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Media
Literacy for the Unconscious Mind
-
Brian Walsh
Abstract
The American public is no longer in complete control of the decisions
that they make. Public space has lost its neutrality now that
marketers are targeting the unconscious minds of consumers. The
majority of the American public is unaware that they are spending
more or less time in stores, moving slower or faster through the
aisles, and purchasing items that have no concrete value to them
because their unconscious is being told to make decisions contrary
to that which they desire. This essay is a crash course in media
literacy for your unconscious mind, covering the areas of Muzak,
mall design, television advertising, and politicized Hollywood
film. A conscious awareness of the unconscious motivations inherent
in these four areas can provide the tools to completely deconstruct
the public world and regain the ability to make decisions for
yourself.
With the
sublime, there is no criterion for assessing the role of taste...
The question then becomes: how can we share with others a feeling
which is so deep and unexchangeable?...this community is yet
to be. It is not yet realized.
-Jean-François Lyotard
One
could argue that such a community now exists, in that the sublime
“inspire[s] an overpowering, inexpressible feeling of awe, often
associated with the presence of the divine or some transcendental
spirit or force; producing an emotion which [is] literally beyond
words” (Lyotard, 1986/1999, p. 212). An event that affects a person
in such a ‘deep and unexchangeable’ manner may well be the product
of unconscious targeting by advertisers, now that a new approach
to marketing ideas has been created on the basis of psychological
research that no longer is interested in directly targeting an audience’s
conscious mind, but rather appeals to a subject’s unconscious and influences its behaviors and beliefs without he or she being
aware of it. This is not ‘subliminal messaging,’ but rather a calculated
and very well documented set of techniques employed by media such
as background music, the architectural design of a mall, Hollywood
cinema, and advertising on television. The audience is not aware
of successful unconscious influence, resulting in an ‘inexpressible
feeling of awe,’ for it has not been consciously processed - and
the result of such an experience would necessarily be ‘literally
beyond words.’ Americans have just such an experience every time
there is a television is turned on the shopping mall is visited.
My intent is to increase the reader’s conscious awareness
of this phenomenon, the result being a greater ability to exercise
free will in decision-making concerning belief systems and behaviors.
The
unconscious is most easily defined in opposition to consciousness,
which, to be brief, is that which one is aware of.
[*] Along these lines, the unconscious would be “an
absence of awareness, as in a coma or sleep” (Goldenson, 1989, p.
771). Sigmund Freud is of course the first to name and identify
the unconscious, but his interest in it only concerned repressed
memories and anxieties that a subject could bring out of the unconscious
mind (and into consciousness) through therapy. The unconscious
retains certain memories or skills, but its most important role
is as the receiver of stimuli on a constant basis. All
sensory perception is filtered through it, with only a minute fraction
actually sent to the conscious mind. Tor Norretranders explains
that, “Every single second, every one of us discards millions of
bits in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness.
But in itself, consciousness has very little to do with information.
Consciousness involves information that is not present, information
that has disappeared along the way” (Norretranders, 1991, p. 125).
This surplus of information is accumulated unconsciously, but is
not fed to consciousness unless necessary or pertinent –
because without this selectivity, the conscious mind would be overwhelmed.
Hence, one job of the conscious mind is to ignore the existence
of the unconscious in order to maintain mental stability.
From this it
can be determined that the world is filled with stimuli, and we
perceive significantly more of it that we realize consciously.
It can also be assumed that the amount of stimuli in the sensory
world has increased exponentially, with, for example, the average
American witnessing over one million advertisements by age 20 (Silverblatt,
Ferry and Finan, 1999, p. 25). The ratio of advertising to public
and private space (both physical and mental) has amplified to the
point that it has become more difficult for any one advertiser to
reach an audience – the stimulus market has become saturated. Within
the context of this environment, it could be argued that in order
to reach a targeted audience, anyone that wishes to influence human
behavior would have an easier time approaching from the side rather
than head on - that is, the majority of the mind is unconscious,
and our motivations stem not from the conscious mind, but rather
the conscious mind accessing the unconscious to find its motivation.
So if a publicist were to plan an approach targeting the unconscious
minds of the audience, the chances of successfully manipulating
consumer behavior would be exponentially increased, not to mention
completely invisible to the general public.
When
I hear one of my songs in an elevator, I know that it’s a hit.
