Shock's next wave

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, dozens of psychiatric patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, fell under the care of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a man with some radical ideas about how the human mind is wired, and how it might be therapeutically rewired by a skilled psychiatrist such as himself. Cameron believed the roots of mental illness lay in faulty thought patterns patients developed over time. He reckoned patients could be "depatterned" through the ceaseless repetition of a key word or phrase -- a technique he called "psychic driving." Confining the patients to "sleep rooms" in the Institute, Cameron "implanted" a carefully chosen "driving message" (usually a negative message, followed much later by an affirming message) into their heads via speakers or earphones. Each message -- for example, "You have no confidence in yourself. You are weak and inadequate" -- was broadcast continuously for 15 hours a day, seven days a week, for up to two months.

Not surprisingly, "psychic driving" quickly became a torturous ordeal for the subjects. Indeed, Cameron's depatterning work suggested the mind-control experiments being carried out in North Korea, where Communist soldiers were allegedly turning captured POWs into robotically programmed acolytes. (The CIA, eager to know more about brainwashing, and to develop countervailing techniques of its own, funded Cameron's work for three years under a project code-named MKULTRA). To "break down their resistance" to the incoming messages, Cameron tranquilized his subjects with electroshocks, LSD, hypnosis, or sleeping pills that kept them in unconscious suspension for up to 22 hours a day as the driving messages played on.

If you don't recall Ewen Cameron's famous brainwashing experiments, don't feel too bad -- neither do his patients. Upon their release, most had no memory of receiving treatment. In some cases, patients who had listened to hundreds of thousands of repetitions of their driving message could not repeat that message back even once. Rip Van Winkle-like, these people were simply missing a chunk of their lives.

But something profound had clearly happened to them. Immediately following the deprogramming trials, they appeared stunned and disorganized. Many could not remember their own names, or how to eat, or in fact much of anything that had gone on in their lives. Even today, Cameron's former patients report such symptoms as violent mood swings and the inability to concentrate enough to read.

The Allan Institute experiments ceased in the late 1960s. Nine patients would later launch million-dollar suits against the CIA, which settled out of court with them for a much smaller sum, in 1988.

In a broader sense, though, Ewen Cameron's work never really stopped. Under new stewards and another guise, the "electric lobotomies" continue apace. The subject pool has expanded from a few dozen people to a couple of billion. The driving messages have become more sophisticated: cryptic, alluring, alarming. There are no longer called implants. They are called ads.

Today's advertisers operate under far tighter constraints than Ewen Cameron did. Ethically (or practically), they cannot "break down" their subjects' resistance with thorazine or acid. They cannot paralyze them with curare poison. They can and do use a kind of hypnosis -- the seductive glow and flicker of television light -- but for the most part, their tools are simply the ads themselves, which must be sharp enough to puncture a subject's consciousness and arresting enough to keep said subject from squirming as the payload is delivered. ("You have no confidence in yourself. You are weak and inadequate. Try these jeans.") You might think of modern advertising as broad-spectrum depatterning: a cocktail of thousands of different repeating messages, their aggregate effect no better understood than the effect of those messages implanted in Cameron's patients 40 years ago. What does advertising do to human beings over the long run? We don't know.

All we know is that year by year, as the commercial messages come faster and more obliquely, the modern media consumer is growing hard to impress. She's no longer the alert student sitting quietly front-and-centre. She's slumped, snoozing, in the back, or else trying to climb out a window. The old-school of admaking -- establishing the product's "unique selling position" and carefully building brand loyalty -- is dead. Traditional agencies like Leo Burnett and J. Walter Thompson are hemorrhaging business to smaller, balls-out agencies like Fallon McElligott and Wieden & Kennedy, who understand that you can't play chess with an attention-deficit-disordered kid: he'll walk away from the board. It's got to be strip chess now, or chess for money. Or you've got to pelt the kid with the pieces.

All of which explains the rise, in recent years, of so-called "shock" advertising. For ads to work, the industry is conceding, they have to be rare and juicy and in your face. They have to offer back-of-the-cabinet images few of us have ever seen -- like a black horse humping a white one, or a supermodel taking a dump, or a woman aiming a jet of breast milk into another woman's cup of coffee.

