream, long since discredited by history. This, however, makes it all the more irresistible, for it caters to popular longings for that time of expansion and prosperity when, it appears, life was less involved and private initiative of more consequence. A clever mixture of Main Street mentality and managerial slickness, current ads look very much up-to-date; yet actually they are the last stragglers from the era that preceded the Great Depression. And nothing compares in splendor with the nostalgic memory of things irretrievably gone.
Secondly, ads are so effective because they are more than a dream. Their dream quality is every now and then suspended; their escapism is not consistent enough to conceal unescapable reality. Ads hint of the truth, if only by implication. And most people will grasp the truth instinctively. They will realize, however dimly, that the relation established in ads between planning and emptiness has a bearing on their own lives, and that the stereotyped smile of ad characters is in effect a smile under the stress of insecurity. As they look at ads, people may be haunted by the vision of the Cheshire Cat taking shape again and reclaiming the smile from its present owners, those insouciant housewives, gas station attendants and college students. But instead of disrupting the spell of ads, the reappearance of this weird animal increases their attractiveness. It causes the public constantly to waver between the two opposite poles of ads—the dream of happiness they spread and the pressure of the reality they admit. The psychological result is that the dream mitigates that pressure, which in turn makes the dream seem more palpable. This intermingling of life as it is and life as it might be having the intoxicating power of a drug.
And thirdly, ads are animated by an almost religious passion for producing and selling goods. Much as they affect us through their mixture of dream and reality, the very secret of their impact is this passion, which imbues any hair tonic or coffee manufacturer with the certitude that he has a gospel to impart, a mission to fulfil. His is so absorbing a belief in the immense signification of his particular product that he feels urged to propagandize, along with it, his whole outlook on Life—a life centering round shampoos or coffee beans. I have said at the beginning that all ads tend to engage us totally; this tendency must, at least in part, be traced to the advertisers’ missionary zeal which often stirs them or their publicity agents to turn into veritable bards. “You’ll be walking on air,” a piece of authentic poetry reads, “… you’ll be dancing with joy … you’ll be feeling smug as silk … once you have the body under the slimming, trimming, smoothing, soothing influence of this.….. girdle or panty-girdle.” It is the girdle, not the girl wearing it, that kindles this emotional conflagration. The passion enlivening commercials bears exclusively on merchandise, as the above-mentioned station wagon ad reveals once and for all through its express advocacy of responses to goods instead of responses to persons: its caption, “The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship!” creates the illusion of the car owner’s concern with his female companion for the sole purpose of driving home his amorous feelings for the ear.
Yet for all its indifference to human values this impassioned interest in business is something promising—a symptom of unbroken vitality, an expression of the creative energies instrumental in American life. Ads are so impressive because the vigor of the passion pervading them endows their otherwise problematic dream of youth and progress with a certain meaning. Besides serving as a means of escape, this dream manifests a belief in the future which is sustained by the existence of those creative energies. Why should they benefit only business? And the same belief in the future makes the glimpses of reality which ads afford appear less frightening. We somehow feel confident that our vitality will enable us to overcome both insecurity and emptiness.
Strong stimulants produce strong effects. Through their perpetual emphasis on conformity ads, along with the other media of mass communication, promote a state of mind which, should it further gain ground, would give the lie to that belief in the future. There are, to be sure, times when nonconformist behavior assumes threatening proportions; but at present the graver danger is what I have called “psychological imperialism”—a tendency, powerful in this country, to prefabricate souls as if they were houses. Ads belong among its most common carriers. The kind of conformity they propagandize not only undermines our creative faculties but helps increase the emptiness about us, thus favoring dispositions for such substitutes as race bias and authoritarian rule.
Fortunately, propaganda has its limits. Speaking of our press, film and radio, Harold J. Laski in his book, The American Democracy (New York, 1948, pp. 622–23), remarks that “the power of those who own and operate these major instruments of propaganda is always being challenged and is never as effective as, superficially, it might seem that it ought to be. There is something in the psychological climate of America which resists any ultimate regimentation of behavior or opinion. Something always escapes the net which is thrown about the people. Nonconformity is an element in American life which is always called into being by the spectacle of conformity.” This statement has been clinched by the results of the November election.1
Our belief in the future is fairly warranted if we continue to disregard the gratuitous intimations of polls—or of ads, for that matter. Should this happen, then I foresee a time in which ad characters will drop their out-to-pattern smile; for ads not only influence people but are, on their part, influenced by what people do and think. Much can be done of which publicity agents are currently unaware. It seems possible, for instance, to feature a shampoo without contending that a boy with disheveled hair cannot be loved. It also seems possible to advertise watertight caskets and yet have death retain its dignity. Someday such possibilities may materialize. This would be a good sign indeed.
NOTE
1. Harry S. Truman, candidate of the Democratic Party, won the U.S. presidential election in 1948.—Eds.