-Paul
Simon
Doctors began
to apply psychological theory to the behavioral studies of humans
in England starting in the 1940s and found that appealing indirectly
to the senses of the subjects could circumvent the conscious mind,
and the decisions of the subjects could thus be controlled. For
instance, factory workers “worked harder and harbored a less resentful
attitude when exposed to morning music”
(Lanza, 199, p. 42). Around the same time, a retired general
named Owen Squier began planning ideal American home and shopping
environments, with the constant play of music being key to his vision.
Squier went on to patent what he called “piped-in” music, and to
name it he combined the word ‘music’ with the name of what he considered
the most innovative company in the world, Kodak, to coin the term:
‘Muzak™.’
The Muzak Corporation
found its initial successes playing in work environments, but performed
research to expand the role of its product and increase its clientele.
Muzak researchers found that very particular song combinations could
influence behaviors in incredibly precise ways, with success rates
showing around 80 percent of subjects responding ‘correctly’ to
audio cues to move faster or slower and become more emotionally
involved in their environment. Eighty-five percent of subjects
also approved of the music being played (Lanza, p. 42).
These results allowed Muzak executives to convince specific companies
to employ their environmental music in an effort to sway customers
to purchase more products. The Muzak Corporation then began to
customize songs and their combinations strategically for individual
clients.
The
engineers at Muzak went on to create many techniques that combined
the study of the unconscious mind with the arrangement, pitch, tempo
and song order of the piped-in music. The most popular form of
Muzak then and now is pop songs played as ‘easy-listening instrumentals.’
Familiar radio songs are re-recorded by Muzak musicians and given
a lighter air, with the hooks and melodies inferred rather
than overtly punctuated. This is so the listener recognizes the
song, but only unconsciously. He or she may hum or whistle along,
but not be able to tell you what tune is playing. The Muzak Corporation
proudly admits that if a listener recognizes a song consciously,
the company has failed in its objective.
The
next step in programming Muzak was setting the order and arrangement
of the songs in relation to each other. Eventually it was found
that techniques such as Stimulus Progression, which calculates the
energy of a collection of songs into a standardized format, could
increase the efficiency and output of employees substantially.
Songs are rated on a scale according to their intensity. Muzak
engineers then arrange these selections in such a way as to directly
oppose a worker’s ‘fatigue curve,’ such as adding a boost to the
music’s intensity during the lethargy that often follows lunch.
An entire day is mapped out in 15-minute cycles and then played
in offices nationwide with alarming results. On average, absenteeism
decreases by as much as 88%, typing errors lessen by 25%, and the
overall mood of the work environment becomes more congenial (Lanza,
p. 43). Later studies confirmed that as employees worked harder
with Muzak, shoppers ended up purchasing more if a precisely engineered
song selection was employed.
a Muzak Stimulus Progression
chart from the 1950’s.
Muzak’s
influence over the consumer occurs in two ways: in the first, the
customer is encouraged to remain in a particular environment for
a longer or shorter period of time, and to shop or
eat at a faster or slower pace, depending on which
behaviors will encourage sales. Hence, grocery stores play slow
tempo music to persuade customers to move in a more leisurely manner
and, in turn, purchase more items, while fast-food restaurants will
play faster music to encourage a larger turnover rate by
urging customers to eat faster. These methods have proven to be
tremendously successful. For the two examples used, “Customers
in the loud music condition spent less time on average in the supermarket
than those in the soft music condition,” and “...fast music in a
university cafeteria led to more bites per minute than slow music”
(Hargreaves and North, 1997, p. 275). Another method that Muzak
employs to encourage more purchases is as part of a technique known
as Atmospherics. This form of encouragement does not concern itself
with a customer’s length of stay or turnover rate, but rather reinforces
the target audience’s general perception of a given store
in order to play upon personal insecurities that stem from the discrepancy
between the shopper’s actual life and their idealized self-image.
This technique is elaborated on in greater detail in the next section.
The
Muzak Corporation more recently starting collaborating with POP
Radio, which designs Point of Purchase advertisements for in-store
play. Now a visit to the grocery store exposes consumers to not
only behavior-influencing music, but also direct advertising about
products currently for sale in the market. This type of advertising
is extremely popular with marketers because it has been found that
65% of all shopping decisions are made while the customer
is in the store. The consumer is being controlled not only in terms
of shopping pace and volume of purchases, but also by specifically what in the store he or she should purchase. Muzak is now
an incredibly powerful tool for retail corporations as well as offices and factories. In its early days, the company only recognized
the potential for such consumer-influencing techniques, but before
they could be implemented, the ideal shopping environment would
have to be invented – and along came Victor Gruen.
We
want you to get lost.
