The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [159]
The Naked Cowboy makes pretty good money as an actual person in an actual place: whenever anyone asks to take a picture, he says, “You gotta put a dollar in my boot.” (“I’m only kidding,” he would add, feebly.) His boottops are stuffed with bills even on an ordinary weekday. At the same time, he is a merchandising phenomenon, a brand name, a self-created cartoon character—an emanation of the new Times Square of global marketers and global media. The Naked Cowboy isn’t a virtual street character, but he is the first street character of Times Square’s virtual age.
TO SAY THAT TIMES SQUARE has a “virtual” dimension is to say nothing more than that it is known through representations of itself as well as through direct experience; and that, of course, has been true since people started sending postcards of the place or, for that matter, listening to songs about the place. Thanks to FPA and Irving Berlin and touring shows, millions of Americans have known all about Times Square without ever setting foot in it. Broadway’s favorite subject has always been Broadway. But the production of images of itself is much more central to the new Times Square than it was to the old. When “the media” meant signs, songs, popular magazines and movies, one could say that the media played a central role in transmitting the life of Times Square to the world. But the media are now inextricable from that life. Disney or MTV, and even in their own way Reuters and Condé Nast, do not simply transmit popular culture; they are popular culture. These media institutions want to be in Times Square because Times Square is the center of popular culture; but the very fact of their choosing to be in Times Square is what makes it the center of popular culture, just as it is the Toys “R” Us flagship store that makes Times Square “the center of the toy universe.”
But it is not enough to say that the great firms that traffic in imagery have a dominant presence in Times Square. The megastores and global retailers that have settled there are also, effectively, creatures of the media. They depend on Times Square to help shape their brand identity, as John Eyler of Toys “R” Us puts it. They want to be associated with the new Times Square brand—with that sense of unthreatening urbanness, contained exuberance, family fun. The power of the Times Square brand inheres in the fact that it is infinitely reproduced, and thus fixed in the minds of millions of potential consumers. This, of course, is precisely what Eyler understood when he booked Bill Gates for Toys “R” Us’s opening night event, thus exploiting the media power of three global brands: Toys “R” Us, Microsoft, and Times Square. It is, in fact, only the media, with its blizzard of images, that makes it possible to instantaneously create or retool a brand.
What makes Times Square so powerful a place, at least in the calculations of global marketers, is that it is so intensely there—so dense with people, lights, buildings, history, emotion—while it is also one of the central nodes of the worldwide media network. It is Times Square’s actuality that makes its virtuality possible, for McDonald’s or Toys “R” Us as much as for the Naked Cowboy. When newscasters need an image that says “urban throngs” they often use a clip of Times Square. In the middle of the Oscars, ABC, which is owned by Disney, showed a clip of crowds watching the telecast on the big screen above the Disney studio in Times Square. ABC’s Good Morning America broadcasts from the studio every day, sometimes showing images of the crowd from the ground floor, sometimes of the buildings from the second floor. NBC’s Today Show broadcasts from Rockefeller Center; Good Morning America positions itself in a different way through its association with Times Square.
Total Request Live, MTV’s version