There are all sorts of things that are done to us—at us, at least—that nobody blinks an eye at because we're all used to it. But God damn it, that's not a good reason! I've already complained about this, but advertisements are super fucked up: I think they're one of those things we've just come to accept but that are way more insidious than we realize, or are prepared to realize. We're all familiar with the cartoonish cliché of the subliminal message effectively brainwashing or reprogramming us from a distance—I'm thinking of the "OBEY" and "CONSUME" billboards revealed by special sunglasses in They Live! or the TV show that makes your Halloween costume eat your head and then spill out bugs in, what movie was it, Halloween 3, I guess?—but I don't think many of us see that as having any real connection to our actual world, except in the vaguest metaphorical senses.
And yet I think back to this dream I had when I was a kid, like I'm sure no more than five years old*: I'm at the beach, in the parking lot at the top of a big sand dune by the restaurant–bar where in real life I used to sometimes try my hand with no real success at Pac-Man, maybe Ms.—young enough that I didn't understand you had to eat the power pellet before you could take on the ghost monsters, so I basically just hurried cooperatively straight to my own doom—and there's a big billboard on the roof of the restaurant-bar, and it says (just as billboards I'd seen back then really did say), "DRINK COCA-COLA"**—at which point there's actually a crowd of people urging me to drink Coca-Cola, actually saying, "Drink Coca-Cola!"—and I don't want to drink Coca-Cola, so I kind of cower in a corner of the car seat (I'm in our old grey Datsun station wagon at this point, pulling out of the parking lot), and the crowd is, well, doing what crowds do: crowding around the car like a mob scene, all reaching out to me, actually literally holding bottles of Coca-Cola and trying to make me drink it, ordering me to drink it, and the car is trying to get out of the driveway—obviously back then I didn't drive, and I don't think there's any particular person driving here, it's just not relevant***—but I feel like the crowd might not actually let us go, like they might overturn the car or just keep it there, come in through the doors, tear off the roof, crowd in with me, all of them reaching out to me with their bottles of Coke, forcing me to drink, drink, drink Coca-Cola...
So, OK, on the one hand it's a pretty absurd and funny dream. And yet step back, and why is it funny? If it's funny, it's because of a child's misunderstanding: the imperative in an ad like that isn't really an imperative! No one's actually ordering you to drink Coca-Cola!
But that's just the problem. Of course someone's ordering you to drink it! That's why they fucking phrased it that way! I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's actually exactly like those sinister alien billboards in They Live! (minus the scary skull-faced aliens, of course****). You learn in Intro Psych that it's hard to say no to something—anything—that you're asked or ordered to do (think Milgram); the evil genius of an ad campaign like "Drink Coca-Cola" is that they're just flat-out telling you what to do—and the equivalent of the radio waves, or whatever it was in the movie that prevented you from seeing the message directly, is that we're all like, "Oh, well, I mean, it's an ad—they're not really giving us an order."
I'm reminded of a line I had when I was in this German play The Firebugs. My character, an arsonist, is talking to a homeowner and just telling him outright that, yeah, he's going to burn down the guy's house—and the guy just sort of laughs politely or something, trying to go along with like a joke he isn't sure he's getting. And my character says (I'm paraphrasing here): "The best part is, here I am telling you that I'm going to burn down your house, and it isn't going to make the least bit of difference because you're so sure I'm joking!—even when I tell you that that's what's going on!" In fact I think I do remember one line more or less verbatim: "I've found that the best way to deceive someone is with the plain and simple truth—because no one ever believes it." I did talk about this in that earlier post (linked above), but if an advertisement said, "We order you to buy our product," you might think it was funny and might not, but the idea that they were actually telling you what to do would probably be very low on your list of reactions, whereas I believe it would be very high on their list of why they'd do it.
So on the one hand, yes, part of the story is just that I learned to read a little too early (in that I could read things but didn't get the subtlety or the context and so I took an imperative too literally)...but on the other hand, maybe a little kid—not yet calloused and accustomed to the way our culture speaks to us (brainwashed is probably too strong a word)—maybe a three-, four-, five-year-old boy or girl actually sees better than we do what's going on; maybe remembering a dream I had back then is the equivalent of putting on those sunglasses in They Live! and seeing the hidden reality, the man behind the curtain...
To end on a tangential lighter note, assuming it makes even the least bit of sense to call a note tangential*****... I'm reminded of a surreal and wonderfully comic image that a rather brilliant 15-year-old of my acquaintance came up with a while back: the enormous floating head says, "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN," at which point the little dog pulls back the curtain, revealing...an enormous floating head. Will somebody please get this kid a MacArthur Genius Grant?
* Context: I was a picky eater for all but a few of my years in the 20th century, a pretty significantly picky eater until let's say the Clinton presidency, and a fucking outlandishly picky eater straight through the '80s—so in 1982 or whenever, I wouldn't have touched Coca-Cola with a plastic lightsaber, and that wasn't even the weirdest of my revulsions...
** Yes, I could read back then.
*** ...which is interesting in itself because it suggests that maybe little kids on some level believe that they're causing the car to move somehow, or at least that they don't adequately understand that Mommy or Daddy is actually controlling the car with anything other than sheer willpower. I still sometimes have the anxiety dreams I remember having before I ever drove a car in which I'm driving and I just really have no way of stopping it from going right into a tree or over a cliff—dreams that really just take the experience of being in a car driven by someone else and stick you in the driver's seat, which in turn suggests that we even as passengers tend to have some kind of illusion of control, maybe...?
**** "As far as I know." –HRC
***** It probably does, actually: the Mo Kline book we were forced to read in 11th and 12th grade insisted that music all comes down to mathematical ratios...which when I think about it is kind of weird and freaky, and I'm pretty sure I just don't quite understand.
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