How now, brown-sleeved Mao?

While working on a piece for this blog, about popularly/commercially defined beauty, I tried paying more attention to beauty product ads so I could review the related slogans. Then I saw something newly jarring and I lost interest in the rest of the cosmetics commercials.

I saw a TV spot in which two teen-aged Chinese students transgress Communist dictatorship by using Alberto VO5 hair products. (See the clip.) They are surrounded by a pseudo-Cultural Revolution backdrop. Rain connotes dampened spirits. Unlike real contemporary Chinese students, these kids attend school wearing dreary colourless uniforms with bright red scarves and are marched into class in gender- segregated lines. Two of the students, a boy and a girl whose attraction to each other is being discouraged, gel up in class and sit back with gleaming eyes to the great dismay of their scorn-faced teacher. Apparently, this forbidden product bestows upon them the spirit of freedom and they run away together after being kicked out of class for their defiance.

At first this premise seems entirely ridiculous and therefore harmless. A hair gel that revives a spirit broken by totalitarianism? Slimy goop as a means of encouraging individuality? But I think what this commercial may really imply is something disturbingly more subversive, if unintentional. That is, the solution to the extremism of a Communist dictatorship (which to many is stereotypically representative of any form of socialism) is to inject the system with the opposite extreme of rampant capitalism (which to many is stereotypically expressive of a fully functional democracy) where it is possible to get and use any product we want. In reality, this quasi-democracy the rest of us live in has cultivated a very real backdrop of hyper-commercialism along with a culture of style over substance that has infected even the political realm of our "free" society. There's no individuality herein either, but marketers (and their political cohorts in public relations) are well-paid trying to create the impression that their clients' products will reveal our inner spirit, if not lead us to sublime transcendence.

It may seem like I'm oversimplifying the scene, but the more people I meet, the more editorials and letters to the editor I read, the more aware I am of the prevalence of black-and-white thinking in our society. Propaganda — whether overtly political or apparently superficial — is so widely successful because it takes advantage of this starkly duo-tone perspective. It often works to deceive the public by playing to our fears of the undesirable extremes we've identified, whether we recognize them in vague terms or in sharp focus. Sometimes people's fears are expressed through ridicule, in which case the ad campaign has capitalized by making fun of the example (as above with the most radical and inflexible form of socialism) and thus earns viewers' interest in the product or idea by making them feel like they are in on the joke. Then the pitch anesthetizes those fears, or rewards those misconceptions, with the option of purchasing and using their products. I'm not above slipping into black-and-white thinking myself. It is so very easy to do. I also use hair care and styling products; in particular, those made by that company that wants women to believe they're on our side, by soothing our self-image problem which was ostensibly created by those other beauty product ads.

Detached observation can be very revealing and doesn't require purchase. Just observe commercials more critically for a while — turning off the sound sometimes helps — and you will start to see more than the obvious tricks. For example, it may be clearer to a distanced Canadian viewer how manipulatively certain American automotive commercials appeal to red-white-and-blue patriotism, more poignantly in a time of war, but it may not be as readily apparent how our coffee & donuts are cast as bringing Canadians together even when we're overseas playing peace-keepers.

Sometimes the peripheral is political.



(Here's a better description of the VO5 ad with a different analysis than mine.)