Is it me, or are the TV commercials more stupid, crass, and insulting than usual? The only ones that interest me (I should say "interested," since the company no longer runs them) are the vignettes by Anacin of working people -- a welder, coal miner, waitress, school teacher, truck driver -- who talk about how they need to get rid of their headaches to do their jobs well. (I'll talk more about these commercials in a minute.) But what does it mean when we have beamed at us quasi-religious experiences with cereal, deodorant commercials where even athletes don't sweat, and the creeping possibility that you might be a computer illiterate, or even raising a brood of them?
We can round up the usual suspects for answers. Some people will declare that the commercials are simply marketing gimmicks and have no metapurpose beyond getting people to buy products. Others will snicker in superior tones about how the commercials reflect vulgar American culture, how we're all acquisitive, fearful, unsecured atoms leeching onto material objects in lieu of spiritual or existential fulfillment. A third group will react against the commercials' want of aesthetic quality, feeling offended that the commercials lack the cultural panache of, say, the muted company announcements on PBS. Geographically, the first group can be found in New York City, the second in the Back Bay in Boston, and the third in Newport, Rhode Island.
All their answers, to the same degree, miss the point. The first group is purely wrong, as Vance Packard pointed out 25 years ago in The Hidden Persuaders. Commercials are mini-myths, the writer's and director's distillation of what he or she sees as the overriding concerns of the society at large. Their effectiveness lies in how well they can exploit those small but corrosive fears we have about our fullness as human beings. The second group feeds off this exploitation in a particular way. American culture has traditions of communal living, radical resistance, and charitable giving in addition to the rapacious history of capitalism, but these traditions have values that must be denied by these often young, often well-schooled, often spoiled benefactors of the nation's wealth. This group needs to believe that the commercials' America is the America so that they can feel above and therefore not responsible for America. They need to deny so much of what America is so that they can justify their avarice -- by the grander terms of entrepreneurism -- and buttress inflated claims of merit and entitlement. They need a bad America to make themselves look good. This is where they overlap with the third group, who see the crassness as a personal affront, having been taught to reduce "the world" to whatever happens to fall within their cataracted and geriatric vision.
Something should be becoming obvious. These three groups are all strung on one common thread: the world they describe, and as well as the world they inhabit, is a specialized one. There is no hunger in it, no disgruntled doctors, no snooping social workers, no leaky plumbing, no lead paint, no police harassment. It is specialized because, as small as it is, it dominates all perception of reality, determines all limits to discussion, directs all production of expenditure and wealth. "The world," the middle-class bourgeois world, like the sun crowds out all other light. What the commercials are beaming at us are messages to keep the faith, fight off the barbarians, indulge all whims, and believe that everyone wants to be like us. It is a call to maintain the fortress of class blindness and prejudice.
Really? Isn't this claim, well, a little radical, a little 60s-ish? Think about it. Yes, we have Orientals on commercials, Blacks, maybe Jews -- and this is supposed to say to the viewer that because Blacks can now make fools of themselves just like whites, equality has finally been achieved, so don't worry, we are all brotherly in this country. Lean Cuisine and Le Menu tell us that food isn't a problem. Bowl cleaners liberate us from guilt, women as vice-presidents can be as surly as men, and the only real problem is choosing the right hair coloring. Things are getting along just fine.
But look at how and what is not included in the well-feeling panorama. No poor people, no working-class people, no homosexuals, nobody that might offend middle-class sensibilities. That's why I applauded the Anacin commercials when they first came out. Not only because they were well-made and elegantly simple, but because they depicted real working people on TV. Yes, the people were actors, the commercials were somewhat sentimental, John Steinbeck doing TV hack work -- but how many times, outside of a Rolaids commercial, have you been forced to see and hear simple people out of a Studs Terkel book? But now even Anacin has fallen prey to the marketing strategy of facts and figures. Recently they have inserted a jangling scientific report in the middle of the actor's monologue, and it ruins the whole quiet integrity of the performance, as if they couldn't trust a viewer to pay attention for 30 seconds without some bells and whistles. (And now the people in the commercials are edging socially upward, med students instead of welders.) Yet, for a moment, the television opened a crack in the myths and another world -- reality -- popped through.
That world, for many, is a frightening one. Statistics do not even come close to measuring it. A simple fact that poverty increased by 15% under Reagan (along with its attendant hunger, disease, and humiliation) and that Reagan's designate for the highest law official in the land can blithely say that there aren't hungry people in this country, should all make us pause in disgust and worry. That it usually doesn't is partly a measure of the commercial world's strength on our imaginations: what we don't see, we cannot know about; what we don't see does not exist. It is also partly due to an unvoiced belief that somehow they belong down there, they deserve their poverty, because if they had the right (read: middle-class) attitudes (read: opportunities, luck and contacts), they would work themselves up and be like us. This is "blaming the victim," as William Ryan called in a book by the same title written in 1971.
That there are poor and hungry in the U.S. is bad enough, but we compound the social and moral dishonor if we believe even for a second that people actively want the degradation and marginal survival that a life of poverty is all about. Some may say that even though we've thrown so many dollars at the problems, they still exist; it must therefore be the fault of the people themselves. Ryan, in his book, again and again shows that the money did not go to the people but into the pockets of bureaucrats who worked hard to keep the poor dependent and powerless to change their lives. A world of pain and starvation, just underneath the commercials' veneer, just outside the fake walnut cabinet of the TV set, walks silently and angrily through the streets of the city. It is a world to which we will have to pay attention either by choice, and thus redeem our moral selves, or by force of circumstance, when the comfortable life is bought at a price too dear for those who do not have.