-Tim
Magill, designer of the Mall of America
The first shopping
mall was constructed in 1956 in Southdale, Minnesota, by Victor
Gruen, who had conceived, in a manner much like General Squier,
of an idyllic environment for shopping (Rifkin, 1996, p. 263).
Gruen’s innovations came in the form of the mall’s layout: the path
that the pedestrian assumes is dictated by the space itself via
unconscious motivation. Department stores, which were the main impetus
to go to malls when they were first designed, are placed at opposite
ends of the interior walkways so shoppers must pass all of the smaller
shops when traversing between them. [†] The layout of the mall does not
employ straight lines, as would seem the obvious choice. Rather,
subtle gradients of angling veer people down the pathways, especially
in the food court areas. Along with climate control, a lack of
clocks, and centrally controlled lighting, the consumer loses all
sense of direction, time of day, and duration of their stay. Coupled
with the maze-like design of the walkways (as well as of the shops
themselves), the mall becomes a very disorienting experience. Mirrors
and glass windows accentuate this confusion, along with reflective
walkways and mannequins, which unconsciously infer the illusion
of more motion and human activity. Parking is often located underneath
the mall structure, so shoppers cannot determine where in the mall
they are making their entrance (although these locations are precisely
scripted), which adds to the disorientation (Rushkoff, 1999, p.
89-92).
Many
marketers argue that this disorientation is exactly what the consumer
desires without realizing it. In Marketing to the Mind, the authors argue that people visit the mall solely for its disorientating
effect – it is a vacation from the senses, much like drinking alcohol
(Maddock and Fulton, 1996, p. 12). Granted, most people do enjoy the spectacle and escape of the mall – but they do not enjoy
parting with significantly more money than they would if these disorientations
did not exist. Yet this is not a concern for the marketer, since
the general public is unaware of the social experiments being performed
on them. [‡]

One of Gruen’s early mall
designs.
Mall designers
call the overall effect of scripted disorientation the “Gruen Transfer.”
When the consumer enters the mall centrally via escalator from the
parking garage, the cacophony of sounds, lighting, climate control,
visual activity, and Muzak create a state wherein the subject’s
eyes literally become glazed over and the consumer loses
the ability to make economically realistic decisions about what
to buy (Rushkoff, p. 85). This behavior has been documented extensively
and can be observed in many other environments, such as an art museum.
There is a correct path to take through each exhibit, and
the pacing of everyone walking that path is slowed to a crawl (the
only other time that people amble this slowly is in similarly scripted
paths such as when exiting a movie theater or sight-seeing). And
similar to the mall, the museum’s scripted paths frequently encourage
patrons to purchase items at a gift shop. [§]
The shopping
mall employs these tactics in a layering approach, with individual
stores managing to keep the illusion sustained throughout the entire
shopping experience by employing Atmospherics. Phil Kotler
introduced this concept in 1974, defining it as “the effort to design
buying environments to produce specific emotional effects in the
buyer that enhance his purchase probability” (Hargreaves and North,
p. 274). It can be best understood as an assault on the senses:
once the disorientation of the mall makes its patrons more mesmerized,
colors, sounds, and smells are employed to lure the patron to exercise
his or her new penchant for spending in a particular store. These
techniques are based on concepts of Classical Conditioning and Behaviorism
(previously only practiced on lab rats) which patrons are only susceptible
to because of the initial disorientation of the mall. For example,
cookie shops pipe out the smell of their baking ovens to pull in
customers. Shops often have soft rugs that contrast sharply with
the hard tile of the mall’s walkways, encouraging customers to stay
and shop. Countertops in clothing stores are as large as possible,
so as to encourage more purchases (Rushkoff, p. 94, 99).
Music (Muzak)
also enters into the Atmospherics equation. By focusing on particular
moods, tempos, and styles of music, a store’s image is both invented
and sustained. Combining music with color schemes, furniture selection,
and even the personal appearance of employees causes the customer
to unconsciously infer a particular lifestyle. This image reflects
the personal aspirations of the main clientele of the store, and
since it is unconscious and non-specific, the customer fills in
the blanks with how they envision themselves.
This
unconscious ideal is sometimes referred to by the store’s name,
such as in the case of Victoria’s Secret, or it can be embodied
by the spokesperson, à la Martha Stewart. Clothing stores with
a target audience of young females usually play upbeat electronica
and other music that is usually heard on a night out on the town.¸ An unconscious association with
a more jet-setting lifestyle is inferred, and, playing on the unconscious
desires of the young girls, much more clothing is bought. A girl
doesn’t have too many pairs of shoes because she needs all of them,
but because her unconscious ideal of the self needs that many shoes.
