Manic capitalist system fueled by advertising - exploitation in advertising and the gluttony of consumerism

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 7, 1997 by Raymond Schroth

A cemetery. A bunch of well-off mourners all in black bunched around an open grave. Through a windshield we see a gray-faced old man with his eyes closed propped up behind the steering wheel of his car. He is a corpse, and his shiny black automobile with its dead owner in the front seat is solemnly, religiously, descending on the hydraulic lift into its grave. The widow wails hysterically, her plump face twisted in grief and tears; at the last terrible second, turning her eyes away, she extends her hand over the pit -- and drops in the car keys. One mourner turns to the other and says, "She really loved that car."

The logo rolls: Infinity.

Are we offended? I guess so. It takes about 30 seconds, but behind it is an American story that we all may recognize, though it doesn't make our value system look good. A man loves his car so much he would rather be buried in it than leave it to his wife. She mourns not his loss but the lost car. It's a joke of course -- a variation of the man-with-mixed-emotions joke when his mother-in-law drives his car off a cliff.

The difference is that the agency that conceived the ad doesn't just want a laugh. They presume that, at least on some level of consciousness we will buy into the premise: An Infinity is so great that you should love it more than your spouse. So buy one. Now. Or maybe they are making fun of their clients -- of us and our obsession with luxury cars. They want us to laugh at ourselves -- then buy one!

For the most part, advertising does not upset us. Which, unless the ad is political, is just their point. Indeed, it's the thesis of a brilliant new documentary, "The Ad and the Ego" (available from California Newsreel, 149 Ninth Street San Francisco, Calif., 94103, 415-621-6196. Video rental, $95; sale, $195). The film suggests that the advertising industry has trapped us in a total social and economic environment that will limit our freedoms and destroy our planet. It was produced by the same folks who brought us "Fear and Favor in the Newsroom," on how corporate ownership of the press controls the news flow.

Most Americans, the program suggests, see advertising as peripheral to their lives, as messages and images which they can tune in and out and then get on with the ball game or sit-com. Which is just the way the advertising industry wants it: they reach us not through the overt message -- buy perfume -- but through the value atmosphere they create -- gorgeous-naked-Calvin-Klein-models-sure-are-pretty-and-are-having -a-terrific-time -- and if I get some of that perfume, I'll be pretty too.

In short, advertising, in a capitalist country, is not just a part of the cultural or economic system -- a source of information about products you might need -- but is its engine, its driving force.

The documentary's thesis was first spelled out in historian David M. Potter's 1954 classic, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Capitalism can thrive, Potter shows, only in an economy of abundance, where advertising's job is to get people to buy things they will never use. Advertising must goad the populace to consume, and to throw away what they buy, so they will have to buy it again. Contrary to other institutions, like the church and the university, he says, in his most devastating paragraph, "advertising has in its dynamics no motivation to seek the improvement of the individual or to impart qualities of social usefulness, unless conformity to material values can be so characterized."

For this anti-advertising video, California Newsreel has brought together seven scholarly talking heads from the United States and Canada. Most have written books, produced videos, testified before Congress, and, as far as I can tell, have had -- to my regret -- limited impact on public policy.

As they talk, we see: Beautiful women soap up their bodies in the shower and pull down their shorts to reveal their tight-bathing-suited behinds; good-looking guys romp in the surf and hug the giddy girls who greet them on the beach: chubby suburbanites slave over hot dogs on a grill; a naked model, clutching her breasts, strolls through a pub under the ogling eyes of beer guzzlers. Calvin Klein reminds us that the human body is good and beautiful.

If you want a microcosm of the values of the advertising industry, try The New Improved Times Square, -- no longer all porn and prostitutes but a Hell's Kitchen version of Disneyworld, a blazing maze of costly schlock, which may not be sexual porn but a level of gluttonous consumerism not much better.

Here are a few themes from "The Ad and the Ego."

* The rise of advertising coincided with a change in the way we viewed human nature. Prior to World War I, we saw humans primarily as rational beings. In the 1920s, under the influence of Freud and Pavlov, we began to see one another as irrational creatures of instinct, controlled by unconscious desires, and, like Pavlov's dog (who barks all during the film), responsive to whatever stimuli to which we can be conditioned. This coincided, in popular culture, with the triumph of the image over the word. Thus the way to capture a mind is to present symbols that tap the emotions -- the levels of the unconscious that make viewers feel insecure and in need of whatever advertisers can sell.