"Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful: A Commercial In Context"
In his study of gender in print ads, Goffman illustrated how the models
in ads abstract certain gestures which reveal social relations, then project
those gestures in simplified, amplified, "hyperritualized" form.
Even animals are susceptible to selective, exaggerated versions of the normal.
In his classic study of the herring gull, the ethologist Niko Tinbergen
(1953) found that the the begging response of the newly hatched chick was
triggered by a red spot on the bottom of the parent gull's bill. Through
an elaborate series of experiments, he pinpointed just which features (position
of the red spot, color, contrast, color of bill, head color, head shape,
shape of bill, lowness, position of bill, etc.) trigger the response. He
was then able to construct a model which the chick preferred to the real
thing! In other experiments, Tinbergen constructed stimuli other birds preferred
above natural stimuli. An oystercatcher, for example, will prefer a giant,
specially-painted model of an artificial egg to its own egg. Normal responses--even
those vital to survival--can be subverted by symbolic stimuli that are more
powerful than natural stimuli.
People are also susceptible to "supernormal sign stimuli" (as
he called them in The Study of Instinct, 44). Tinbergen discussed one example:
exaggerated sign stimuli derived from the face of the human baby. He observed
that dolls, films, and the pet trade all employ idealized baby faces. Here
is his characterization of the elements that go into the idealized baby
face: It must have " a small facial part and a large brain part of
the head. Moreover, its cheeks must be fat and rounded. The baby's crying,
and its clumsy movements, are also necessary to make it really cute."
(Herring Gull, 223).
Advertising's easy-looking images of hard-earned perfection may, in general,
work like hypernormal stimuli. Such images certainly do not come easily.
Diamant (1970) and Arlen (1980) documented the mind-boggling lengths to
which a producer will go to achieve the fleeting images in 30- or 60- second
commercial. No family can be as perfect as the one pictured. Few moments
in life can have the immediacy of the AT&T commercial that took weeks
to stage, shoot, and edit. We can seldom reach out and touch so vividly,
so completely, so gorgeously, so ideally, as those immaculately staged images
do in the ads. Technology amplifies the ads' perfection. Anyone who has
attended a demonstration of the Scitex graphics workstation can verify how
easy it is for graphic designers to make magazine pictures even "more
perfect"--deleting inconvenient portions of the picture, enhancing
color balances, moving component parts of the image around, even importing
images from other photographs--all without leaving a trace.
No one can look as good as the picture or video image of a fashion model--not
even the models themselves, whose looks are for the camera. In life, many
models are said to look startlingly skinny. A book like Cheryl Tieg's The
Way to Natural Beauty documents the immense effort required for a professional
model to maintain her casual good looks. One line suggests the magnitude
of the labor of being beautiful: "I hate spending even an hour fussing
in front of a mirror in the morning" (19, italics added). As a result
of her labors, she became one of those who embodied the ideals of beauty
and presented them for women to emulate.
The supernormal images of perfection presented on the media (such as a photograph
of Cheryl Tiegs) are worth some thought, because any kind of guiding image
has a double nature. One the one hand, idealized images can uplift and give
direction. In the pursuit of the unattainable, people attain great things.
The uplifting ideal may be to love like Jesus, to manifest the compassion
of the Buddha, to show the wisdom of a beloved Rabbi, to be the fastest
runner in history, to raise a happy family, to look like Jane Fonda at 45,
to live a balanced life, to bring about world peace, to end hunger, and
so on. Even if you try but fail to attain such ideals, you can remain pointed
in the right direction and ennobled by the effort. We belong to a culture
guided by unattainable ideals: liberty, equality, happiness. Noble failure
while pursuing great ideals is central to our striving, romantic spirit.
For Americans, the hyperreal has often been merely a way of pointing us
toward a future that has exceeded science fiction's wildest dreams.
But idealized images are uplifting only when there is some way to move from
where you are in the direction of the values implicit in the image. If there
is nothing to connect you with the image, so that the ideal seems unattainable,
you can feel cut off from it. If the ideal is important and the gap formidable,
an unbridgeable gap may seem to loom before you. Instead of inspiring you
to cross that gap, the separate, unattainable ideal begins to mock you and
becomes a torment. In the worse case, you can become obsessed by an ideal,
yet feel you have absolutely no means of moving from where you are to it,
or even toward it. You can become stuck, powerless to move toward what you
most desire.
By using idealized images that have no connection with the product, commercials
may be promoting, not the joining of the viewer and the ideal, but just
such a separation. Through certain strategies in commercials, we are led
to desire various states of mind, yet we are misled in the means for achieving
them. By depicting highly-valued states of being, yet offering no avenue
to those states except consumer products, commercials make us the cognitive
equivalent of sinners: cut off from the ideals we aspire to and mocked by
the mediators that promise to take us to that heaven implied by television
images. In showing us what to aspire to, but providing us means that will
surely fail, advertising has given us a formula for despair.