Not coincidentally, this schizophrenic ‘Other’ usually lives in
Paris rather than, say, Cleveland. This is why the stores have
exotic names such as Limited Express, Lerner New York, Esprit, and
French Connection. [**]
The shopping
environment has been transformed from a relatively neutral space to
one that harbors numerous stimuli that urge its patrons to behave
in such a way as to be beneficial to the store but financially detrimental
to the consumer. Marketing industry employees agree that stores benefit
from unconscious motivation, but argue that the consumer is benefiting
as well. However, the consumer is only benefiting in that their unconscious
ideal of their self and their life is reinforced. To argue that consumers
legitimately gain anything from further falling out of touch with
the reality of their actual lives is in direct contradiction with
the psychological theories on which behavioral motivation is based
. Freud’s only interest in the unconscious was to help individuals
recover from mental illness by bringing their unconscious anxieties
and insecurities to consciousness – hence, an increase in the fantastic
side of the unconscious necessarily nurtures anxiety and fear,
which is the most significant motivating factor in making unnecessary
purchases.
The mall is “the TV you walk around in,” says
Wlliam Kowinski, a mall maven who has paraded through dozens of
them. A kaleidoscopic extravaganza of shop front logos, copious
piles of brand-name merchandise, New Wave music, sparkling lights,
and rapidly shifting images, it’s like watching television’s insistent
succession of can’t-ignore images. Like the TV commercial, the
mall can transform passivity into desire with only the sketchiest
of images. A quick glimpse of the Eiffel Tower is enough to evoke
romance and adventure. An abbreviated storefront is a prop signifying
an entire Main Street where everybody knows everybody. “Television
and the mall are in the same business.”
-Carol Rifkin
Victor
Gruen later claimed that others more sinister than he had capitalized
on his idealistic vision for the shopping mall. His impetus to
invent the mall was to rescue the suburbs from the decentralization
of Main Street, but he alleges that ideas were turned inside out
to persuade the public. General Squier did not live to see his
own vision reach the same ends, but similarly had intended to improve
public space rather than cause it to manipulate the consumer.
In contrast to these concepts that reached their theoretical fruition
in the 1940’s and early 50’s, television was born without such a
retrospective conscience. Its assumption from the onset was that
American consumerism is based on desire, which in turn is based
on a lacking (which, interestingly enough, does not exist until
marketers invent it). At what point does the consumer lose the
ability to differentiate between actual and advertising-created
desire, especially when the invented desire is based on their real-life
insecurities? The products or services promoted in modern advertising
are associated with the unconscious anxieties and desires of the
target audience, and not only is an idealized life referred to overtly
(much like the environmental stresses of clothing stores on young
women), but personal fears are unconsciously alluded to, inferring
that to neglect to at least acknowledge the legitimacy of the product
would be a failure in social society as well. The most obvious
example is print-based beer ads, which blatantly refer to a swinging
lifestyle filled with parties and girls – which makes most men (unconsciously)
feel inadequate - and the easiest way to relieve the guilt created
by inadequacy is to purchase the product.
Television
advertising can be seen as still images in succession, with roughly
30 static frames per second. This sequencing of the image is the
very basis of the power of television. As Doris-Louise Haineault
and Jean-Yves Roy explain in Unconscious for Sale, “...representations
regroup among themselves, form series, sequences, cohorts from analogous
elements. Signifiance, consequently, would never originate
from an isolated representation, but instead from series of representations”
(Haineault and Roy, 1993, p. 90). In other words, when the concept
of motion is added to the equation of advertising strategies, the
descriptive behavior of the unconscious fears and desires alluded
to can much more successfully elicit the desired response. It is
important to reiterate that this is not a reference to ‘Subliminal
Messaging,’ with words ‘hidden’ in brief successions of frames to subconsciously influence behavior. Studies have proven such
popular conceptions and fears totally untrue. A better way to approach
this argument would be to consider the potentially sinister applications
possible in advertising once TV ad men have gained an awareness
of, say, Jungian archetypes: if, as Jung theorized, there are artifacts
of subtle distinguishable visual imagery that evoke particular responses
from a general audience, how can advertisers apply them to increase
sales?
