"Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful: A Commercial In Context"
Near the end of Ways of Seeing, John Berger describes advertising
in terms of envy. Advertising "proposes to each of us that
we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more....
[Advertising] persuades us of such a transformation by showing
us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result,
enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour."
And advertising (he uses the British term, "publicity")
"is the process of manufacturing glamour." (131) Advertising,
he concludes, is about the solitary happiness that comes from
being envied by others.
In this sense, envy implies the admiration of others. This "envy"
suggests that others might covet your possessions, looks, manner,
etc., and want to be like you. Surely Berger is right in a way;
advertisers must want us to want to be like those beautiful people
in the ads. But envy has a dark side which has largely been lost
to twentieth-century thought. For at least a thousand years, a
distinction has been made among envy, coveting, and jealousy.
You are jealous to protect something you already have. You covet
what you want but do not have. Coveting and jealousy are minor
sins. But since medieval times, envy has been considered a major
term for identifying the causes of human suffering. In many versions
of the Seven Deadly Sins, envy took first or second place. According
to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, from envy come "hatred,
calumny, detraction, and many types of malevolent behavior."
In Purgatorio, Canto XIII, Dante meets Sapia, whose punishment
for malicious envy--she rejoiced to see her countrymen lose in
battle--was to have her eyelids sewn shut with steel wire. Plotting
the death of Cassio, Iago tossed off these chilling lines: "If
Cassio do remain,/ He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That makes
me ugly." (Othello, V.I.18- 20). Shakespeare's audience would
almost certainly have recognized this as an instance of envy.
Modern writings on envy are rare, but the German sociologist,
Helmut Schoeck, has produced a rich, scholarly volume on the subject:
Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. In his review of what great
thinkers have said about envy, he quotes Nietzsche's compelling
definition: "When some men fail to accomplish what they desire
to do, they exclaim angrily, 'May the whole world perish!' This
repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is,
'If I cannot have something, no one is to have anything, no one
is to be anything!'" (179) Schoeck argues that envy is a
universal drive that ranges from a spiteful Schadenfreude (malicious
glee at another's misfortune) to horrible acts of mutilation and
murder for no other reason than that the perpetrator felt belittled
by the accomplishments of the victim.
I covet when I want something I do not have; I can covet my neighbor's
wife, car, house, talents, or achievements. Coveting, indeed,
may be one of the virtuous vices of a competitive economy; but
there is nothing virtuous about envy. Coveting says, "He
has it; I want it." Envy, though, says: "If I can't
have it, nobody can."
Envy is frustrated desire turned destructive. Envy is what leads
a child to break another child's favorite toy, or a boss to frustrate
a talented employee. In the play and film, Amadeus, Salieri enacts
a highly theatrical version of envy as he sets out to destroy
Mozart for effortlessly writing music far greater than all Salieri's
labors can produce. Impotent to attain the ideal, the envious
person feels destructive toward it. Like despair, envy derives
from the separation of the person from the object of desire, combined
with a sense that one is powerless to attain what is desired (Schoeck,
17). In envy, the urge to reach out becomes the urge to destroy.
Envy seems to be a difficult concept for the modern mind. In their
recent collection of wise quotes on almost every subject, Good
Advice, for example, William Safire and Leonard Safir confuse
envy with coveting and jealousy. I have given up finding the meaning
of envy in Britannica III. In November, 1987, Harper's ran a parody
in which a different agency produced an ad for each of the Seven
Deadly Sins. Many of the sins were represented both keenly and
humorously. The advertisement based on envy, however, left one
with the feeling that envy was an amplified form of griping. Going
back as far as the turn of the century, Schoeck consulted decades
of American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology,
The British Journal of Sociology, and other prominent journals--without
finding "a single instance of 'envy,' 'jealousy,' or 'resentment'
in the subject indexes." (9) Anyone unconvinced of the reality
of envy will find the case argued well by Schoeck. It is remarkable
that such an ancient and powerful concept can have disappeared
from the moral landscape of educated people. It is even more remarkable
that a television commercial could bring it back to mind.
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[Added Oct. 16, 2007] Some recent images document the way "envy" is frequently used in a positive, even assertive way, as if to say, "This is something really good. Don't you wish you had it?"
And finally, Envy, the Las Vegas steakhouse:
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Advertising as Mythology
From a variety perspectives, different writers have concluded
that advertising is the consumer culture's version of mythology.
