I’ve long believed that advertisements–our “fables of abundance,” as historian Jackson Lears recently described them–are central to the way we Americans understand the world. Astonished at advertising’s pervasiveness and convinced of its malevolence, I once read a series of deeply pessimistic books about the advertising industry and its effects on American life. Everyone agreed, it seemed, that advertising was doing terrible things to Americans: it was making us a boring, homogeneous people; it was transforming a nation of proud individuals into a land of gray-flannel conformists.
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It’s a standard complaint, of course. But the letter I’m now holding in my hands, signed by a “Junior Planner” for a New York advertising agency, seems to stand it on its head. It is his job, Mr. Planner announces, to help his agency “produce more effective, focused, and ‘cutting-edge’ advertising.” Cutting-edge? On Madison Avenue? “Perhaps you have seen our new Saab campaign featuring the animation brilliance of Jean-Paul Phillipe,” he continues. He means Jean-Philippe Delhomme, but never mind. “We pride ourselves on doing what others normally would not . . .” In fact I have seen the campaign; it’s been annoying me for some weeks now. One Saab billboard advises me to “Drive in the face of convention”; a magazine ad recommends that I choose a Saab in order to “Peel off your inhibitions” and “Find your own road”; a cartoon commercial being shown on TV depicts an existentialist yuppie throwing over his conventional job, shocking the bourgeoisie at a stuffy dinner party, and rebelling against logocentrism generally in order to find himself–behind the wheel of a Saab, of course.
Rule-breaking, convention-defying, and yourself-being, however daring and subversive they sound, are now clearly the province of America’s official cultural masters, the same guys who used to go to work in gray flannel uniforms. Products aren’t sold by bespectacled authority figures in lab coats, but by screaming tattooed skateboarders, by rock ‘n’ roll sound tracks, by liberated youngsters snickering at the lame consumer choices made by their uptight elders. As a recent ad for Marlboro puts it,
As a result our culture is now dominated by what might be called an orthodoxy of perpetual transgression. Our world is awash with rebels: they stare insolently back at us from TV sitcoms, commercials, and movie publicity posters; their hymns to consumer liberation tinkle softly in dentists’ offices and boom from the cars of juvenile delinquents; items from cameras to cars are now routinely dubbed “the rebel.”