Since the environment
in which television is viewed is subjectively defined rather than
objectively scripted (like cinema), it is understood to be more
honest. That is to say, people believe in video. We have
all learned to mistrust film, with its actors being well known outside
of the medium, as well as the special effects and often-fantastic
storylines that make up most of cinema today. The legitimacy of
television, however, has never been doubted. Our obsession with
the medium and unquestioning belief in its content is oddly analogous
to late 19th Century film screenings featuring footage
of an oncoming train that resulted in audience members running out
of the back of the theater in fear. Rodney King is innocent, OJ
is guilty, because the TV told me so. Partly because of
this unquestioning belief in its content, techniques of unconscious
motivation in television advertising are extremely well documented
and open to the public. The Muzak Corporation proudly promotes
its statistics, and anyone interested in mall design can read articles
about Atmospherics, but there are entire reference books for how the television advertiser can appeal to the unconscious
portion of the brain. Perhaps the broadness of the topic can best
be visualized by considering television advertising as being a Muzak
version of the Gaze.
Any comparison
between advertisements for one particular product from over twenty
years ago and ads for the same product today reveals that although
the mood, style, lighting and characters change with the times,
the unconscious appeal of the product is identical. Advertisements
for beer that play during sporting events have illustrated this
phenomenon quite successfully for over thirty years, with men, sports,
women and beer being the only staples. This type of unconscious
motivation is based on the most simple and applicable Freudian concepts,
such as sex, desire and anxiety. Television is the most successful
medium for conveying these concepts within advertisements, since
the visuality of the medium lends itself to an audience’s inherent
understanding of non-verbal communication. Take, for example, the
latent meanings of certain body language, such as the swagger or
the leer.
Much of the
general public would consider themselves aware of the shameless
promotion of TV advertising - my point is that there is much more
going on than most people realize. Just as the employees at upbeat
clothing stores are hand-picked in accordance with the unconscious
idealization of a particular lifestyle, the actors in advertisements
embody all that the target audience wishes to be. Like Muzak’s
Stimulus Progression technique, advertisements are broken up into
segments that play in predetermined rhythms and coincide precisely
with the style, mood, and visual technique of the show they interrupt.
This is not solely because the target audience for the show and
the advertisement are identical, but also because advertisers would
prefer the audience to not know when the show stops and the advertisement
begins. When companies began to donate televisions and VCRs to
schools for educational programming, the tapes that were provided
had advertisements (for the companies that had donated the equipment)
interlaced with the programming. The only stylistic motif for the
advertisements was the similarity of the advertisement to the educational
programming, which were both created by the same companies.
So, for example, one tape on history could show a large amount of
black and white footage, and then fade to advertisements, which
are shot in seemingly identical black and white. This is an employment
of the unconscious in the most deviant sense, with programming and
advertising blending to the point where the viewer does not consciously
wonder at what point he or she should stop memorizing the
material - especially when the pre-determined audience consists
entirely of middle-school students.q
Identical techniques
are employed for adult advertising as well, with automobile ads
consistently the most overt example of unconscious prodding. Speed,
power, and luxury are standard claims of any car ad, but the subtle
messaging in advertisements for SUVs is often more explicit because
the target audience is so well defined. According to marketers
from American car companies, the psychological makeup of a minivan
driver is more concerned with ideas of family and community, whereas
SUV drivers are “more restless, more sybaritic, less social people
who are ‘self-oriented.’” General Motors employee Fred J. Schaafsma
explains that “SUV owners want to be like, ‘I’m in control of the
people around me.’” Daimler Chrysler employee David C. McKinnon
explains that his bosses told him repeatedly to “get [SUV drivers]
up in the air and make them husky.”À These are direct appeals
to the target audience’s perception of their idealized or imagined
selves – again, similar to the tactics used by clothing stores on
young female shoppers.
Once
an individual’s social identity was defined in accordance with the
type of car that he or she drives, not only did car advertisements
begin to be concerned almost exclusively with targeting the unconscious
by playing with personal insecurities, but also particular genres
of automobiles began to be designed to apply directly to this unconscious
self. Take, for example, the recent trend of ‘sporty’ cars, such
as the Nissan Xterra: the only difference between these automobiles
and other mid-sized SUV’s is that they are marketed to an ‘extreme
sports’ audience, and reinforce a personal perception of the self-as-rugged-mountaineer,
however inaccurate it may be.
Often the intended
effect of unconscious urging in television advertisements must rely
on specific associations in relation to the music in the ad. When
a hit song is not available for a television advertisement because,
say, the artist does not want his or her music associated with the
product, a ‘copy’ song can be made, that mimics the originally desired
song note for note, with only enough changes in the music to avoid
copyright infringement – but to the audience, the difference is
almost imperceptible, since the music is only meant to appeal to
the mind unconsciously in terms of recognition in order to
create an association. This is practically identical to the re-recording
philosophy of the Muzak Corporation.
