THE PACKAGING OF AMERICA: POLITICS AS ENTERTAINMENT ENTERTAINMENT AS POLITICS
Levy, Ellen
At first glance, it's a standard commercial for pain relievers—neutral background, earnest expert. Then, suddenly, this figure risks undermining the authority we had automatically ceded to him...
...The commonplaces adequate to describe this situation haven't yet emerged, but intuitions of its significance pop up here and there...
...Coalition politics may, therefore, prevent the members of a "national society" from forgetting how difficult, and how necessary, it is to live with one another's differences...
...A 1986 hit film about an elite school for fighter pilots actually run by the U.S...
...The actual passivity and isolation of audience members become, in the reflected image of the media, the activity and solidarity of cheering crowds...
...BACK TO THE FUTURE...
...Enough practice in passivity will make them cease to value the capacity to judge individually...
...Liddy's menacing past (in case you'd forgotten, photos of Nixon and Kissinger hung over his desk) was mined as a source of chic...
...In the 1980s, power has come to advertising...
...Caddell unconsciously yoked together the Deep South and MTV in a reach for the source of the Republicans' puzzling new claim on middle- and working-class Southern whites...
...Both Hart and Iacocca stumbled on appropriate showcases...
...MTV is now synonymous with rock video...
...But the applause an audience accords a "stage presence" merely ratifies it...
...Mass practices teach the personality to ignore its own reactions in the face of a television or movie screen...
...To GUN...
...In the article cited earlier, Raymond Williams similarly compared the support of 1950s advertisers for legislation restricting the promotion of patent medicine, whose "quack methods" broke the ground for the development of modern advertising, to "the newly-crowned Henry the Fifth dismissing Falstaff with contempt...
...Ashbery ascribes an "exact value"—a moral weight—to the doings and sayings of the human personality...
...MTV elides the past and its moral MTV...
...Lee Iacocca recently made a cameo appearance on the MTV-influenced Miami Vice as a parks commissioner whose few lines included the politically key phrases "We don't go for commercializing public land" and "I know how to handle a gun...
...Or rather, had been, until 1981, when MTV (see box) started running record company promotional tapes as programming, immediately boosting record sales beyond even MTV's owners' wildest expectations...
...Those deprived of economic and political power are placated by the prospect of the return of the malign dreams of national, racial, and sexual domination once repressed by liberal politics...
...He time-travels back to 1955, where his teenage mother develops a crush on him that almost prevents her from marrying his father...
...But we live in a society that is a national society...
...They distract from the real lack of alternatives by offering us freedom to choose among fantasies (front-runners in the market can claim to be "the real thing," while laggers like Wendy's and RC have to emphasize freedom of choice...
...Writing in Paris on the eve of 1968, Guy Debord already figured out that: youth, the transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of those who are now young, but of the economic system, the dynamism of capitalism...
...Like the products in commercials, the latter supply needs that are largely the invention of those who can make a 442 profit on them...
...This deliberate blurring of the distinction between seller and buyer allows viewers to see themselves as part of the spectacle, and thus to buy themselves back, packaged as a "national society"—"Coca-Cola Classic, Red, White and You," is one ad's neat equation...
...In most Vice plots Johnson and his vice squad partner run down coastal drug traffickers...
...THE EXTENSION OF REAGAN'S image from acting to politics reassures an audience for whom the extensibility of an image is a measure of its value...
...Each group in a coalition represents specific needs and desires that cannot be assuaged by a nationally resurgent patriotism or nationally approved military ventures...
...When the conservatives themselves notice discrepancies between power and its new package, they move to close the gaps...
...and "America" in pop songs and ad jingles...
...Where the fantasy cannot suppress the articulation of real differences, it interrupts it, as when critics of this administration break off in the midst of discussing Central America to put their undying opposition to Communism on record one more time...
...He failed to foresee the eventual displacement of the objects themselves by the slogans and logos that represent permission for us to enter the fields for dreaming owned and operated by the corporate sector...
...It might not be too farfetched to suggest that the politicians' wives who lobbied to institute censorship of rock recordings and videos also had an interest in making MTV more compatible with politics...