"Despair" may sound like a harsh word to apply to a commercial,
but I believe it is accurate. I am not implying that television viewers
are all lying around in paralytic states of despondency. Rather, I want
to suggest that certain advertising strategies provide the cognitive preconditions
for a well-known state of being whose structure has been documented for
centuries. Turning to an excellent summary from experts on the subject--the
New Catholic Encyclopedia--we find this definition: Despair "signifies
a positive act of will by which a man gives up the expectation of salvation
because he considers that, in his own case at any rate, it is a thing too
difficult to be achieved." Because of my early training, I tend to
turn to literature first for illustrations, and we find one of the most
powerful depictions of despair in Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, a play
contemporaneous with the early works of Shakespeare. In his last scene,
Faustus finds he must live out his part of the bargain and surrender his
soul in exchange for his great knowledge.
O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop! Ah, my Christ!
Notice how he portrays his desired ideal--salvation--as something far away.
Although he can vividly imagine the heaven of his desires, he finds himself
with no way to attain it. He is unable to reach up toward that salvation,
and no mediator reaches down to him. The God of love becomes transformed
into a God of wrath:
Where is it now? 'Tis gone. And see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows.
Mountains and hills, come, come , and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God....
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
I am not calling upon these sources for their Christian perspective, but
to point out how much the inner structure of despair resembles the way I
have just analyzed advertising: one is enticed to desire an ideal, then
cut off from all means of attaining it.
Advertising promotes despair of this kind, first, by surrounding us with
images of unattainable perfection. Second, advertising promotes despair
by implying that the product will deliver the ideal--when it can't. In both
cases, consumers look across a vast gulf at the promise of values--and find
that the offered means (products we buy) cannot take us there. As one critic
of advertising put it: "Sadness betrays the idyll [of advertising's
more-than-perfect world] .... While busying themselves with feeding us,
the ads are offering to appease a more unassuageable hunger, and failing
to do so." (Conrad, 118) We do not gain titillating encounters through
DoubleMint Gum, a youthful dancer's vitality through diet Pepsi, family
closeness through Priazzo, or power and control through Z-cars. Despair--I
am arguing--is a natural byproduct of the experience structured into the
way advertising promises to deliver the values implicit in its hypernormal
images.
Beauty may bring its own forms of despair. Beauty, and women's relations
to it, are far more complicated than just imitating the example set by gorgeous
models in advertisements. What Ewen called "the pursuit of beauty through
consumption" (1976, 181) has a discouraging effect on many women. Women
have written of the way advertising has promised that "perfection is
obtained on your grocer's shelves. Perfection, cleanliness, godliness, gracious
hospitality, and an adoring family are attained through the purchase of
Lemon Fresh Joy and Drano." (Scott, 199). Yet many women say the pursuit
of such perfection has made them not more beautiful, but more ashamed of
their bodies:
"Whole industries depend on selling us products through slick ads depicting 'beautiful' women, playing on our insecurities and fears of imperfection.... The media defines 'looking good' so narrowly that few of us ever feel we have made it... We always have to measure up to some image" (Boston Women's Health Collective, 5).
Even for women who meet the prevailing standards for "looking good,"
there are problems in what the poet William Butler Yeats called "the
putting on of burdensome beauty." In "A Prayer for My Daughter,"
Yeats wished that she might be blessed with beauty, but in moderation--
not enough to draw upon her the kind of destructiveness precipitated by
the beauty of Helen of Troy. In their book on the politics of beauty Lakoff
and Scherr summed up the burden of beauty this way:
"Women do not have power through beauty: beauty has power. Therein lies the paradox. Men--whose judgments are what give beauty what power it has--envy and resent women for their supposed 'power' through beauty over men's hearts and minds (and pocketbooks). Women fear the dependence upon men, since only men can unlock the 'power' of beauty and make it function to woman's advantage. Men are angry at women for possessing a power which, in fact, women do not possess; if anything, it possesses them." (279)
Arguing from a psychoanalytic framework, Holbrook in The Masks of Hate (1972)
claims that "the glamorous images in the mass media" are manifestations
of the "intense unconscious hatred of woman" that is "expressed...widely
in our culture" (41).
Beauty has not always seemed so complicated. From the time of the Greeks
till the early 20th century, philosophers and poets connected beauty with
such glorious ideals as truth and harmony. Plato considered beauty "a
self-subsisting idea shining through bodies, laws, and knowledge itself.
Every beautiful thing partakes of this eternal oneness of beauty. Beauty
and goodness are found together...; in fact, they are identical" (New
Catholic Encyclopedia). For Plato, as for Dante, such ideals were the guiding
lights that illuminated existence. One has only to remember the conclusion
of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn:"
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
In contrast, listen to the words used about beauty by the modern commentators
we have quoted: vacuum, depersonalized, power, paradox, envy, fear, dependence,
advantage, angry, possession--and hate. We have travelled a long road to
come back to that commercial for hair conditioner with such a vocabulary
in mind.
Let's continue our discussion of the way advertising uses idealized images,
by focusing on the term most central to our commercial: "envy."
Contents
Forward to The Two Faces of Envy