You Are What You Watch

As you probably know by now, I work in television. I consider myself fortunate to have the career that I do. I genuinely like the work that I do, and I like to think I'm more than just a little bit good at it. I try awfully hard not to pay too much attention to the medium that pays my bills, though.

You've probably seen the commercials for one of the mini-dish satellite providers where the guy who installs the systems in the homes has to endure embarrassingly overlong and over-affectionate embraces from the joyful recipients of the new hundreds-of-channels-at-your-fingertips satellite service. Now I'm not so stupid or naïve as to think that this is a representation of actual reality. But all too sadly, it isn't all that far removed from actual reality, is it?

We all know people (maybe you're actually one of these people) who always have their tv on. I know a few people like that. If you go out to dinner with these people and go back to their house afterwards, within minutes of your arrival, the television is on. Doesn't matter if anyone is paying attention to it or not - the damn thing is always on. Remember the movie Poltergeist? The tv was always on in their house, and look what happened to them! That's right. The mother sang commercial jingles while making beds. The kids had all the latest toys and games (which they loved until the next big toy or game came along).

Here's another commercial image for you. A couple is driving (in their shiny new Acura) to look at a house they're thinking of buying. While the woman is reading the ad and getting excited over the way the house is described, the guy is driving the twisty road to the house like he's driving at Lemans. When they finally reach the house, the guy looks at the road he's just driven up to the house, and without even looking at the house says, "We'll take it!" He can't wait to drive his Acura over this road every day, the simple-minded boob, and he'll spend a vast amount of money to have a house that will allow him to do this.

Are we really this hopelessly dim-witted? Jeez, let's hope not.

There was a time, way, way back in the deep, dark past, when the message in advertising was "Buy this. It's better than our competitors' products." It was simple. It was straightforward. It was (basically) honest. Sure there were exaggerated claims of effectiveness, and other kinds of false advertising, but by and large, most people with a product or service to sell did so by trying to convince potential customers that their thing was better than all the others.

Then came Marshall MacLuhan, and nothing has ever been the same. A lot of people went around saying "The Medium Is The Message" back in the 60's and early 70's, but I wonder how many of them really understood what it meant. The people in ad agencies understood it, though. They - to use another 60's term - GROKKED MacLuhan and embraced him like a masochist would embrace a cactus.

Little by little, advertising started to change. Where previously shaving products had trumpeted tempered steel blades or the lubricating ability of foam, suddenly there was a gorgeous Swedish model purring, "Take it off. Take it alllllll off," after smearing Noxema Medicated Shave all over the guy's face. It wasn't the least bit subtle, but it sold shaving cream like mad. Commercials were starting to become less and less about the product itself, and more and more about how the makers of that product wanted you to feel. Lots of these commercials were clever and many of them were funny, but that only served to distract you from the fact that they weren't telling you that the product was better anymore.

It didn't take long for commercials to move completely away from praising a product's good qualities into the realm of pure aesthetics. There may have been others before this one, but the first ad I really remember as having virtually nothing to do with the product was the one that told me "You've got a lot to live, and Pepsi's got a lot to give." To this day, I still haven't figured out just exactly what the hell this is supposed to mean, but I can still remember the jingle, and I can still see all those rapidly-cut lovely images of beautiful people, each one with a Pepsi in their hand. And that was all it was: a parade of pleasing images designed to evoke feelings.

Not to be outdone, Coca-Cola declared itself to be "The Real Thing" - an equally insipid and meaningless claim - and proceeded to show us its own beautiful people, all of whom were drinking Coke. The most memorable of these commercials was a classic of subliminal advertising, and began thusly: As the first line of the "Coke: It's The Real Thing" song is heard, a line of Beautiful Young People is stretched side-to-side across your tv screen. They are arranged boy-girl-boy-girl, and as they walk together, they all have their arms over the shoulders or around the waist of the people on either side of them. They're all smiling and happy and, of course, very attractive. Dead center of the screen, with the biggest smile of all the Beautiful Young People, is a young woman with enormous breasts, and they are bouncing like Super Balls as she walks toward us. As you might imagine, I, and all my buddies, liked that commercial a lot. Then one night there happened to be a female in the room with us watching tv, and she said, "Next time that commercial comes on, try to tear your eyes away from the girl and look at the guy on her left." So the next time we did, and saw something truly startling. The guy walking directly to the left of the girl with the big boobs either had salami stuffed in his pants, or he had a massive erection! Whichever, the effect was the same. It turned out, that there was an arresting image for you at the opening of that commercial no matter what your proclivities. Predictably, sales of Coke were rising even higher than the contents of that guys pants.