The creation of memory: Baseball icon Barry Bonds as 1)
a childhood memory of the viewer loving baseball – and wanting to
visit Disneyland, 2) now a grown-up star hitting a record number
of home runs, 3) with his family announcing that after breaking
the record, “We’re going to Disneyland,” and 4) the closing Disneyland
logo.
The power of such unconscious associations can go so far as to invent
contexts in a person’s mind. An article in the Media Guardian showed how advertising could alter an individual’s childhood memories.
Adults were shown an advertisement for Disney World that has a shot
of Bugs Bunny shaking hands with children as they entered the park.
Many of the adults became convinced that such an event had happened
to them as a child, even though Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character
that has never appeared at Disney World. This research was undertaken
after Disney televised ads for their “Remember the Magic” campaign,
which some marketers recognized were creating or altering the viewers’
memories of the theme park (Cozens, 2001).
You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the
shop. But it’s a secondary organ of the total human being,
and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve
the humanity of the body.
-Joseph Campbell
Advertising has
ceased all concern with reality and concentrates almost exclusively
on an indirect approach that confuses the audience’s mind to the point
that non-existent associations are made, sometimes even between events
that never occurred. A similar form of association is made when politicians
employ rhetoric to circumvent actually saying anything concrete: key
words that play on the unconscious are used to infer a sense that
something powerful is being communicated, but once again the intent
is similar to that of a magician keeping one hand in motion to maintain
the audience’s attention while the real ‘magic’ is happening in the
other hand.
Media outlets
continually decry politicians for evading questions and not providing
direct answers on their policy. This is quite simply because specifics
push a candidate’s ideology into the audience’s conscious mind,
whereas non-specific, inoffensive and meaningless jargon portrays
the image of a platform. Facts work on the conscious, and
images affect the unconscious. This is why the unconscious tactics
outlined in this essay all employ some form of image-creation: Muzak
employs sound-as-image, its main purpose being to alter or illuminate
environmental space. Mall design is a particular wing of Architecture
that concentrates almost solely on the creation of the spectacle.
And television is based on the creation and sustainment of false
images. So how does one create an ‘image’ for a specific political
party platform? By employing the largest fantasy-creation engine
in America: Hollywood.
Other than
the significant rise in product placement in Hollywood film over
the past decade, cinema has always assumed an ‘artistic’ role perceived
as more legitimate than television advertising. The faux-cinematic
advertisements that now precede theater film screenings not only
take advantage of what marketers refer to as a ‘captive audience,’
but also remind us of the convincing power of the film medium, especially
when viewed in a dark theater at maximum screen size. Just as the
television has an association with honesty, the cinema embodies
the fantastic, which in turn can make the products advertised seem,
well, out of this world. Techniques such as product placement differ
considerably in approach to television advertising, but their tactics
appeal to the same portion of the unconscious.
Hollywood film
is the ultimate example of spectacle overtaking plot and purpose,
and for this reason, unconscious messages can be inserted that are
much more specific and politically motivated. A look at the past
few decades of Hollywood film illustrates the tendency to reflect
the social concerns of the public in cinema, such as the numerous
political assassination films that came out in the late 60’s and
early 70’s (Target, The Parallax View, The Manchurian
Candidate), or the films of the 1980’s that critiqued American
foreign policy (Salvador, Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Rambo
series [††] ). A direct correlation between what is on the
public’s mind and what is captured on film is, if anything, healthy,
but in more recent times, this call-and-response setup has reversed
itself somewhat, with movies legitimizing political movements, rather
than the other way around. The best example is the Republican ideology
films of the 1990’s that star Harrison Ford. Why Ford became the
icon for this belief system is uncertain: whether or not he identifies
himself as a Republican is not what the audience identifies with
– it is more important that he is older, white, male - and damn
good looking.
The Republican
National Convention of 1992 marked the true beginning of the concept
of ‘family values,’ a campaign concern that in part lead an election
loss to the Democrats. But the Republican Party claimed that the
American public, specifically the rural middle-American public,
agreed with them that “faith, family and freedom” were important
issues. This was the most specific definition of ‘family values’
that the GOP ever provided without getting in trouble – any definition
containing factual information continually offended a large section
of the populace because the tenets of the proposal entered the conscious
mind.À
The ideal of
Family Values is necessarily fictitious, since it never existed
in the past, and never could now, unless homosexuality, single mothers,
and minorities simply disappeared from the American landscape.