Such is the theme of Leymore's book, Hidden Myth:
"No society exists without some form of myth. Once this is
realized, it is not very surprising that a society which is based
on the economy of mass production and mass consumption will evolve
its own myth in the form of the commercial. Like myth it touches
upon every facet of life, and as a myth it makes use of the fabulous
in its application to the mundane." (156)
The sociologist Peter Berger, not quick to embrace the structuralist
approach of Leymore, defines myth as "a conception of reality
that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience
by sacred forces" (1967, 110). A few hours' worth of television
will show you "sacred forces" at work transforming people
and products, working magic, causing cats to sing, rescuing victims
from halitosis, body odor, and other fates worth than death--all
on commercials which are strong candidates to meet Berger's definition
of myth.
In order to understand why the makers of a commercial would want
to evoke hate and envy, we must recall a central function of myths.
In his book comparing Piaget and Levi-Strauss, Howard Gardner
wrote:
"Myths are designed to deal with problems of human existence which seem insoluble; they embody and express such dilemmas in a coherently structured form, and so serve to render them intelligible. Through their structural similarity to given 'real world' situations, myths establish a point of repose or equilibrium at which men can come to grips with the crucial components of the problem, and become aware of the 'fix' they are in. Thus, a myth is both intellectually satisfying and socially solidifying." (148)
A sharp summary of this view comes from Jonathan Price, at the
end of his anecdotal study, The Best Thing on TV: Commercials:
"Myths [and commercials] also help us express and control in a safe way, impulses that could potentially tear our society apart.... They arouse our deepest impulses toward sex, violence, and faith, and they express these instincts while at the same time keeping that expression aesthetic, rather than physical, thus saving our society from the potential chaos of orgies and massacre." (158, 162)
To see evidence for this kind of mythology at work, turn to the
magazine version of this television commercial--as it appeared,
say, in the May, 1988, Elle. On the left, a full-page, color picture
of the model's gorgeous face bears the bold headline: "Don't
hate me because I'm beautiful." Facing her is a page containing
a block of text and a small black and white photo of the same
model looking like a wet puppy: her hair stringy, disheveled,
and (especially) dull, half her face pleading, the other half
pained and shadowed. The viewer of this ad does not need to ponder
an envious attack upon the gorgeous model; the attack has been
accomplished for you in the small picture. It is a ritual, surrogate
defacement. One is given the satisfaction of seeing her defaced,
without having to feel the full power of envy, violence, and guilt.
The print version of the commercial supports the possibility that
the ad was designed to arouse and appease the specific emotion
of destructive envy. From this perspective, the commercial acts
as a surrogate myth for viewers whose cultural myths are not adequate
to help them identify and deal with the socially destructive emotion
of envy.
Beauty, Hate, and Religion
Now that I have reached a neat conclusion, I have to complicate
things by emphasizing that envy is only part of the story, and
there is another way of looking at "myth." In The Rhetoric
of Religion, Kenneth Burke analyzed the opening chapters of Genesis
as the sequential spinning-out of a series of relationships that
were essentially simultaneous--a horizontal version of a vertical
story, so to speak. Burke wrote, "'Myth' is characteristically
a terminology of quasi-narrative terms for the expression of relationships
that are not intrinsically narrative, but 'circular', or 'tautological.'"
(1970, 258) The context in which I want to view "Don't hate
me because I'm beautiful" is mythic in Burke's technical
sense. It is a linear, narrative version of what I believe to
be a set of cognitive and emotional structures inherent in the
kind of advertising we have been discussing.
I am proposing a mAP Test, That locates beauty, advertising and
hatred in a relationship to one another. Hate, on this map, can
be reached from several directions. The fullest route comes through
envy, after passing through the despair caused by believing in
media images that offer inadequate means for attaining the ideals
they depict. Beauty--with highlights in its conditioned hair--sits
among those unattainable ideal images. (See Figure 1). After finding
out ten thousand times that the product does not provide the psychological
reward implied in the commercial, why should one not hate the
teasing, unattainable image of the beautiful model who makes the
promises?
