The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [70]
He pauses for a moment, scanning their eyes. Seated to her left, Ursula recognizes the spiky-haired woman and the grim Asian man with the underbite from the savage-girl presentation. They gaze up at Chas fearfully. He steps out from behind the podium and begins taking measured paces across the stage as he talks.
“In Dichter’s own time this theory was not as readily understood as it is today, because on the face of it American-style advertising and Soviet-style propaganda looked and felt about the same: both were utopian endeavors, depicting idealized citizens reaping the benefits of life in their respective societies. Probably even Dichter himself didn’t realize how right he was, for no one could have fully anticipated the revolution in marketing-driven dissatisfaction about to sweep the country.
“To appreciate the full impact this revolution had on the popular psyche, you might try a little thought experiment. Try imagining yourself as a factory worker in the Soviet Union in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-one. Imagine yourself standing there on the assembly line, fitting tab A into slot A. And the whistle blows. And you walk into the cafeteria to get your daily ladle of borscht. And you go and sit down in your favorite corner. And your hands are too tired to pick up the spoon just yet, so instead you look out your favorite grime-covered windowpane, and painted on the wall of the local party headquarters across the road there’s a new mural of your leader. But something’s different about this mural. He’s not looking off heroically into the distance like he’s supposed to. No, he’s looking right at you. And his eyes are kind of baggy, kind of like yours when you look in the mirror. And his shoulders are a little slumped. And his gut hangs out over his belt. And below this oddly frank picture is a declaration in block letters that says, ‘Attention, Comrades: Vlad Lenin was a craven megalomaniac. Joe Stalin was a tyrannical butcher. Me, on the other hand, I’m just a run-of-the-mill party hack. But hey, at least I’m not ambitious. Yours truly, Nick Khrushchev.’
“You’re sitting in that factory, and you see that piece of propaganda, and it’s like no piece of propaganda you’ve ever seen before. In fact, it seems to mock the foundational principles of propaganda itself. It acknowledges that your way of life is far from ideal. It shows a respect for your intelligence that leaves you breathless. Its incisive humor seems to promise a revaluation of all values, to offer the hope of a whole new era of directness, freedom, and authenticity. And there it is, right on the wall, right up there for everyone to see.
“As it turned out, of course, the Soviet worker never saw that mural. Khrushchev didn’t put that poster up, and for good reason. Publicly sanctioned ironic doubt would have run counter to the purpose of propaganda, which, remember, is to create contentment.
“But marketing thrives on discontent, which is why in the U-S-of-A, in the year nineteen sixty-one, Americans opened their copies of Life magazine to find an advertisement like none they had seen before, an advertisement for that squat little tail-finless car called the Volkswagen. The photographs purposely tried to show the Volkswagen in the harshest possible light. The copy admitted the car was ugly. Follow-up ads not only mocked the Big Three automakers for their showy tail fins and gimmicky gadgets and planned obsolescence, but also directly mocked the deceitfulness of conventional advertising—the impossibly happy nuclear families, the bogus expert testimony, the photographic trickery, the overblown rhetoric of ad copy. By buying a Volkswagen, these ads suggested, you were buying a critique of the entire automotive industry and, moreover, flouting the elaborate marketing system of manufactured desire.”
Chas takes his place again behind the podium, presses a button, and the slide