"Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful: A Commercial In Context"
You are watching network television. It is late evening, the time of Dallas and Falconcrest. Even more suddenly than most commercials begin, a gorgeous model appears on the screen, looking directly at you with those compelling, magazine-cover eyes. Her voice is friendly, direct, and in complete control. By the time you become aware of her, you have heard her say:
"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."
The line is carefully delivered. Its emphasis falls, lightly, on "beautiful,"
almost as if, discarding "beautiful" as a reason, we might find
other causes to hate her. But like most television, the line (which takes
about two seconds) melts into the commercial, then flows into the ongoing
dramas of power, passion, and perfection that haunt the television landscape.
But wait: That's an astonishing statement--"Don't hate me because I'm
beautiful." It begs a question. Is it, "Why would anyone hate
a beautiful woman?" Not quite. More like: "Why would anyone hate
a beautiful woman on a commercial?" More fully, I think the question
is this: Can we find a way of looking at beauty, commercials, and hatred--
that makes a link among them plausible?
I'd like to argue that we can.
Recent critical works on advertising employ a variety of approaches. In
Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Williamson
(1976) analyzes a collection of individual print ads for recurring themes
and semiotic patterns. Her commentaries are often lively, provocative, literate,
and insightful. Goffman (Gender Advertisements, 1979) brings an imposing
sociological relativism to a selection of print ads, in order to illustrate
how ads employ stylized versions of gestures and postures--"hyperritualized"
gestures--to signal the relations between the sexes. Leymore's Hidden
Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (1975), caps a wide- ranging
series of observations with a structuralist analysis of advertisements from
print and television. Her discussion culminates in mathematical analyses
of the basic "binary pairs" structuralists seek in myths--opposites
like endogenous/exogenous, happiness/misery, nature/culture--and the results,
while fascinating, are rarefied.
In Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the
Consumer Culture, Ewen (1976) traces modern advertising as an essential
function of the rise of mass production and consumption. Advertising is
depicted as one of the main ways people's minds are kept oriented to serve
the structures of the capitalist system of production. Drawing from psychoanalysis,
anthropology, and especially Marx, Jhally (The Codes of Advertising:
Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society,
1987) criticizes advertising as a system where products function like magical
fetishes that help mass media and the marketplace replace traditional institutions.
In this paper, I draw upon these authors less for their technical methods
than for the broad issues they hold in common.
My methodology is much closer to literary analysis. It resembles the approach
used by a fellow student of literature, Kenneth Burke, in The Rhetoric
of Religion. It is an attempt to uncover relationships inherent in the
structure of certain dominant strategies of advertising-- and to use those
to interpret "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." I take the
line as a given, then try to create a context in which it makes sense.
Note: Due to copyright restrictions, I have not posted copies of any of
the advertisements in the series, "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful."
I hope the verbal descriptions help you imagine what they were like.
The immediate context for any commercial consists of other commercials.
Viewers apparently remember and compare commercials. That supposition underlies
Frank Deford's 1984 scrapbook on the Miller Lite commercials. On a deeper
level, advertising--as Williamson and others have argued--forms a system
of meaning. The TV viewer "sees all advertisements as one, or rather,
sees their rules as applicable to one another and thus part of an interchangeable
system." (Williamson, 1978, 13). Many television commercials, for example,
are loaded with images of ways to be. Watching them, you are virtually flooded
by images of values, ideals, desirable states of being--such as liveliness,
fun, pleasure, self confidence, contact with nature, family closeness, sex
appeal, success, power, sophistication, popularity, patriotism, youth, adventure,
superior knowledge--and, of course, beauty.
A commercial of this kind from the summer of 1987 shows vivid, masterly
scenes of idealized family togetherness. Parents, children, and grandparents
move together in a miniature drama of family closeness. They smile, they
move close to one another, they look at one another with glowing fondness.
Their world consists of 30 seconds of an idealized relationship. As the
commercial goes on, M&Ms candy plays in increasing role in this togetherness,
until it seems to be the cause, the motivating force behind the happiness
of the participants. M&Ms share the stage with a nearly mythical moment
of magical togetherness.
Many commercials follow a similar strategy: Images of desirable states of
being are associated with products. In The Best Thing on Television: Commercials,
Jonathan Price quotes advertising author Walter Taplin to illustrate how
the approach is recognized and discussed in the advertising industry:
"Most of the things we want are not material but mental. We want states
of mind. The advertiser, beginning with a material object, which is to be
sold, suggests the states of mind which may be achieved by the purchaser"
(50).
Here are some recent examples. When environmental awareness grew in the
'70s, tobacco companies presented glorious images of backpackers communing
with nature (and with their cigarettes). As jogging became popular, many
commercials featured images of happy joggers--associated with unlikely sponsors
(such as banks) that had nothing to do with jogging. As our divorce-torn
culture groped for the meaning of family in the early '80s, idealized images
of family togetherness, family reunions, and traditional extended families
appeared on many commercials, associated with candy, diet cola, fast foods,
and other products. Around a decade ago, billboards began to announce "Alive
With Pleasure!" and implied that the product responsible for this happy
state was Newport cigarettes. A current commercial states, "There's
someone exciting living inside you," and offers a product to set that
person free.
To the extent such a commercial is successful, it convinces us (on some
level) that the product is a good way, the best way, or the only way to
achieve the ideal state celebrated in the ad. For the ad to be successful,
its product must become the link between our reality and the idealized image.
Through such advertising, products become the connecting link between people
and a wide range of personal, social, and psychological ideals.
Advertising and
Sermons
Commercials repeatedly imply that products can connect us with almost any
conceivable value. Watching them, you might conclude that virtually any
desirable state of being can be attained, if only you purchase the right
products. The seemingly innocent M&M commercial, for example, is structured
to imply that M&Ms bring families together. The commercial implies that
the ideal--family togetherness--comes to us by means of the power of the
product.
Commercials of this kind employ a common rhetorical method: Present an ideal;
convince your audience they need it but do not have it; convince them that
you have the secret for moving from where they are to the desired state;
tell them what to do next. This structure has frequently been used in sermons,
especially at the revival meetings of my youth, where it appeared in this
form: There is a God and heaven. Due to Adam's fall and your own failings,
you are separate, a sinner. Christ is the only link between you and God.
Embrace Christ and you will enter the desired state of being saved. Refuse
Christ and you will not only remain a sinner in this life, after death you
will live forever in damnation. Now, since you clearly don't want to burn
in Hell forever, come down to the prayer rail and be saved. (See Table 1.)
In both cases, the method of presentation is designed to emphasize the importance
of the mediator and the powerlessness of the listener. In both sermon and
commercial, viewers are led to feel that they lack something, they are cut
off from an ideal state of being which they can attain only through a mediator.
Jhally (1987, 171) uses the term "fetishism" to describe consumer
products in the same series of relationships: a desired state, a separation,
a magical object that connects you, and a ritual for evoking that magic.
In advertising, the product serves as mediator between us and the image
of beauty--or other desired states of being. The product symbolically becomes
the savior, the mediator, the fetish, the efficacy that promises to save
us from the ordinary and elevate us to the company of those perfect beings
whose images grace so many advertisements.
Contents
Next: The Two Faces of the Ideal