...Fox averts this catastrophe, bucking up his father in the process, and returns to 1985 to find his father confident, his mother sexually satisfied, and his family's status and income (consequently) much improved...
...Navy...
...The correlative of this "apolitical" freedom is, as Tom Cruise whoops while gunning up his jet, "Rock and roll...
...But a psychoanalyst might note that Caddell distinguishes between near-synonyms, as if he were divided between two perspectives on the same phenomenon...
...The teenage hero of Back to the Future time-travels in a Delorean—extreme symbol of free enterprise —to 1955 in order to improve his own chances by reforming his whimpering father-to-be into a real man, fit to hold down a self-willed wife and a high-paying job...
...accepting its claim to the right to improvise the facts is becoming second nature to us...
...In the commercial, Fox is never identified...
...For neither jokes about the president's being an actor nor his repeated confessions that he's no expert seem to disturb the voting public...
...Love" and "positive thinking" have been used before as euphemisms for self-interest triumphant, but it's the magic aspect of the triumph that prepares us for something like the president's claim that the hungry have just lost the trick of finding food...
...In an obliquely related commercial, the film's star, Michael J. Fox, takes a break from reading The Power of Positive Thinking to get a Pepsi...
...In a striking instance of this sleight-of-hand, the Top Gun video garbles images styled on World War II films with technology developed in Vietnam, to approximate a timeless scenario for World War III...
...The image of Michael J. Fox is among the most "saturate" of any currently on the market...
...Some changes in the content of American movies and television shows coincident with the Reagan presidency have been hard to miss: Rambo-ism, military comedies, the mantralike repetition of "U.S.A...
...Since our palates alone might never learn the difference between various fast-food burgers and colas, ad campaigns and brand names drill us in the lesson that sameness is difference...
...One of the many episodes with political themes co-starred G. Gordon Liddy as an ex-CIA provocateur in Vietnam (most of the vice squad members are Vietnam vets) now selling heroin...
...Whereas Miami Vice exemplifies the Democrats' guilty fantasy—every week an organization of gun-happy Vietnam vets tries to restrict the flow of imports (cocaine, not cars)—Cheers reflects the Democrats' popular image as a bunch of lovable failures...
...By contrast, citizens under Eddie Murphy's jurisdiction, or Nicaraguans under fire from real-life graduates of Top Gun, have no rights under rock-and-roll justice...
...The "I'm not a doctor" ad (which started running in 1985) prompts the suspicion that now we have stopped even pretending to desire remedies...
...But images of the past can as easily mask present realities as illuminate them—just as the image of the actor as authority inspires confidence or indignation, according to its packaging...
...It was directed by Tony Scott, who started out directing commercials, as did Adrian Lyne, director of Simpson and Bruckheimer's Flashdance...
...People in the Deep South get MTV...
...Commercials, which secretly aspire to mesmerism while publicly espousing active choice, provide a model for a politics that aims to maintain diversity in theory while diminishing it in practice...
...all of which led to Fox's return to TV in yet another, different but related, form for Pepsi...
...A cable TV service that offers rock videos, alternating with video-like commercials, twenty-four hours a day...
...Their embarrassment served as a handy reminder that transforming political participation into image consumption must inevitably lag in, or be resisted by, the psyches of all but the most hardened twelve-year-olds and the most mindless Republicans...
...However, MTV airplay proved to have a more dramatic effect on a record's sales than any previously tried means of promotion...
...Walt Disney, who dubbed his corporate enterprise the Magic Kingdom, understood early on that the real trick was to saturate the dream markets—commodities, resorts, movies, and above all, television—so that the corporation would begin to seem like a second nature...
...One, for Wendy's hamburgers, features a Soviet "fashion show" in which the same gray shift passes for "svimyear," "eveningvear," and so on...
...But viewer enthusiasm for the conservative kids led the show's creators to take the edge off the satire and phase out references to the parents' ethics and politics...
...An editor might eliminate either "presentation" or "stage presence" as a redundancy...
...that crowds are instruments not actors seems now to occur only to agents of professional actors...
