The late, great comedian/philosopher Bill Hicks had a marvelous bit about advertising. He had several, actually — advertising was one of the things, like willful ignorance and the Kennedy assassination, that really got that wonderful, hopeful bastard riled — but I have a favorite.
It starts like this:
"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising, kill yourself."
The bit goes on to illustrate Hicks' perception of advertising as parasitic, manipulative, meaningless and wholly unjustifiable by imagining the hushed, admiring conversation of marketing executives in the crowd.
"Oh, Bill's going after the anti-marketing dollar," he hears them saying. "That's a big market."
When Hicks protests to his speculative antagonists that that's not what he's doing, telling them to quit twisting his motives and shut the fuck up, they respond:
"Ooooh, the angry dollar. Huge market."
And so on.
Hicks' unrestrained condemnation of marketing's insidious menace used to resonate deeply with me. I was more than annoyed at corporations' completely transparent attempts to influence my spending. I was insulted that they believed a catchphrase or a jingle or a popular rock song, when married to calculated visuals, could do such a thing. I used to think advertising was beneath contempt.
Now, I'm not so sure.
Several months ago in this column, I related the bizarre and paranoiac effects that not getting TV programming at the Seaside Shack was wreaking on my psyche. I didn't eschew television out of some sort of intellectual snobbery, or as part of a grand sociological experiment. I just didn't want to pay for cable, and my goddamn rabbit ears couldn't pick up anything other than syndicated sitcom characters moving around and saying inane things behind an impenetrable curtain of snowy static. And it's not like I haven't been wasting copious hours in front of the tube — Netflix's menu of TV shows on DVD is to me what Meals on Wheels is to shut-ins, and I'm still kidding myself that I'll eventually get caught up on a season-and-a-half of Lost.
I hadn't been exposed to a great, big, endless parade of television advertisements for nearly a year.
Until last week, when Becks and I sat down on her pink, pitifully sprung sofa and watched all three gloriously misguided hours of the made-for-TV mangling of Stephen King's Desperation on her 19-inch screen.
I don't know if absence really makes the heart grow fonder, but it sure as shit renewed the intensity. The colors were brighter. The highs were higher. The lows were, well, pretty much what you'd expect from watching shitty ads on network TV on a Tuesday night, but they felt even lower, if such a thing is possible.
I felt like a member of a long-forgotten cannibal tribe, plucked from densest Amazonia and instantly deposited in a La-Z-Boy in front of a wall of TVs in the electronics section of Sears. I probably looked like a confused puppy, cocked-headed and trying to figure out if the human in front of me is actually making that noise.
I'm not saying I loved it. Most commercials suck, because the surest way to be wrong is to assume you know exactly how to make someone else want something. That's why the word "stalker," and stiff penalties for being one, exist. And I'm not saying all, or even most of the ads worked; let's face it, if a majority of the decisions you make in your life are governed by what you see between 10-minute intervals of programmed fiction, sliding into a warm bathtub and slitting your wrists to the melancholy sounds of the theme from M.A.S.H. will probably save you a lifetime of disappointment.
What I'm saying is, a prolonged distance from such a pervasive element of American culture has afforded me the opportunity to view it from a different vantage point. But I'm not just able to appreciate ads now, the way a man who's been crawling through the desert for three days can appreciate a warm can of Fresca with a cigarette butt drowned in it.
Now, I recognize commercials as art.
I'm employing a fairly liberal definition of the word "art" here, but it's one with which I think many might agree to some degree or another: a work of creative expression that evokes/provokes an emotional response — be it joy, outrage, whatever — within those who experience it.
The acceptance of television commercials as art under that criteria might involve setting aside the fact that they're only a part of our lives because somebody wants to sell something. But like I said, if you're buying your gum because the TV said four out of five dentists recommended it, your input scarcely warrants consideration.
Of course, most commercials are appallingly bad. They insult our intelligence, our individuality, our taste, our image of ourselves as discerning. But then most of the music that reaches the most ears is appallingly bad. Most of the movies that sell the most tickets are appallingly bad. Most of the landscapes and post-impressionist works and profiles of "Tippy the Turtle" and "Pirate" created by individuals who desperately want to express themselves cause nightmares for anybody who's been to the Louvre.
Then again, some of that stuff is pretty good. A fraction of it is really good.
The same is true of advertisements. Should we fault the final, um, product because its impetus had something to do with the desire for money? Of course not. How many portraits hanging in the world's finest museums got painted because their subjects wanted to sell themselves as noble, and because the artists needed to pay the rent?
And if, when I finally stop laughing at the cell phone commercial where the guy says his phone comes with "theft deterrent" before chucking it at the other guy's head, I turn to Becks and say, "if I didn't already use that service, I'd switch to it," well, what of it?
Sorry, Bill.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2006.