"Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful: A Commercial In Context"
Figure 1 depicts the thesis of this paper
as a network that pinpoints just how I understand the line, "Don't
hate me because I'm beautiful," to make sense in the context of advertising's
use of idealized images of values people desire.
This figure is based on larger conviction that human experience has structures
that are shared everywhere--in this case, structures deriving from the mind's
inherent idealizing tendency--or, on a more subtle level, the act of categorization
that underlies language.Throughout this paper, I have been implicitly arguing
from the conviction that the human imagination and human emotions have a
high degree of structure, and that structure underlies everything we experience.
This approach stands in sharp contrast to the post-modern belief that human
experience is local and consists of an opaque surface that prohibits us
from finding such structures.
As you can see, however, I have not been able to pull all the ramifications
of even a single line on a single television commercial into a tight focus.
If this were a large topic, I would feel bad about reaching such a diffuse
conclusion; but the small moments of daily life are, I think, the most complicated
to explain.
To summarize: From what appears in advertising today, I conclude that creative,
resourceful, insightful, and unscrupulous people constantly try to discover
what others value most -- then look for some way to hitch their product
to that star. There need be no connection whatsoever.
It is precisely this breaking of the connection between values and means
that is my real subject. By their very nature, few products can help us
attain the ideals that are "visually promised" in so many commercials--ideals
such as family togetherness, personal power, self-esteem, sociability, authoritativeness,
security, sex appeal, and clear orientation in a confusing world. The promiscuous
coupling of so many products with so many ideals promotes a deep confusion.
Williamson called the results a kind of surrealism:
"All ads are surreal in a sense: they connect disparate objects in strange formal systems, or place familiar objects in locations with which they have no obvious connection. We are so familiar with perfume bottles haunting desert islands and motor cars growing in fields of buttercups that their surreal qualities go unremarked. (Dali's 'Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach' could be the description of an everyday advertisement." (1986, 69)
Advertising is a diverse field, of course, and not all commercials exploit
ideal images or imply that products will deliver values. But commercials
driven by value-laden images which are unrelated to the product may be alienating
us from the very values they exploit, confusing us about how to attain those
values, laying the groundwork for despair, resentment, and apathy, and even
prompting us to turn outside the culture to seek ideals that do not seem
corrupted. Perhaps advertising will make Buddhists of us all.
Head-down in the midst of this tangled web hangs hate--hatred of the product
that fails to link us to the ideal, hatred of anything that reminds us of
the tormentingly unattainable ideal, hatred of ourselves for still yearning
for the exhaustingly unattainable ideal, hatred of commercials for exploiting
our deepest yearnings, and hatred of those supernormally beautiful people
who promise us values but deliver only products.
And yet, at the heart of this hatred lies the remarkable depth and simplicity
of human longing--a longing for life, ideals, values, vitality, and love.
A longing for connection. For beauty. It is a longing that projects itself
optimistically through symbols, images, and idealized concepts, then draws
a world together in the spaces between what can be imagined and what is.
It is in those spaces--cosmic spaces silently inhabiting our smallest thoughts--that
we hear the resonance of "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."
And it is in those very spaces that we can create other relations between
ourselves and the unattainable images of advertising, media, and culture.
And we can create a relation other than hate. Indeed, our main alternative
is to create--to create a context more generous and expansive than the inevitable,
controlling simplifications of the images we inherit, and even of the images
we make.
For, contrary to the commercial, we are not the haters of unattainable beauty,
we are the creators of ideals of beauty, creators of ideals of all kinds.
And in us lives the power to translate those ideals into reality. We are
not, as the commercial seems to presume, separated from fulfillment by an
unbridgeable gap and despairingly dependent on a missing messiah. We are
the gap. We are the longing. And we are the bridge.
The real challenge is to look knowingly--even affectionately--at media,
advertising, culture, conventions, and all human forms, and reclaim ourselves
as participants and co-creators in the world of images that limits us as
it sets us free.
Conclusion
In discussing a single line on a single television commercial, I
have sought to provide the most fundamental requirement for interpreting
meaning: a context that makes sense of it (Douglas, 1970, 37). Unfortunately,
there is no procedure for identifying the correct, best, or even a good
context by which to bring meaning to a given event. But because the line
turns on "hate" and because the commercial uses some of the strategies
that have led critics to call advertising a form of religion, perhaps terms
from the traditional moral vocabulary have provided an appropriate context
for interpreting the commercial. I have considered the commercial a "mythic"
way for ritually discharging envy, and I have argued that the neglected
universal emotions of despair, envy, and hate are potential byproducts of
the cognitive strategies employed in certain types of advertising.
This paper has sought to open up a fleeting, seemingly trivial moment--a
single line of a single television commercial--in order to glimpse the intricate
symbolic resonances that we share under the guise of ordinary reality.
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