The Sponsored Life.

I have written that television and law are all that we have in common in America, but I am beginning to think that this is too rich an assessment. It's all television. And it has more than an influence on us: We can be influenced by the way the weather makes us feel, or by a recent good essay or novel we've read; but television in fact creates the world within which we feel, and instructs us how we should feel. It creates the world within which we are influenced. Even if, like me, you spend relatively little time watching television, the world in which (to quote Saint Paul) you live and move and have your being has been made for you by people whose world is dervied from television; which is to say, your world is derived from advertising, a world in which you are the one to whom things are sold.

You can flee this world by becoming a hermit and moving to Antarctica, or you can simply accept it as unalterable, or you can try to change it (fat chance). The only realistic way to begin to deal with it, I think, is to see what advertisers are trying to do to you, to see the world they want you to believe in. This demands a distance and objectivity that may be hard to come by; but both are essential for any clarity, not only about television itself but about the world it has given us.

I recently read a book which is a nearperfect tool for achieving this distance. Leslie Savan is the advertising columnist for the Village Voice. In The Sponsored Life (Temple University Press), she gathers a number of columns and articles she has written over the last several years. She deals not only with ads on television but also with print ads. Television, however, is the most powerful advertising force, and the time on television which is not devoted to advertising is formed by it; and this in turn forms the rest of our world.

"To lead the sponsored life you don't really have to do anything," Savan writes. "You don't need to have a corporate sponsor as the museums or the movies do. You don't even have to buy anything--though it helps, and you will. You just have to live in America and share with the nation, or at least with your mail-intercept cohorts, certain paid-for expectations and values, rhythms, and reflexes." She points out that there is little serious criticism of advertising itself, only questions like "does this ad work?" The reasons are obvious. As Savan writes:

Conveyors of commercial culture are free to question nearly all of modern life except their own life-support system.... When the Center for the Study of Commercialism, a well-respected, Washington D.C.-based nonprofit group, called a press conference in 1992 to announce the results of a study that showed the press repeatedly censoring itself under direct or anticipated advertising pressure, not a single TV or radio reporter attended, and only a few papers even mentioned it.

Savan offers a series of "tactics" on how to keep your distance and how to be clear about what these people are trying to do to you. I won't list them all here, but among them she recommends keeping in mind the fact that "we don't buy products, we buy the world that presents them." There is a world presented by BMW ads: If you can't afford to buy the car, you can at least buy a Ralph Lauren shirt or a Dove bar. Another tip: follow the flattery. "You'll find the ad's target market by asking who in any thirty-second drama is being praised for qualities they probably don't possess. When a black teen-ager plays basketball with a white baby boomer for Canada Dry, it's not black youth that's being pandered to. It's white boomers--the flattery being that they're cool enough to be accepted by blacks." She also points out that those ads that flatter us by being ironic, making us feel superior to all this hype, allow us to feel that we are controlling TV and its effect on us. "The cool commercials--I'm thinking of Nike spots, some Reeboks, most 501s, certainly all MTV promos--flatter us by saying we're too cool to fall for commercial values, and therefore cool enough to want their product."

You won't watch television in quite the same way after reading this book, which is what makes it so pleasantly subversive. Why is this important? Savan points out at the beginning of her introduction that if you count all logos, labels, and announcements, the average individual encounters about 16,000 ads every day. These aren't all encountered with full awareness and attention, of course, but they do form the texture of much of our life; and television's cultural influence is much more powerful for most of us than the cultural influence of ethnicity, religion, or family. This can be superficially irritating--for example, a lot of adolescent girls now speak in an accent that has nothing to do with region but is the result of a TV-borne virus--but its deeper reaches are pernicious: we are made restless and unhappy because of what we think we need, and the desire that is created for us by the advertising culture is bottomless.

When you think of the fact that most art for most of history served religious purposes and had a public function, which was to form the perception and understanding of the viewers, you realize that we are, in a way, wired to respond to images by being formed by them. But for most of history these images were sparsely placed: icons or statues or murals in a church or on the walls of a public building; the word, read out loud. Now every home is at the bottom of a funnel into which images are poured. Savan writes:

The one question I am most often asked is, "Does advertising shape who we are and what we want, or does it merely reflect back to us our own emotions and desires?" As with most nature or nurture questions, the answer is both. The real ad in any campaign is controlled neither by admakers nor adwatchers; it exists somewhere between the TV set and the viewer, like a huge hairball, collecting bits of material and meaning from both. The real ad isn't even activated until viewers hand it their frustrations from work, the mood of their love life, their idiosyncratic misinterpretations, and most of all, I think, their everyday politics. On which class rung do they see themselves teetering? Do they ever so subtly flinch when a different race comes on TV? In this way we all coproduce the ads we see. Agency people are often aghast that anyone would find offensive meanings in their ads because "that's not what we intended." Intention has little to do with it. Whatever they meant, once an ad hits the air it becomes public property. That, I think, is where criticism should aim--at the fluctuating, multimeaning thing that floats over the country, reflecting us as we reflect it.

When we see examples of Nazi art, celebrating blonde heroics and Wagnerian values, or when we look at Soviet socialist realism, we see how obvious and how perverse the attempt to form people through the use of images can be. But what forms us is, for most of us, invisible as the air, because it surrounds us so completely. Savan's book, with its frequently funny and often brilliant analyses of particular ad campaigns and general trends, helps to see what surrounds and forms us.