Blasters of deceit

ArtForum, Sept, 1998 by Thomas (American writer) Frank

It is an inspiring sight, is it not? This wholesale piercing of veils, this society of pioneers' descendants, noble in their imperviousness to propaganda. Enlightened opinion - whether issuing from cultural-studies departments or the pens of cyberecstatics like George Glider - holds that we have entered a new age of radical democracy; a replaying of 1968 or 1848 or maybe even 1789; a great flowering of heteroglossia, the attunement of a glorious choir of diverse voices. No longer will The People remain passive subjects, washed hither and von by tides of mass-produced entertainment and establishment editorial. One can almost hear the captains of consciousness grumbling in their Cadillacs as they race for safety.

Hear them, that is, were they not so loudly and so boldly leading The People's advance themselves.

Madison Avenue, for one, should have been a prominent victim of the proliferation of critics. It is, after all, among the most dictatorial and openly commercial elements of our national culture. But, after some rough years early in the decade when it briefly seemed that nobody could sell anything to the young, the advertising industry has taken our doubts to heart. Today they cause our tubes to abound with visions of reprehensible fakeness, of the manipulative manufacture of images, and, conversely, of products that stand outside the evil adman's repertoire of deceit. They now go beyond the simple self-referentiality of Energizer Bunnies or Miller Lite's "Dick" spots to encourage our biggest doubts: Doubts about the objectivity of the news. Doubts about the trustworthiness of celebrity testimonials. Doubts about the beneficence of television.

Commercials for the new Fox News cable channel, starring TV journalist Brit Hume and former judge Catherine Crier, bravely encourage viewers to save their most "critical thoughts" for the news hour. Another shows a microphone cable knotted into a hangman's noose and notes how "three out of four Americans believe the news media is biased, that its coverage isn't fair and balanced," but how at Fox, the network owned by the man who virtually invented tabloid journalism, "we believe in trial by jury, not by media."

The swelling of suspicion has also revitalized the most down-to-earth ad campaigns, giving new credibility to that old staple, the man-on-the-street testimonial. Even advertising for products like Clairol Daily Defense, said to be "Haircare for the real world," begins by showing us the mendacity of the false world: "It's easy to get hair this beautiful," a voice sneers over pictures of an overly- made-up blonde, "in a TV commercial!" We gawk as real people develop brand loyalty to the pregnancy test that let them off the hook, as figures whose realness is carefully noted describe their real-life relationship with the practical Hyundai.

Advertising has always been obsessed with authenticity and the sanctity of the brand - think of The Real Thing and our national spats with governments that harbor brand-counterfeiters. But in recent years, with the population aroused against fakeness, this obsession has taken on an air of moral urgency. "Don't Fake the Flava!" screams a billboard pushing Captain Morgan Spiced Rum (an industry leader in the authenticity trade, lately sicking their trademarked pirate on all manner of transparently foolish ads, each of which the jolly buccaneer defaces with his mark). Those oft-analyzed commercials for Sprite embrace a horror not only of media but of money itself - which is then resolved by the assurance that image is nothing, that the virtues of Sprite are a thing beyond the tawdry reach of the marketplace. Radio spots feature jingle-singers who confess, in midjingle, that they are in fact merely hired jingle singers, that their enthusiasm for the lemon-flavored soda water is trumped up; that they have accepted money to work their homogenized magic. TV commercials feature basketball star Grant Hill offering a hypernormal, Muzak-accompanied testimonial about how the lemon-flavored soda "refreshes" him but every time he says something nice about Sprite, cash registers ring and great fat piles of cash appear at the bottom of the screen. He has been paid - paid! - to say these things!

By some weird coincidence, perhaps one of the many made possible by demographics, by the fact that my tastes in TV (along with my oh-so-corrosive doubts about advertising) are as easy to predict as the next guy's, a great deal of the advertising discourse of skepticism/authenticity revolves around sports, particularly basketball. The game is said to be a drama not just of teams, but of dreams, of moral purity and the corrupting forces of the market. Nike used to run ads comparing basketball to revolution in its spiritual intensity, and another series in which old hoopsters talked lovingly about the way the game was played back in the innocent '70s, back before filthy lucre had polluted it. Today there's the rise of the Women's National Basketball Association as an all-around marker of authenticity. Star guard Cynthia Cooper appears in one commercial rhyming about how the WNBA is "keeping it real," and in another for Bud Light, applying her blessing to a manly game of one-on-one. And then there's twenty-year-old LA Laker guard Kobe Bryant, whose promise as the next great athlete-brand is directly linked to his nonmediated style. "Our society has become more sophisticated and can see through a contrived strategy to develop an icon," one marketer working on contriving exactly such an icon recently told Advertising Age. "Kobe Bryant comes across fresh and natural and not contrived." (All of which contrasts with the recent sinking of the commercially overladen Shaquille O'Neal, the Edmund Fitzgerald of pro sports, into the bottomless seas of celebrity overexposure.)