...all three are selling something they hesitate to specify as either a product or a politics...
...Fox himself originally viewed his character as a "caricature," but decided he had better become a "role model" after fan letters poured in from young girls whose idea of romance was mutual upward mobility...
...Youth is in the saddle and rides mankind—or, as another lyric would have it, we are the world, we are the children...
...Phenomena like the actor-president and the actor-doctor, the defense fantasy nicknamed "Star Wars," and MTV alike warn us that the distinctions we habitually make between entertainment and the real world of products and politics will no longer serve...
...Real differences would only undermine the authority of this fantasy of choice...
...The 1985 episode of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was generally interpreted as another conservative attack, if a frivolous one, on civil liberties...
...Kids who buy this future can imagine their way out of the economic and moral constraints that appear to hobble their parents...
...Chrysler's 1986 "Born in America" ad borrows, on Lee Iacocca's behalf, the Reagan spot's proven formula and its political glamor...
...Rock and roll is widely accepted cultural shorthand for anti-authoritarianism...
...MTV, which diverts our recognition of advertising as effectively as advertising diverts our recognition of real need, is becoming the nexus of a saturation of the dream markets aimed at making advertising seem "natural," an ordained part of things...
...THE MORAL MAJORITY recalls the past, however falsified...
...The nationally broadcast MTV enacts these divisions as adolescent fantasies, notoriously accountable to no one (when pressed on the subject of their racist selection policies or sexist program content, MTV's management points at the audience and shrugs...
...In a 1986 Village Voice interview on the future of the Democratic party, former Carter media gonzo Pat Caddell made a connection between the Republican triumph and MTV in emphatic, if vague, terms: The Democratic Party . . . has survived for a long time as a coalition party...
...THOSE WHO WOULD JETTISON coalition politics would be the first to emphasize that a high tolerance for difference is what largely distinguishes the U.S...
...An audience mesmerized by "stage presence" has no need or desire to voice its own responses...
...If rock and roll was to be appropriated as the language of authority, its celebrations of the abuses of authority—sadistic violence, rape, white supremacism—were bound to become an embarrassment...
...You have to understand what that means in terms of culture...
...MIAMI VICE...
...Yet neither Iacocca nor Hart could shake off an air of sheepishness as they made their appeals to an audience newly trained on MTV...
...When the MTV people first proposed to record companies that they supply them with free videos (which the companies had been using for some time as occasional promotional devices), some companies balked...
...In television, for instance, news and documentaries are mostly excluded from network prime time, while commercials, the financial base of the medium made visible, have been sharply distinguished from programming...
...therefore the personality in Ashbery's positive sense is replaced in the spectacle by a sensationalized ersatz with the same name, "the personality...
...These commercials no more speak to a diversity of real needs than does the Reaganite theory of the Evil Empire, which presents us with a simplistic choice between two "systems," as a distraction from the specifics of any given political situation (and particularly of our own interventions...
...Gary Hart chose to make his prime-time debut that same month on the yuppie-oriented comedy Cheers...
...The show's already high ratings soared...
...MTV enforces minute-to-minute amnesia as new videos confront and replace one another...
...One episode spawned a radio hit— Glenn Frey's "You Belong to the City"—which was subsequently recycled into both a video and a Pepsi commercial featuring Frey and the show's star, Don Johnson...
...the movie also produced a video, which boosted both theater ticket and record sales...
...The personality under siege needs aphorist Guy Debord's reminder that "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images...
...Free associations like these create meaning only by inconsistency and omission...
...In the spectacle, 441 value shifts from moral weight to sensational impact...
...Caddell's slip from "presentation" to "stage presence" plays out in miniature a change in political practice pioneered by the Republicans, and now slowly being embraced by the Democrats...
...but in these films, the wielders of the absolute freedom of action that is celebrated are the authorities...
...Some associate these dreams with the Moral Majority, but MTV is a cannier abbreviation for the substitution of dreams for democracy...
...Bruckheimer and Simpson were among the first, and the most successful, moviemakers to capitalize on MTV's promotional power by packaging rock scores and sequences cut like commercials into nearly ready-made rock videos...