And we were off and running. The media dominoes fell in rapid succession. We haven't looked back.

Music videos, merely another, longer-form kind of advertising became wildly popular, and it didn't take long at all for music video directors to tire of making the content of the videos match the lyrics. Videos are now a non-stop barrage, an assault of aesthetics. And now, when a new piece of music becomes popular, instead of the music forming individual images in the minds of the listeners, everybody has exactly the same visual impression of a song. To me, that's sad; it's a death of the imagination. Now, it's almost quaint when a video comes along that actually attempts to "depict" a song.

Tv shows were the last bastion to fall, but fall they did. This trend reached its peak when Miami Vice came along. This was a cop show where the cops were a couple of hunks who wore designer clothes and drove a Lamborghini. Though there were some decent stories on Miami Vice, it wasn't really a show about stories at all. It was an hour-long advertisement for beauty, and the commercials that punctuated it were only more of the same, hawking more designer clothes and expensive cars.

For longer than most of us in this country have been alive, television has sustained itself on the principle of LOP - that is Least Objectionable programming - and just in case you don't know, this is how it works: Once a tv is turned on, it tends to stay on. Particularly since the advent of the remote control, people will look for something to watch before, after or in between the shows that they really want to watch. They will go through the channels searching for something that they can tolerate watching. It doesn't necessarily have to be good, it just has to be acceptable. Undoubtedly, some cynic coined the LOP term, the implication being that all the programming is objectionable, but people will watch what they find to be the least objectionable. The bad news about this situation is that though you'd think that the proliferation of programming outlets would refine people's tastes and make them more choosy, pretty much the opposite has proven to be the case.

Now you can watch hundreds of channels - once your wife stops hugging the dish installer, that is. And for every West Wing and Frontline, there seem to be hundreds of offerings that appeal to humanity's baser instincts. These are programs that require little or no thought on the part of the viewer, and give back very little in return for the viewer's investment of time. But, as I said last month, they fill up the time between commercial breaks, which is, frankly, all most media outlets care about anymore.

But now we can finally take back some control of our lives. Television is no longer the only game in town. I myself have traded a lot of the time I used to spend in front of the tv for time at the computer. Maybe you don't think that's all that much of a difference, but at least with a computer I get to be the one who chooses what goes on. Also, a computer can do about a bazillion times the number of things that a television will do. And even if you want to leave the tv on, you can choose what you do and when to an astonishing degree these days. We've gone beyond the simple VCR, which still has lots of uses, but with hard disc recorders and DVD players, your television takes on whole new dimensions. DVD's, for example, can be marvelous time-spenders, especially if you get one of those two-disc releases. I rented Fight Club and I could have spent the whole weekend just exploring all the stuff that was packed into the two DVD's.

But I digress.

This column seems, at least in these first few months, to be taking on the character of some sort of hybrid of history lesson and stern scolding. I only do this to give some perspective on the state of media now. Things are the way they are now because events in the past paved the way to this point. All I'm trying to say this month is that if you let yourself be manipulated by the media - if you find that you measure your self-worth by the things you own, that reading bores you, that you have trouble getting interested in anything that happened longer than six months ago - you probably deserve anything that the ignorance you've engendered in yourself brings to your doorstep.

The people who foist these images upon you don't care one bit about you. They only care about taking your money from you and placing it in their pockets. Do yourself a favor. Turn the damn thing off now and then.

(C) 2002 - Karl Cable