Advertisers will tell you that shock boils down to truth. Drop a truth-teller into a dinner-party full of genteel liars and shock ensues. The current level of candor in tampon commercials would make Cathy "I think it's perfectly natural" Rigby blush, but mopping up a cafeteria spill with a Kotex is really just life as it's lived by real people, no?

Epater les bourgeois. Shock middle-class values. Art, it is said, has no interest in morality. Which may be where art and advertising -- at least shock advertising -- differ. Shock ads are all about morality. They usually involve sniffing out, simply for the sake of provocation, the ripest cultural taboo. In Germany, that probably means Nazi imagery; in Italy, the Catholic church; in North America, sex. What's left of this particular topic to explore? Incest? Pedophilia? Defecatiovoyeurism? (Those Jenny-McCarthy-on-the-throne print ads turned a few people on, a few people off, and purportedly boosted sales of Candies shoes by 19%). Shock advertisers tend to measure success by the controversy their campaigns generate. If you can't shock the middle class, shock William Bennett and Newt Gingrich. Piss off the powerful jackleg Republicans. Earn some salty reprobations on the Congressional record. Shock Jesse Helms. Conservatives are about the only people you can still get a rise out of these days. That's why shock advertisers love them. They need them.

The rest of us, not wanting to be mistaken for anyone liable to revoke arts grants or suppress free expression, adopt an open position of blanket permissiveness. Two horses fucking shocks you? Hey, you don't get out much, do you, friend? I'll bet you found A Clockwork Orange troubling, too.

And so we've learned not to be fazed by anything. Even as advertisers mine the most sacred parts of ourselves for distribution and resale, we sit passively by, pretending not to care and ultimately not caring. Baby, we are teflon-coated, like those skillets from France. The media can't touch us because we are cynics.

But could it be that we are cynics because the media has already touched us? Touched us there?

The almost banal truth is, it's very hard to shock us now. So advertisers are giving up trying to shock in the conventional way, and are working on a kind of silent electromagnetic pulse aimed to inflict grave, undefinable damage on any circuitry it hits.

I'm going to argue that there are now three levels of shock in advertising: visceral shock, intellectual shock and, for lack of a better term, "soul" shock.

Let's assume I'm an advertiser whose aim is to shock you at the gut level. I want to bypass your brain, evoke an involuntary response. I want to scare you or sicken you or, especially, turn you on. Twenty years ago, that might have meant showing a woman in a bra. Ten years ago, it might have meant showing a woman out of a bra. We're in Calvin Klein's bailiwick here, of course. Klein shot to the top with a succession of increasingly provocative icons: Brooke Shields in her unzipped jeans; Jeff Aquilon, hung like a grizzly bear, posing in his y-fronts; Kate Moss naked on the couch. Things have gotten really quite skanky of late: young girls deep-throating bananas, inflatable sex dolls looming from highway billboards, semi-naked kids lounging like chickenhawk-porn actors in crummy wood-paneled rumpus rooms. The fashion retailer French Connection recently discovered that while you cannot use the word "fuck" in a mainstream magazine, the word "fcuk" is just fine. You can produce commercials that say "fcuk fashion" and "fcuk advertising" -- thus smuggling the king of the seven taboo words past the border guards and into print, because everyone reading the word "fcuk" on the page is saying "fuck" in their head.

But visceral shock is getting harder to deliver in a culture wallpapered with surreal and violent and erotic imagery. This may be why a current trend in advertising is to go not for the gut but for the head. What I call "intellectual shock" really just means advertisers upsetting the expectations of readers and viewers. We see it, most commonly, when an advertiser apparently "comes clean" and is honest with us -- a fairly shocking thing for an advertiser to do.

Thirty-five years after the birth of irony in advertising, and 15 years after the birth of reflexive irony in advertising, we may be seeing the dawn of a new core form -- beyond irony, closer to a kind of hyper-calculated faux-naïvete. Yes, advertisers seem to be saying, the jig's up, you're on to our game.