To a certain (perhaps unconscious) degree, the drafters of this
ideology realized that it was impossible to achieve. This is why
the concept was fictionalized in the most legitimate way possible
– by Hollywood. The idea of Family Values was only successfully
communicated through fiction – since the subtle influences of film
would allow for the ‘message’ of family values to get through to
the audience unconsciously without a significant portion being offended.
In other words, a fictitious dream for the future could only be
embodied by fiction, since any realistic policies based on family
values would meet with overwhelming opposition. [§§] But as an un-actualized inference of a desire
for things to “go back to how they were,” most people agreed with
them, since the program’s approach was not targeted to the conscious
mind.
The majority
of the American public that agreed with the image of family
values is arguably the most desirable target audience for Hollywood,
and so not surprisingly, action films (middle-America’s favorite
genre) became motivated by the concept of family. Beginning in
1992, the same year as the aforementioned Convention, Patriot
Games was released: the story of an ex-CIA agent who gets involved
in a case only to have a terrorist target his family for
revenge. This was followed by The Fugitive (1993), in which
a man searches for the ‘someone else’ that killed his beautiful
and virtuous wife. The audience meets her in numerous flashback
scenes that indicate that the desire for family and the ‘way things
were’ are Dr. Richard Kimble’s main goals. Next came Clear and
Present Danger (1994) [***] , in which even
Leonard Maltin reveals “Ford plays more of a symbol than a character”
(Maltin, p. 239). These films alone illustrate that what Quayle
and Bush were referring to in their rhetoric was not just the idealism
of the traditional family, but also a strong critique on the concept
of the other, be it homosexual, foreign, or minority. Tom Clancy’s
role in writing the novels that many of these films are based on
is not completely innocent, either, considering that his only consistent
stylistic motif is relating foreign conflict to the struggle of
one man protecting what he believes in – namely, his family and
country. The enemies in all of these films are foreign terrorists
and one-armed men, echoing the sentiment that that which is ‘other’
is against the concept of family. The reason that The Fugitive was remade in 1993 was because the concept of the unidentifiable
‘other’ that destroys the family was on the public’s mind because
of the Republican Party platform.
The public
necessarily found ‘family values’ a frustratingly empty phrase,
since it could not be clearly defined without offending large portions
of the electorate - namely single mothers, welfare recipients, homosexuals,
feminists, and non-Christians.p
Quayle usually blamed more extreme conservatives for putting specific
labels on the term rather than keeping it intentionally vague.
After Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson both made derogatory comments
about homosexuality under the umbrella of family values, Quayle
felt it necessary to tone down the comments from such clear and
defining statements: “I would say that we have a very good policy
of nondiscrimination. I don’t think you heard any of that rhetoric
coming from me. You didn’t hear it coming from the President” (Quayle
1992). Quayle’s use of the term ‘rhetoric’ is a clear attempt to
dismiss the comments as inaccurate and politically motivated rather
than honest. Also, his declaration that he didn’t think
that he said anything like that indicates his awareness of how the
concept of family values in fact does have specific tenets
that would infuriate most of the American public, but he tries not
to express them clearly.
These Republican
ideology films serve to put a face in front of this ideology, and
prove that a traditional appreciation for the family unit always
overcomes the ‘other.’ The most striking example of this ideology
put to film is Air Force One (1997), Ford’s closer in the
series. This time, the concern for family values is embodied by
an actual President. The First Family’s plane is hijacked
by dissident Post-Soviet rebels and used as ransom for a recently
imprisoned rebel leader. When the hijackers commandeer the plane,
Ford only pretends to enter the President’s escape pod, in
order to attempt to save his family personally. He manages to orchestrate
an en-masse hostage parachute to freedom, but stays behind to save
his own family (this is as the President of the United States,
mind you). When finally the plane is back in American control,
a daring rescue occurs, with Ford once again insisting that his
family be freed to safety, much at the risk of his own life. It
is not that such altruism is rare, but rather that it is rare for
the President of the United States to risk his life for his
family’s, even when the clear alternative of having his Secret Servicemen
save his family is an option. Some of Ford’s lines seem literally
cut from the family values speeches that Republicans Dan Quayle
and George Bush delivered at the Convention in 1992. A sampling:
·
What about my family?
·
I’ll do anything to save my family.
·
Leave my family alone!