...By "politics," they mean the sticky reality out there, while the fantasy politics of a Stallone or a Reagan offer as complete an escape from that reality as the science fiction blockbusters (from 1977's Star Wars to 1982's E.T...
...When it began airing in the early 1980s, it was a satire on the mores of the present generation of teenagers, as seen through the eyes of two former flower children turned middleclass parents...
...Last year, when 60 Minutes ran a humorous segment matching clips from Reagan's movies with news footage in which he struck the same postures and mouthed the same lines, viewers were not amused...
...Two of the more crassly anti-Soviet ads to run in recent years celebrate the diversity of products in America...
...The other shows the party faithful saluting Pepsi, and then Pepsi and Coke, in keeping with state policy, then cuts to a cottage in the Ukraine where dancing peasants chug RC Cola until the KGB tracks them down...
...Following an advertising trend, the client wasn't identified until late in the ad, at the height of the viewer's emotional response...
...We give our attention to the packaging, which no longer conceals its intent to deceive...
...He became a teen idol playing the neoconservative spawn of a 1960s-idealist couple in the television situation comedy Family Ties...
...Top Gun—like the other big hits produced by Bruckheimer and partner Don Simpson, Flashdance (1983) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984)—promotes freedom as an opportunity easily recognized and easily seized...
...The image emerged as the halfaccidental reflection of political change, and carried its political associations with it (when Fox lands in 1955, Reagan's name is on the Main Street marquee) as it moved into the MTV nexus: the teen idol as dynamo of capitalism...
...On television, applause can be stage-managed or piped in...
...Reagan once told the Boy Scouts that this situation comedy was his favorite television show...
...Things rule and are young...
...Where the aims of politics and advertising are simply conflated, the effect can be grotesque...
...Meanwhile, the reduced emphasis on product names in its ads and videos makes room for the impression that MTV's new, improved sponsor is the future...
...L . 444 referents, the better to sell reactionary clichés as bright ideas...
...That change begins in the relation of an audience to its legitimate representatives...
...The pessimistic words and images of the Springsteen video signify less than its tag line, which works the same emotional territory as the other two ads...
...The elastic category of "spectacle" can include any social act that has an aspect of performance, from conspicuous consumption to the bombing of Libya...
...Then, suddenly, this figure risks undermining the authority we had automatically ceded to him as he confides that "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV...
...Television has made this a single country...
...Television exposure led to Back to the Future, whose success in turn boosted the ratings of Family Ties...
...from the U.S.S.R...
...that served as its outriders...
...For Ashbery, "packaging" is not just another image, but the measure of a change in social relations, the necessary consequence of the fact that, as he wrote, "In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality/By ignoring it...
...Their kids watch MTV...
...In this Steven Spielberg production, Michael J. Fox plays an ambitious kid from a lower-middle-class family headed by a pathetically weak father and (consequently) alcoholic mother...
...The film's MTV and radio hit attributed his success to "The Power of Love...
...It has also been buzzed around that much of this materiel is surplus from the last cold war...
...What sort of social relation holds among a nation of television-watchers (hallucinated as a country of teens hooked on MTV...
...Ticket-buyers for Rocky IV or White Nights have been heard to insist that they're not interested in politics, they just want to be entertained...
...I n a 1961 essay Raymond Williams saw advertising as a "magic system" in which fetish objects drew off those dreams and desires that exceeded any available social expression...
...That is not to say that American audiences haven't noticed that the mass media have taken a sharp rightward turn in recent years...
...A taboo had been violated, not by stating the well-known facts of Reagan's case, but by failing to create an atmosphere of neutrality that could thwart moral judgments and historical comparisons...
...Top Gun (the school's nickname) graduates participated in the bombing of Libya...
...Until the audience responds, the "presentation" remains incomplete...
...Spectacular stunts like Live Aid and Hands Across America evidence not only the vitiation of politics by entertainment, but also the new tendency of "mass practices" to submerge the personality by including it...
...When he can't scrape up the change, a xerox machine on which the book is resting reproduces an image of a Pepsi can, which, magically, turns out to be all Fox needs to quench his thirst...
