Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister for a decade, is a woman of formidable intellect and undisputed decency. But few would describe her as a byword for joy. The face she presented, to the public at least, was that of the headmistress of one of the more censorious private schools, and her idea of a relaxing holiday was a three-day slog through wet bush. So every three years, as another election loomed, her campaign posters came as something of a shock. Overnight she would appear on the sides of buildings, three times life-size and grinning like a beauty queen. Momentarily it was hard to recognize her.

  The happy couple on the beach, by the way, were promoting Hertz, the car rental company. You probably guessed.

  28

  The tyranny of the image

  My dog is running. He has somewhere to go quickly, probably somewhere I don’t want him to go. Then a molecule of rotting possum reached the smell receptors in his nose. His muzzle is yanked involuntarily to one side, as if it were moored to the source of the smell. The brakes come on but he is travelling so fast that his hindquarters carry on in the original direction. They swing round, describing a semi-circle, the centre of which is the point to which his nose is now directed. Thus he addresses the smell that he was powerless to resist addressing. The dog is an olfactory creature.

  We are visual creatures. It is through the eyes that the stimulus reaches us to prompt a similar and barely resistible reaction. Like music, images bypass the analytical bits of the brain, the critical faculties, and arrow home to the ancient bits. I recall one hot afternoon in Spain when I was riding a bus to a factory where I taught the managers English. Through the bus window I caught a glimpse of a poster so sexy, so precisely attuned to my desires, that I simply got off the bus and walked back to stare at it, powerless to resist the urge. I can still conjure that image in my head, in detail, thirty-three years later. I remember nothing of the lesson I later taught.

  A picture is famously worth a thousand words. Time was when every picture had to be made by hand. Now cameras create them endlessly and effortlessly. And no human invention has done more than the camera to enable the proliferation of bullshit.

  People who seek publicity design things around the camera. They schedule photo ops. I open today’s paper and there is a picture of John Key planting a tree. Only he isn’t. He is wearing a suit and the light glints from the blade of his virgin spade. Someone else dug the hole and will fill it back in and tamp it down and mulch and tend the tree. Mr Key is ‘planting a tree’. It’s a symbol. The image associates the leader with good things.

  The fundamental lie of photography is that it freezes time. Consider the Hertz ad. The happy youth is carrying the happy girl across the beach in perpetuity. Their smiles will never fade. Now, I don’t recall ever carrying a young woman across a beach, but I can imagine doing so and I am confident that at some point my smile would fade. As I dragged my feet through the sand, stumbling perhaps on a piece of driftwood, or stabbing my sole on a broken shell, I would begin to pant, to sweat. Lactic acid would accumulate in my thighs. And however white the young woman’s teeth and however charming her smile, and however her laugh might ring across the sand like the tinkle of silver bells, the time would come when I would say, ‘Okay, darling, that was fun, but would you mind getting off? My back’s killing me.’ In the Hertz ad that time never comes.

  Even as amateurs we acknowledge the deceptive potential of the camera. ‘Say cheese’ says the recorder of the moment. ‘Come on, everybody, say cheese.’ And we who have stopped having a good time in order that someone should record us appearing to have a good time, dutifully fake it. And when the shutter finally clicks we all smile for real at the relief. But then, ten years later, the photo is all we have of that afternoon and we’ve grown to believe, gradually, that that’s how it was. And when our house catches fire we dash back through the smoke to rescue an album full of such frozen dishonesties. Images are potent.

  Because of the potency and emotional immediacy of the image, bullshitters increasingly use words in a manner that strives to imitate its instant appeal. The text of the Hertz ad begins thus: ‘Sunny skies. Warm weather. And ways to enjoy even more of it with Hertz.’

  Note the sentence fragments, the gobbets of language like patches of colour. No verbs. Nothing complicated. This is language as an emotive anaesthetic. And what it seeks to anaesthetize, as always, is the analytical and critical faculties. What exactly are the ‘ways to enjoy even more’ warm weather? The next paragraph purports to provide the answer: ‘Including a wide selection of vehicles to choose from, 24-Hour access to Emergency Medical and Roadside Assistance plus great additional extras like zero insurance excess and Neverlost GPS.’