·
My family first. [†††]
One
word hasn’t been used so repeatedly in cinematic history since Mel
Gibson’s “freedom” obsession in Braveheart (another topic
altogether, but oddly relevant). It should also be pointed out
that not only is the Republican idea of family values clearly alluded
to and supported by these Ford films, but the more general Republican
Party platform idea of a self-made destiny is also quite evident
– The President doesn’t rely on ‘the government’ (his Secret Servicemen,
for instance) to save his family – he pulls up his bootstraps and
does it himself. This is a direct unconscious allusion to the Republican
ideal of self-sacrifice over a reliance on the Government for assistance
(hence the cutting of welfare programs, a removal of Affirmative
Action, and a general downsizing of the Government itself). There
have been stand-up guys that support traditional values throughout
the history of film, but I cannot remember one so specific in ideology
and motive – nor can I think of one as timely.
Screen
shot from Air Force One (above left);
Photo from the examples of successful families in Dan Quayle’s book The American Family: Discovering the Values that Make us Strong
(left).
This Hollywood
promotion of political ideology is especially interesting considering
that Quayle and many fellow Republicans frequently condemned what
they called the “media elite” and often proclaimed that they were
challenging the ideals promoted by Hollywood. In his speech at
the 1992 Republican National Convention, Quayle said “And, on behalf
of family values, we’ve taken on Hollywood and the media elite –
and we will not back down.” Perhaps Hollywood began to support
this Republican ideology just enough so that they would
back down. It should also be pointed out that the term ‘family
values’ is never uttered in any of these films, and any allusion
to the concept and its tenets is completely indirect and implied.
By fictionalizing an already fictitious concept, the audience is
completely unaware of how their opinions on the politicizing of
the family may have changed. Like Muzak, it probably only enjoys
about an 80% success rate, but the overall results are quite impressive.
The concept of family as the most important asset of any American’s
life is unconsciously acknowledged so that any conscious opinions
about the subject could be altered significantly.
This is exactly
what Muzak does. The inclination is to step back and consider that
it is only music. But if that were the case, why would it
be employed under such precise techniques? It is not simply
music: it creates a temporary ideology about the shopping environment
that in turn encourages one to spend more money in order to participate
in the illusion of the better life. The mall is not only a convenient
place to get all of one’s shopping done, it is also the most convenient
setting in which to employ techniques that use pure spectacle to
encourage better patronage. Television advertisements no longer
describe the legitimate strengths of the products being promoted,
but rather appeal to desires, insecurities, and non-existent memories
until the consumer feels compelled to purchase. Air Force One is not just a film about bad guys, it is the subtle embodiment of
a key tenet to the Republican Party platform that acts to legitimize
an otherwise empty piece of rhetoric.
How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious?
It is of course only as something conscious that we know it,
after it has undergone transformation or translation into something
conscious. Psycho-analytic work shows us every day that translation
of this kind is possible.
-Sigmund Freud
These are not
minor influences in America. Muzak has over 250,000 clients, with
an estimated 90 million workers and shoppers listening on a daily
basis (Lanza, p. 5). People spend an average of 6 hours a week shopping
but only 40 minutes with their children. The typical American sees
enough television advertisements in a lifetime to total one year of watching them (Silverblatt, p. 25). And the total domestic gross
so far of the four aforementioned Republican ideology films of the
1990’s starring Harrison Ford is over $560 million (http://www.boxofficereport.com).
All
of these occurrences employ some level of unconscious influence
exactly because they are encouraging consumers in a way that would
not be popular if the public was aware of it. Unconscious
motivation is not employed solely because of its success rates or
as a result of the dramatic increase in advertising competition,
but rather because it can make the public act on and believe in
ideas that they would consciously reject. If this were not the
case, the hallways of the mall would adhere to straight lines, and
‘family values’ would be to some extent a realistic philosophy.
Television advertisements would simply indicate the strengths of
a product and its uses. And Muzak would become music. The realization
of the ‘sublime community’ has occurred within the realm of the
unconscious, and used against us rather than for our own
pleasure. Recapturing our unconscious minds takes only awareness,
and the larger the portion of the public that is aware of unconscious
motivation, the less power corporations have in making our decisions
for us. The American public must regain the ability to make their
own decisions as to how they spend their money and decide their
political affiliations.
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Carol (1996). America’s Fantasy Urbanism: The Waxing of the Mall
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p Dan Quayle’s words in his defense: “Family values is neither meaningless
nor mean-spirited.” New York Times, 3 Sept. 1992, p. A20.
For the most complete analysis of the potential definitions of
the term ‘family values,’ see William Safire’s On Language
article from the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, 6 Sept.
1992.
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