...However, in our habits of speech and of consumption, at least, we make the segment of the spectacle called entertainment into a paradigm for the whole apparatus of mass culture...
...but Caddell's remarks are valuable for the questions they leave open...
...The regionally based Moral Majority emphasizes the God-given necessity of social divisions...
...q 446...
...The responses aired on a later show all took the tone of How dare you...
...Politics, commerce, crime, disease, are all reflected in the parallel world of the spectacle, as a glance through any issue of People, the weekly catalogue of "personalities," will show...
...That the majority of Americans under twenty-five who voted for Reagan seem to take this reversal of meanings in stride shocks many of us over twenty-five more than it should...
...at the same time it will discourage them from forming the alliances among themselves that could give their responses social force...
...The strength of that claim, Caddell implies, is founded on the promise not so much of real, but of psychic, gains...
...Clearly, he doesn't mean it as a joke, although at least one professional, and who knows how many amateur, comedians have substituted "president" for "doctor," reinforcing one's sense that the actor's confession has somehow strengthened his authority after all...
...things confront and replace one another...
...We then set it above and apart from the rest, as fantasy from reality...
...Is "stage presence" an addition to, or replacement for, "presentation...
...Such successful suppression produces tough hybrids of entertainment and politics, which out of habit we still identify as one or the other...
...One 1984 Reagan campaign ad consisted of politically inexplicit images of a prosperous America "united" by rapid editing...
...Williams concluded that "Advertising had come to power, at the center of the economy, and it had to get rid of the disreputable friends of its youth...
...Trying to convince interviewer Alexander Cockburn that Top Gun was truly "apolitical," producer Jerry Bruckheimer explained, "we see this as kind of our Star Wars on earth...
...Their brood includes a Valley Girl type and the Michael J. Fox character, who worships money and keeps a picture of Richard Nixon over his bed...
...The film's rock score includes "Great Balls of Fire...
...Why the Deep South...
...One assumption that Caddell shares with equally ambitious, if more rhetorically coherent, Democrats is also questionable— that the party can and should move beyond coalition politics...
...that Back to the Future is both the title of Rambo's chief competitor at the box office, and an axiom of Reagan-era style...
...His reliance on "charm," his claim to represent ideas he admits he doesn't understand, his avoidance of logical connections, recall the television juxtapositions of "personality," logo, and slogan they've come to prefer to developed narratives...
...His appearance is not an endorsement, but the further extension of an image which diversifies just enough to increase its share of the market, like the Classic, New, Diet and Cherry incarnations of Coke...
...Our habits themselves are breaking under the pressure of the simultaneous changes in our media and our government that could end by rendering the two of them virtually indistinguishable...
...445 The "Born in America" theme also underscores the debt both the Reagan campaign and Chrysler/Iacocca owe to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A...
...The first network show to adopt the dream-logic editing and empty high style of rock videos...
...FAMILY TIES...
...The problem for the Democrats, in part, has been that the Republican Party, because it is a party that is more narrowly defined ideologically, has the ability to make a national presentation and a national stage presence...
...The framers of a genuine "presentation" expect their audience to question, comment on, approve or disapprove their work...
...What the viewers know is that they like the emotional certainty induced by tag lines, rapid editing, and saturation, and that the certainty is greater the less specific the demand on them to buy...
...Many Democrats, as the Caddell example demonstrates, are less concerned with exposing this fact than with seizing the stage...
...That old habits die hard is another fact that Democrats might here seize upon as an opportunity, rather than fear as a personal deficiency of their leaders or followers...
...Twenty years ago, in talking about the mass media, John Ashbery made the chilling remark that "There is no remedy for this 'packaging' that has supplanted the old sensations...
...As aging plants 443 close and old agreements cease to protect the interests of workers, as our government struggles to maintain old imperial arrangements against the will of other peoples, images of youth dominate the media and their audience reads them as signs of domestic economic regeneration and a new freedom to impose our will in foreign policy...
...To resist, we have to build on discrepancies, beginning with the one between the residual belief that our government requires our active response, and the present administration's contempt for that belief...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