  Once again we have a sentence with no finite verb. But more significantly this is language divorced from sense. Having ‘24-Hour access to Emergency Medical Assistance’ is not a way to enjoy more good weather, any more than a zero insurance excess is, or a GPS system. Behind this inanity you can sense a residual trace of what ought to be there. There is in the copy a ghost-memory of the pattern of reasoned argument, but it has been lost in language that aspires to the emotive potency of the image it accompanies.

  A century and a half ago an image was a rarity. Today images are impossible to escape. And the most potent purveyor of them by far is that box in the corner of the living room that presents us with a mediated version of the world beyond our walls, the television.

  Television has been a worldwide success because, as visual beasts, we absorb the endless succession of images on the screen without interpretative effort. Indeed if a television is on in a room, in a bar, in an airport, it requires a conscious effort not to watch it. The screen is hypnotic, stupefying, infantilizing. It reduces us to the status of babies, lying back and watching stuff moving before our eyes, like the clothesline of plastic shapes stretched across a pram. If the plastic shapes stop moving the baby falls asleep or starts to cry. We just change channel. A simple press of the finger will take us somewhere else in the endlessly entertaining labyrinth of the alternative universe that is tellyland.

  The makers of television do not want us to change channel. Their business depends on retaining our attention. So they try never to allow the shapes to stop moving. On the news today there was a story of the possible departure of Greece from the Eurozone. The story told of bailouts, soaring interest rates, a possible run on the banks, all of it significant stuff. But none of it visual stuff. So in order that we baby viewers should not get bored, burst into tears and change channel during an item that lasted a minute at most, we were shown file footage of a machine printing bank notes, hypnotically stacking and slicing, stacking and slicing. Look, said the picture, this is all about money. Look at the clever machine.

  29

  Branding

  I was clever at school and reasonably athletic. But at seventeen and with a late dose of puberty, I didn’t want to be clever or athletic. I wanted to be beautiful and cool. I wanted to be Andy. Andy was the coolest kid in our class, with a remote disdain that I revered with such intensity that I thought I was in love with him. But it wasn’t so much Andy that I wanted, it was the qualities he embodied.

  One Friday evening he turned up at the pub in a V-necked T-shirt with a bird design on it. It made me ache with desire. The following day I toured the shops till I found something similar. There was only one left and it was a size too small but I bought it, and I wore it that evening. Astonishingly it did not make me look cool or beautiful. It made me look like a dork. I wince still at the memory. But in my absurd belief that the shirt would prove somehow magical lies the foundation of much of our contemporary commercial world.

  A store in the centre of Milan. At the entrance stand two youths. They are wearing jeans but no shirts. Each youth has the body of a Greek discus thrower. All suggestion of body hair has been waxed or shaved from their gym-buffed muscle. These are ideal specimens of the young male form. Teenage girls mill and titter around them. The youths chat and smile and put their arms
around the tittering girls for photographs.

  The youths are paid to be there by the store and the store sells clothes. Yet the point of the youths is the clothes they’re not wearing. Their job is to embody a muscular ideal that excites girls and arouses admiration or envy in boys. The hope is that these emotions become transferred by association onto the clothes inside the store.

  And it seems to be working. The place is thrumming with the young. Music is playing, music that the young enjoy. Hidden downlights pick out racks of shirts and skirts, and piles of folded T-shirts. Cloth letters are sewn onto the front of the T-shirts. ‘ABERCROMBIE & FITCH’, they say. The letters are large enough to be read from 20 feet.