Call them anti-ads: actually commercials that look very much like the kind of parodic "subvertisements" magazines like the one you're holding pioneered. Ads that not only undersell the product, but often send up advertising itself. Advertisers today must feel like punk rockers in the mid-1970s, when the punk movement began unexpectedly to find the mainstream. To survive, true punkers understood, punk had to "reject itself." Most advertisers realize that advertising, too, must reject itself if it hopes for any credibility with a cynical public.

Consider the TBWA/Chiat Day spots for ABC TV. "Who among us hasn't spent an entire weekend on the couch, bathed in the cool glow of a Sony Trinitron, only to return to work recuperated and completely refreshed?" The campaign acknowledges, candidly -- if tongue-in-cheekily -- that the thing being sold is bad for you. (This may not be as risky as it sounds: it worked pretty well for "Death Cigarettes.")

Or the Amstel beer ads featuring the fictitious activist Garrison Boyd, who calls for a serious boycott of Amstel beer. The campaign began with conventional ads for Amstel that ran for a couple of weeks. Then into the picture rode Boyd, loaded for bear, papering over the Amstel ads with anti-Amstel stickers. Finally, the campaign devolved (or evolved) into Boyd's anti-Amstel screeds: "Avoid these Amstels at all costs!"

Or Sprite's recent campaign wherein two schmucks watch TV ads for a pretend soda called "Jooky," until it dawns on them that drinking Jooky isn't going to improve their sex lives anytime soon. The unspoken message: neither will Sprite.

Other examples abound. In recent Fosters beer and Simple running shoe campaigns, we're given a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of the ads themselves -- for example, briefings from the creative director to the copywriter on how the pitches can move product. Such ads follow in the tradition of the famous Isuzu ads where David Leisure played a congenitally lying car salesman, and Nike's Bo Jackson spots, where the preposterousness of shoe ads is held up to the light. But they take Isuzu and Nike a step farther, inviting the readers to laugh along at the whole shallow business of admaking from the inside.

Selling to a generation of cynics requires real finesse. Advertisers must acknowledge their own naked calculatedness, acknowledge that the customer is wise to that naked calculatedness, and then still try to make the sale. "The thing to remember about popular culture," precocious cartoon kid Calvin tells his tiger pal Hobbes, "is that today's TV-reared audience is hip and sophisticated. This stuff doesn't affect us. We can separate fact from fiction. We understand satire and irony. We're detached and jaded viewers who aren't influenced by what we watch." Then Calvin takes a break from his sermon to inflate his basketball shoes. Calvin is the postmodern consumer.

Why do faux-naif ads work? One reason is that the advertiser is trafficking in paradox. The consumer gets two conflicting messages. One is, Since advertising itself is bogus, you should be deeply suspicious of the worth of any product you see advertised these days. The other is, We've been so honest with you about everything; would we lie to you about the worth of this product?

In effect: Don't trust us. Trust us.

Something very strange happens when people receive a mixed message. They are temporarily paralyzed. Let me illustrate this point. A friend of a friend of mine, a small guy who frequents nightclubs where things routinely get out of hand, has learned to use the mixed-message to great effect. When goaded by a bigger, tougher guy, he will step right into the aggressor's face and say, "I don't want to fight, do you?" The big guy always takes a second or two to process this -- here's an openly aggressive gesture coupled with a declaration of peace -- which is long enough for my friend to a) disengage, or b) land the two punches that will end the fight before it can begin.

The shock of the faux-naif ads is the shock of subverted expectations. Imagine the job applicant you're interviewing suddenly saying, "Don't hire me. I'm stupid and I'll skim from the till." Or your date opening with "Hi, I'm Kelly. I have manic-depression and genital warts." This shock is the shock of getting the last thing you thought you were going to get. Briefly, your belief systems are shaken. Most 14-year-olds experience a similar disorienting moment when they realize their parents are using "reverse psychology" on them. ("Son, I rolled you a couple of joints for the Everclear concert. And take my car -- here are the keys.") It catches the kid off guard, reduces him to a single reflexive response: You are fucking with my head.

Intellectually shocking ads, then, are not high-voltage electrodes applied at the scalp and the ankle, but a dilute concentration of nerve gas sent through the air ducts. Over time they can break down your confidence in your opinions, judgments, values. It becomes very confusing to consumers when antagonists (advertisers and subvertisers) start using the same language. When identical words are used to, as situationist Guy Debord might have put it, create the spectacle and to attack it, the consumer does not know whom to trust, if anyone.

