Spoofing and Schtik

PAULINE KAEL

“I trust ya’, Honey — but cut the cards”

Advertising experts look to the future and find — a new breed of sophisticates that will not be so easy to convince.

They’re coming. The new generation of young adults. Wise, hip, skeptical — unlike any audience businesses and advertisers have ever known before. A new breed of sophisticates who have been deluged by advertising since they were 3. Bred to new wisdom at television’s knee. Able to “tune out” automatically at the first sign of advertising puffery. Promising advertisers no problem so great as that of sophisticated disbelief. Purveyors of the advertising scene see this coming. The simplest social analysis of the highly educated, worldly American society now emerging indicates it.

This is an almost-full-page ad in the New York Times, May 11 and June 16.

And what is the ad for? Good Housekeeping and its Consumers’ Guaranty Seal. The ad closes with “Seeing it in Good Housekeeping is believing.”

The basic flattery of the customer is familiar, but the kind of flattery is new. Advertising, TV commercials, movies arc trying to outwit disbelief by including it in the sell.

Are those who no longer “believe” the advertising they hear and see really “a new breed of sophisticates,” part of “the highly educated, worldly American society now emerging”? If disbelief were the result of knowledge, every New York cabdrivcr would be an educated man. What this generation was bred to at television’s knee was not wisdom but cynicism: it is an indication of how self-important and self-congratulatory advertising men have become that they equate the cynical indifference of those wised up to their methods with wisdom.

Our society is disastrously utilitarian. We can no longer distinguish the ad from the entertainment, the front cover of the national magazine, in which an actor poses to plug his film, from the back cover, in which an actor sells cigarettes and indirectly also plugs a film. Television shows with groups of celebrities are a series of plugs (for books, records, nightclub appearances, movies) interrupted by commercials. Movies are constructed with product tie-ins worked into their structure: mattresses, stoves, toothpaste, airlines, whiskey, all with their brand names shining. The companies so advertised in turn feature the movie in their ads. Even without product tie-ins, modern-dress movies look just like ads and sell the advertising way of life. This is one of the reasons why our movies seem so slickly unreal: they look like the TV commercials that nobody “believes.”

The acceleration in the standardization of mass culture since the end of World War II means that we are all hit by the same commodities, personalities, ideas, forces, fashions at the same time, and hit increasingly hard. If you drive across the country you’ll find the same movies playing in every town and city, Fanny Hill and Candy on sale in every drugstore, pop and op in the bank and shop. At roadside restaurants you’ll hear the same semiparodistic songs coming out of jukeboxes; at a motel in the middle of nowhere you’ll see the same TV shows, the same commercials you saw at home. The motel itself may be an exact reproduction of other motels, and you’ll drive past supermarkets and housing developments that you could swear you’d already passed. The people in the small towns smell, look, read, react I ike the people in the big cities; there are no sticks anymore.

Only “schtik” — the fraudulent uniqueness that sells when real individuality or difference is risky. Schtik is the special bit, the magic gimmick that makes the old look new, the stale seem fresh; it is what will “grab” the public. It is the desperate hope of an easy solution when the sellers cannot predict what the public, satiated increasingly fast, will buy.

What stories will seem believable, what themes will involve modern audiences, what will interest people? The problem that the “purveyors of the advertising scene” analyze is also being doublefaced by the slick magazines and by Hollywood. Like the Mademoiselle editor explaining why a piece of Jean Harlow fiction was being printed, “We thought it would be sort of campy and fun,” they clutch at any little schtik.

They’re afraid they can’t do the same old stuff anymore—not straight, anyway — so they do it “tongue-in-cheek.” They pretend they’re superior to it. There is a story told about Tennessee Williams at the opening of The Rose Tattoo. When a stagehand said in consternation, “Why, Mr. Williams, they’re laughing,” Williams is supposed to have replied, “If they laugh, it’s a comedy.” People all over the country were bored with or laughing at advertising, commercials, magazines, movies, so the purveyors found a face-saving device. Now advertising kids advertising, TV commercials kid TV commercials, movies kid movies. They go “way-out,” become “send-ups”; they nudge us that what they’re doing is just a “put-on.” It’s as embarrassed and halfhearted a strategy as that of the fat man who makes himself a buffoon so you can’t make more fun of him than he has already.

Spoofing has become the safety net for those who are unsure of their footing. Unlike satire, spoofing has no serious objectives: it doesn’t attack anything that anyone could take seriously; it has no cleansing power. It’s just a technique of ingratiation: the spoof apologizes for its existence, assures us that it is harmless, that it isn’t aiming for beauty or expressiveness or meaning or even relevance. To many in the advertising business and to those young artists who often seem to be in the same business, it is a way of life — or, rather, a time killer on the way to the grave.

Still, the purveyors are full of anxieties. In screening rooms, the publicity men and critics can be heard asking nervously, “Will audiences outside the big cities get the joke?” Is it perhaps that they’re uncertain whether they get it either? What is the point? Who is being put-on? Way-out where? Send-up what?

We’re sending ourselves up. We are reaching the point at which the purveyors don’t care about anything but how to sell and the buyers buy because they don’t give a damn. When there is no respect on either side, commerce is a dirty word.

But not all the new generation is buying. Many of them don’t just “’tune out’ automatically at the first sign of advertising puffery” because they know there’s no place to tune in again. They’re surrounded by selling, and they tune out, period. They want some meaning, some honesty, some deeper experience, and they try to find them in romantic ideas of rejection and revolution based on their moral revulsion from the situation in the South, in folk music, in underground movies, in narcotics.

Even the worst underground movies — the most chaotic, confused, and boring, the most amateurish — may still look more “real,” more “sincere” than industrial products like The Sandpiper or Harlow, which you can’t believe, or gigantic spoofs like The Great Race, which you’re not supposed to believe. But though the desire, the need, the clamor, among college students particularly, for underground movies grows out of important kinds of rejection, the underground movement is infected by what the students are trying to escape.

The underground cinema is largely a fabrication of publicity: the students are “put-on” by Film Culture and the Village Voice, and then they’re fobbed off with parodies of Maria Montez movies, Andy Warhol spoofs of experimentation, and underground variants of exploitation films. And if these films often spoof old movies, new big movies are already an imitation of the underground. What’s New, Pussycat? has the kind of jokes associated with underground movies; The Knack is already a fashionable, professionally “youthful” treatment of underground attitudes.

A movie that looks amateurish is not necessarily an answer to commercialism — it may be an innocent or a very shrewd form of commercialism; and commercial movies can all too easily imitate the amateurish look. Thus far, underground movies are too easy an answer: they’re an illusory solution to a real problem — a commercialized society that nobody believes in.