  At numerous shops nearby there are T-shirts for sale at far lower prices. And since a T-shirt is pretty much a T-shirt, any kids who buy an ABERCROMBIE & FITCH T-shirt must perceive some value in the words. That value cannot be physical because the words don’t make it a better or warmer T-shirt. So the value must be psychological. It must also be substantial because the kids are happy not only to pay for it but also to become promotional billboards for it, to announce their allegiance to it, an allegiance legible from 20 feet away. The words ABERCROMBIE & FITCH are that remarkable thing, a brand.

  A brand is a cluster of associations. The trade refers to these associations as brand values, but they are not values. They are emotional connotations, the feelings that the brand name triggers in the mind of the purchaser. A successful brand is essentially an irrational, unreflective belief system, a form of juju that turns ordinary objects into sacred objects. So when the teenager fingers an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt it prompts a slew of positive associations that soften the heart and open the wallet, just as Andy’s bird-design shirt did for me.

  One of the great commercial discoveries of the second half of the twentieth century was that the brand and the product are distinct entities. Take cigarettes, for example. Cigarettes are by and large cigarettes. The differences between them are negligible, the similarities overwhelming. Yet there are a thousand brands.

  In the 1970s, when the anti-smoking crusade had just begun and it was becoming harder to say good things about fags, an advertisement appeared in the Sunday magazines. A bird cage hung from a ceiling, lit by a horizontal shaft of light. On the perch, a packet of Benson & Hedges. And on the far wall, the shadow of the cage. On its perch, a budgie. That was it. The ad said nothing about cigarettes, because there’s nothing much to say, but it created a surreal image of ironic intelligence. And to this day the notion of Benson & Hedges as a better class of cigarette remains fixed in my skull. For it is in skulls and skulls alone that brands exist. Like cookies in computers.

  Nike did not exist when I was a kid. Today they are a huge sportswear company, perhaps best known for their training shoes. Their branding trick has been to associate their gear with an attitude of mind. Nike’s most famous slogan, ‘Just do it’, feels intuitively attractive to our hesitant selves. It evokes decisive derring-do, a devil-may-care commitment to action, let the consequences be what they may. Though as a piece of moral advice its merit does rather depend on what it is you’re thinking of doing. Commit rape? Just do it. Bash that little rich kid over the head and steal his Nike trainers? Just do it.

  But regardless of its merit as advice, the attitude of mind is spurious. Some training shoes may be better training shoes than other training shoes, but no training shoes have an attitude of mind attached. If you want to just do it you don’t need Nike shoes to just do it in, and if you do have Nike shoes they aren’t going to just do it for you or make you into a person who just does it. It’s self-evident bullshit. But it shifts training shoes.

  Interbrand’s Top 100 Global Brands report for 2011 judged that the most valuable brand in the world was Coca-Cola. I recently watched a documentary about the manufacture, bottling and distribution of Coke. Approximately two billion servings of Coke are sold around the world every day and the operation of getting it made, bottled and distributed was a wonder of organization, testimony to the unique talents of the human animal to think and design and make and organize and innovate, all of it driven by the remorseless exercise of reason. Meanwhile the process of promoting Coca-Cola, of creating the brand as distinct from the stuff itself, of installing an image of Coke in virtually every skull on the planet, is the apotheosis of bullshit.

  Coca-Cola is a sweet fizzy drink with abundant rivals and imitators. When I was a kid one of those rivals, Pepsi, spent millions of dollars trying to demonstrate that most people couldn’t tell Coke from Pepsi. They may or may not have been right. But Pepsi were flogging a horse that had long since left for the knackers’ yard. They were trying to convince people by rational argument, whereas the decision to choose Coke over Pepsi or any of the other rivals is not a rational one. It’s an emotional one, driven by the brand and not the stuff itself. And Coca-Cola leads the world in branding.

  Coca-Cola’s advertising says nothing about the soda it sells. It aims merely to establish a slew of positive associations that become part of the circuitry of the brain. Once established, that circuitry is there for good, unseen, unacknowledged, unconscious, just available at all times for activation. Obviously the best time to achieve this is when the brain is still forming. So Coca-Cola aims at the young.

