By Reid Collins on 11.20.03 @ 12:02AM
We are what the ads say we are (alas).
Those who remember the slogan, "Lucky Strike Means Fine
Tobacco," probably recall the early days of television hucksterism
when Betty Furness sold refrigerators simply by opening an
appliance door. She wore an apron over her housewife's dress.
Gone. All gone. The debate now ensues whether the Victoria's
Secret underwear show is a mild form of pornography and what
exactly it is designed to sell. Tall models wearing garments men
would be ashamed to ask for in the store, but mincing along a
runway in that one-foot-in-front-of-the-other manner that tends to
alarm the gluteus muscles battling one another to keep up. The
struggle is ill-disguised by the apparel designated for the event.
And you recall, much more recently than the Lucky Strike ad, there
was a moment when Brooke Shields was estopped from suggesting that
nothing came between her and her Calvin Klein jeans. How
quaint.
If any mode of advertising demarks our time, though, it is
probably the automobile ad. Cars are now advertised for their
horsepower and are shown speeding along highways, spinning out in
dusty arabesques, racing pell mell through crowded city streets,
the heck with the speed limits and the environmentalists.
A poor housewife is suddenly beset by a monster. It threatens
her and wrecks half of the house before she quells it with a broom
stick, forces it back into the garage and finally down into the
hood of the car. Her last words to her departing husband, "You
forgot to lock the car again." In other words, there is a monster
under the hood so powerful it sometimes gets out and terrorizes the
house. As hubby streaks out of the driveway in his new Mercedes,
the voice-over informs us of the hundreds of horsepower endowing
this automobile.
But the unconscious irony is left to the Cadillac ad. A man
wearing a tie and a hat seats himself in a subway car and glances
out the window at the wall advertisement for a long-gone Cadillac
-- one of those graceful, finned creatures that looks a block in
length, probably out of the Seventies. As the subway accelerates,
the car advertisement flickers by and gradually metamorphoses from
the old model into a new 2003 one. It is no longer the sleek
graceful vehicle it once was; it is boxy, similar in shape to
economy cars costing a third its price. And the man has evolved
also. No hat now as he debarks the subway looking at the current
car. And no tie. A white shirt is open at the collar. Like the car,
he has evolved from a gentleman to a guy.
You have to be a certain age to appreciate the unconscious irony
of the Cadillac ad, the unintended consequence of illustrating how
things once were and what they have become.
You probably have to know instinctually what L. S. M. F. T.
stands for. And you have to wonder as they mince down the runway:
do women really wear those things?
topics:
Television, Environment
