My nostrils flare. J’accuse! I think. You did this to me. Caused me to eat that half package of mediocre black-and-white sandwich cookies. Exhibiting exactly the kind of distracted-old-lady behavior that I’ve long prided myself on avoiding.
On the television an adorable black boy in a red shirt deftly removes a cookie from the middle of a stack of a dozen without toppling it. A blonde girl with a simpleminded smile unscrews the two halves of her snack, just as I must have been doing in my kitchen as Phoebe looked on in mute feline horror. The camera pans a cellophane package, and then the voice is spelling out “O-R-E-O, goes great with imagination,” and I could just about scream.
Imagination. I sip my Negroni.
I don’t remember when I saw this ad before, but I certainly have seen it. I don’t remember wandering the grocer’s aisles with the idiotic jingle playing in my head, but no doubt I did. I don’t remember lifting the cookies from their shelf—thinking wistfully of my young Gian as I did so, I’m sure—and dropping them in my basket, but nevertheless they infiltrated my pantry. A nutritionally nugatory Trojan horse. And I ate them. I ate them while on the phone with my grown son.
To sell a thing—goods, services, property—one tells a story. So we, the copywriters of my generation, were told, and it was true. Now, though, it seems the language of commerce has little use for stories. Stories take too much time. The span of attention—I see it like a bridge, a span of that sort—is shortening, shortening. Or being shortened.
In my career I always assumed that advertising communicates with people in order to persuade them. But these ads don’t persuade; they barely bother to communicate. Why be clever? Why be novel? Why not simply find an asinine catchphrase and repeat it endlessly?
No longer is there a bridge to span, a walking across from either side, seller to purchaser, a meeting in the middle. There’s just a stabbing at the base of the brain—so much the better if its targets aren’t even aware that it’s working. This seems to me like a great cheapening of all of us. Instead of appealing to my reason, my thrift, or my taste, those Oreos insinuated themselves into my unspoken desires and anxieties. My missing Gian back when he was young, still more my son.
I have a great many unspoken desires and anxieties.
Another commercial comes on, this one for Twix, clearly meant to be taken as happening in New York City. These ads are revolting and inaccurate, objectionable not just for being false but for being so much less interesting and vibrant than the city itself. The commercial shows an ersatz Jerome Robbins dance-routine vision of the city that is even less edgy than West Side Story. I do not see my city in it all.
I want to tell Sam, who is down at the end of the bar, chatting with the couple, that his new TV and his Negroni have helped me to see what is so repulsive to me in these ads: the way they depict, and thereby encourage, this infantilization of the country. Through most of this century most of us Americans were treated as—or were encouraged to behave like—grownups, proper adults. But now we have turned, or are being turned, into a tribe of incorrigible brats.
Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one. But I can’t say that to Sam. Gauche to bring up politics.
Onscreen, a batch of housewives orgiastically fondle rolls of toilet tissue, then are instructed by a shopkeeper to “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.”
Sam comes back to check on me.
“Sam,” I say. “I would like you to answer for me just one small question.”
“Sure thing, Lily,” he says. “Fire away.”
“Why has this establishment installed a television set?”
“Not a fan of it?” Sam says.
“Honestly not, no.”
“Me neither,” he says. “But I guess the owner just thought it was due. Almost 1985 and time to get with the trend. People come into a bar, they expect to be able to watch the game, see the news.”
“But the Yankees are terrible, and the news is appalling,” I say, and Sam laughs. “I don’t hate TV, just so you know. For example, Columbo is an excellent program. That Peter Falk.”
“I love that guy,” says Sam, chomping an imaginary cigar and raising a hand to his forehead. “One more thing!”
“I also enjoyed him in that Cassavetes movie, that Husbands.”
“Really?” says Sam. “You don’t say. I heard it was depressing.”
“Well, I think that was the intent,” I say. “But, Sam, to return to Columbo and my point, what I mean is that I watch Peter Falk in the privacy of my own living room. I do not go out into public gathering places to ignore other people while I watch him solve mysteries.”
“I hear you,” says Sam. He nods toward the flashing box. “Seems like it’s already making people less likely to talk to each other. Or to me.”
“It hurts your tips,” I say.
“It hurts my feelings,” Sam says.