  To take just one example, it sponsors American Idol, a talent show that is hugely popular with teenagers. After each performance three judges comment. It is the moment of the most heightened emotion. And standing on the desk in front of each judge, unremarked but quite unmissable, is a branded Coca-Cola glass. (Coke is not alone, of course, in seeking to indoctrinate the young. McDonald’s aims even younger with its Happy Meals and kids’ birthday parties. Give me a child till he’s seven, and I’ll make him love burgers for life.)

  Coca-Cola had a good war. Shortly after the States joined the fighting in 1941 the company announced that every serving man should be able to buy a Coke for five cents, regardless of where he might be. Coke bottling plants were shipped all over the world. To the troops the drink became a symbol of their homeland, a patriotic substance, with the warmest possible emotional connotations. And those troops were young men. Most had a further half-century of potential consumption ahead of them.

  The ruse also introduced the drink to a plethora of new markets, and in the most propitious circumstances. The Americans were liberators, and Coca-Cola was the American drink. Thus Coke acquired an identity that is effectively political, wedded in the global mind with the notion of American power and American wealth and American freedom. Which is presumably why the Middle East is one of the few regions where it doesn’t dominate the soft-drink market. There Coke is outsold three to one by Pepsi, despite Pepsi being every bit as American. In branding, perception is everything.

  Coke’s slogan writers have always favoured brevity and vacuity: ‘Coke is it!’ ‘Always Coca-Cola.’ ‘The real thing.’ Each of these is an absolute. Each is an assertion. And each is quite unverifiable. Coke simply asserts that these things are so, in the hope that for all their vagueness they will take root. Taken together, the three slogans imply an entity that is eternal, that lies at the heart of things, that endures when ephemera have faded, and that can be defined only in reference to itself. These are substantial claims. But they have been made before and they continue to be made, and not just for Coca-Cola. They apply equally and exactly to god.

  I said in the introduction that the bullshitter seeks power over the bullshittee. Power in the end is just power, whatever its specific nature, and its purpose, always and everywhere, is merely to sustain itself, to go on going on. It is Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on a human face — forever’. The three most common strands of power, which forever overlap and intertwine, are commercial, political and religious. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the world’s most powerful brand touches on all three.

  30

  My sort of pope

  Mike visited yesterday with his daughter, whose seventh birthday is next week. I aske
d her what she’d like for a present. She said she wanted some Sylvanians.

  ‘What are Sylvanians?’ I said.

  She showed me the website. Sylvanians are families of toy animals with babies. There are cuddly panda twins and squirrel families and piggy triplets, each baby a wide-eyed anthropomorph that comes with a bottle or a cot or whatever. There was page after page of them. The whole collection would cost thousands.

  The little girl was staring rapt at the screen. She said she wanted the chocolate Dalmatian twins. I didn’t want to stamp on her rapture, but these toys were so obviously cynically designed to arouse her girlish sentiments and thus to plunder Mike’s thinly furnished wallet.

  I said nothing. She looked at me, and perhaps sensed my distaste. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I can’t stop myself saying, “How cute”.’

  And there you have it. Her instincts were bellowing one thing to her while another part of her self was watching it happen. Here was consciousness at work, self-awareness. And here was a little girl engaged already in what will be a lifelong battle with bullshit.

  It has taken me close to a year to write this book. While I’ve been down here in this basement study my dog has been asleep on the sofa upstairs or stretched in front of the fire. Every couple of hours or so he decides that there might be some chance of getting me to leave the keyboard and play a game or take him out, so he comes padding down the stairs and sits beside me, looking up with brown eyes. I stroke him. He nuzzles against my thigh. I stroke him some more. My chain of thought snaps. And a minute later the dog and I are outside playing tug.

  The dog does this because it works. If it didn’t he’d stop doing it. As behaviourist B.F. Skinner observed of his lab animals, ‘The rat is always right.’ In other words the rat, like my dog, acts on sound empirical principles and never fools itself, never believes anything in defiance of the evidence. No animal does. Except us.