For advertisers, this is a delicate game. It's as if, by parodying themselves, stealing the subvertisers' thunder, they are challenging subvertisers to make a counter-move--to jam the negative with a positive. What's a magazine like Adbusters to do? Run ads straight-facedly promoting Amstel beer or Marlboro cigarettes or Nike sneakers, on the assumption that the public is so suspicious of ads, any ads, that their response is to reject the message out of hand?

Which brings us, in a convoluted way, to the third and final new kind of shock. "Soul shock" goes beyond titillation, beyond headgames. These ads aren't clever, or coy, so much as deeply unsettling. Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield calls them "advertrocities." Examples? Benetton's dying AIDS patients and dead Bosnian soldiers. Calvin Klein models drowsing in shooting galleries with hunted, heroin-hollowed eyes. Recently the Italian jeansmaker Diesel launched an extremely disturbing print campaign. The company's cryptic ads-within-ads, set in North Korea, feature images of, for example, skinny models on the side of a bus packed with (presumably) starving, suffering locals. "There's no limit to how thin you can get," says the ad on the bus.

These strike me as some of the most complex shock ads ever made. They appear to be operating on a deeper level than even the advertisers themselves know or understand. Many have one foot in the "intellectual shock" camp. Diesel Jeans' North Korea ads, for example, deflate fashion ad conventions. But unlike, say, the ABC TV spots, they aren't very funny.

If intellectual shock rocks our belief systems, "soul shock" targets our values. There's probably something immoral about ads that inure people to the suffering of other people. The way shock encourages malaise reminds me of what David Korten called the "cycle of alienation," to which today's jaded consumers are somehow intuitively wise. [Basically, we move through four stations: (1) Advertisers assure us their products will make us whole. (2) Buying their product required money. (3) the quest for money widens the gap between ourselves, family and community. (4) Deepening alienation creates a sense of social and spiritual emptiness, which can only be assuaged by ... see (1).] The first time you see a starving child on late-night TV, you're appalled. You send money. But as these images become more familiar, your compassion fades. These ads start to repulse you. You never want to see a starving kid again. Cynical consumers understand what's being done to them. They just don't really care.

This idea of the deepening spiral of consumer cynicism is nothing terribly new. And yet it can, I think, explain whole lives. It provides a credible answer for why mood disorders have risen 50% in North America in the last 20 years. (More credible, at least, than the theories that point to the additives in our food or the volume of information we must now contend with or the wash of electromagnetic radiation millions of times greater than our ancestors experienced). The repetition of unsettling messages may be having, must be having, some effect, however unquantifiable, on the deeper strata of our minds, the primitive parts, the limbic regions where sexual and creative impulses live.

Never in history have advertisers so specifically isolated their targets. Who has disposable income? Increasingly, it's the young. (America, a current vein of wisdom holds, is basically run by teenaged girls). So the agencies crank out shock ads, anti-ads, "advertrocities" for their compassion-fatigued, hard-to-impress young clientele. It's as if 75% of us are being forced to listen to the soundtrack of the world way louder than is comfortable for us because the volume has been calibrated to the damaged eardrums of the other 25%. Over time, this creates not just tension but anger. Eventually, the 75% start hunting down the other 25% with torches.

What shocks us now? Maybe nothing. We can be titillated, still, we can be amused, but perhaps we can never really be shocked. To be shocked requires a measure of innocence you rarely find these days in people over five. More than we care to admit, maybe we have already been depatterned, like Ewen Cameron's psychiatric patients. Maybe we are the Manchurian Candidates of the consumer village, wandering through malls with our heads full of messages driving our behavior ("You have no confidence in yourself. You are weak and inadequate."), messages we cannot repeat back even once.

Bruce Grierson is a Vancouver-based editor and writer. He has never been depatterned, but still can't remember where he left his car.

Text above retrieved from http://www.uhc-collective.org.uk/uhc_design/client_policy/non_clients/diesell/shock_tactics_r.htm.

Related: For info on the MKULTRA project, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA.

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