If we hate her, it may not be for being intrinsically beautiful
in her own right, but because she is part of a conspiracy--a conspiracy,
among other things, to appropriate our idea of what is beautiful,
along with other ideals, values, and longings--and tell us that
only by consuming products can we attain them. We may hate her
because, being "beautiful," she reminds us of all the
values that we--as good viewers, bombarded by yearnings, yet left
with no instructions but to consume--are cut off from. We may
hate her not for being a sexual tease, but for being part of a
system that teases and frustrates our need for valued states of
being--such as family togetherness, community, self-confi-dence--and
beauty.
There may, then, be reasons to hate her--"her" being
the image in the commercial. Hate, however, is but one node in
a web of reactions--and a particularly difficult place to settle.
You might be able to sustain hatred if you had a specific object:
something, someone to become the hated center of your life, the
great counter-motivating force. But less-focussed hatred is nearly
impossible to sustain; it leads past the beautiful models and
their beautiful products to a soul-wearying exhaustion--fatigue--inertia.
No doubt people arrive at apathy through other routes; but this
pathway will suffice: from impossible ideals, through disillusion
and envy to the exhaustion that lies on the other side of a wearying
and impotent hatred.
Because products do not provide the kind of psychic payoff promised
by the imagery of advertising, we are left to doubt whether anything
can. If we follow this doubt, we wind up contemplating the state
of mind in which a black hole surrounds almost every product like
a ghostly negative of its radiance--the black hole of failed promise.
And into this black hole, dug by advertising's exploitation of
so many ideal images, steps any religion that promises to cut
through the cycle of idolatry and connect us with the one great
ideal that transcends all others: God, immortality, cosmic consciousness,
enlightenment, the spirit world, the deep self, the light, or
whatever name It has. In using techniques that are fundamentally
religious, advertising inadvertently advertises religion.
Conrad (1982, 117), Jhally (1987, 197, 203), Williamson (1978,
12) and others have plainly labelled advertising a form of religion.
Jhally cites a marvelous passage from drama critic Martin Esslin:
"The TV commercial, exactly as the oldest known types of theater, is essentially a religious form of drama which shows us human beings as living in a world controlled by a multitude of powerful forces that shape our lives.... The moral universe...is dominated by a sheer numberless pantheon of numberless forces, which literally reside in every article of use or consumption, in every institution of daily life. If the winds and waters, the trees and brooks of ancient Greece were inhabited by a vast host of nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and other local and specific deities, so is the universe of the TV commercial. The polytheism that confronts us here is thus a fairly primitive one, closely akin to animistic and fetishistic beliefs...We may not be conscious of it, but this is the religion by which most of us actually live, whatever our more consciously and explicitly held beliefs and religious persuasions may be. This is the actual religion that is being absorbed by our children almost from the day of their birth." (Esslin, 1976, 271)
If you consider the resemblance between advertising and religion,
this paper's use of traditionally religious moral terminology--such
as envy and despair--will appear less arbitrary. Considered in
terms of religion, advertising encourages people to believe that
the most vivid and appealing ideals of our culture can be easily
attained, if you just find the right product--or, by extension,
the right savior, philosophy, church, guru, cult--or even drug.
(I first made the connection between advertising and drug psychology
before a U. S. Senate subcommittee in 1971.)
That is a disturbing possibility; but another possibility is even
more disturbing. Years ago, Hayakawa pointed out how "poetic
language is used so constantly and relentlessly for the purposes
of salesmanship that it has become almost impossible to say anything
with enthusiasm or joy or conviction without running into the
danger of sounding as if you were selling something." (1972,
223) Could we be producing a generation that distrusts ideals
altogether, because the most powerful, forceful, convincing presentations
of those ideals occur on TV commercials--where the ideals are
prostituted in the service of sales? Are we creating a disillusioned
generation? A generation that will have difficulty not hating
beauty of the kind used to manipulate and disappoint them in advertising?
And will they also hate being delicately overpowered by real beauty
when they encounter it in the world? After being nibbled to death
by little broken promises, will people continue to be able to
hope, have faith, set goals, and believe in something beyond themselves?
In view of such questions, is it enough to reach the neutral conclusion--as
some recent authors have -- that advertising is merely a "modern
myth," serving the same function as the mythology of traditional
cultures? (cf. Leymore). That approach fails to reckon with the
possibility that a mythological system may be debased, manipulative,
life-negative, or one among several competing value-systems. If
advertising is a genuine mythological system (which I doubt),
it is surely a myth that has failed in its primary responsibility
to give personal identity, community, and spiritual meaning to
those it reaches.
Contents
Forward to The Broken Connection
