Week of August 11, 2005, Issue #512
FRONT
You're soaking in it!
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
It’s late at night. A man is sitting in his office, studying a sheaf
of important-looking papers. Suddenly, he pauses, thoughtfully strokes his chin
and stares fondly off into the middle distance. As the image fades to that of
a beautiful but appropriately chaste-looking blonde—the man’s wife—walking
barefoot by a lake and sitting under a tree with their young daughter, we hear
the warm, lulling strum of a guitar, the gentle plucking of a harp and a Claudine
Longet-style female folksinger warbling these haunting words: “If you
can’t be with him... be in his mind... be a mind-sticker...”
The images continue: the blonde woman nuzzling her daughter’s nose, the
woman running down a series stone steps in a forest path, the cap being pried
off a bottle of Tab cola. “Don’t you want to have a good shape?”
the song continues. “He wants you to have a good shape.... Shape with
Tab....” Now a soothing male voice takes over the pitch: “Be a mind-sticker,”
he says. “Tab can help you stay in his mind, with a shape he can’t
forget. You know, keeping your shape in shape has its rewards.” Under
those words, we watch the husband and wife, finally together, giving each other
a fond kiss before heading upstairs to their bedroom. “The Coca-Cola company
wouldn’t have it any other way,” the announcer concludes. “So
enjoy Tab—and be a mind-sticker.”
Young, slender blondes will always have an honoured place in pop culture, but
Matt McCormick knows that cheesy TV ads will always be the real mind-stickers.
That jaw-dropping Tab spot is only one of dozens of vintage TV commercials and
public-service announcements from the ‘60s and ‘70s that McCormick
and his partner Morgan Currie have assembled in What the ‘70s Really Looked
Like, the central feature of The ‘70s Dimension, the latest DVD to be
released by San Francisco’s innovative Other Cinema video label.
Other Cinema is devoted to promoting the specialized art of “found footage”
films—films in which a director takes existing, often long-forgotten scraps
of celluloid (usually discarded, undistinguished educational films, newsreels,
stock footage, corporate documentaries and the like, the flotsam and jetsam
of a century’s worth of celluloid) and re-edits and re-scores it to his
own, usually subversive purposes. The genre encompasses everything from Joseph
Cornell’s landmark 1936 experimental film Rose Hobart to mainstream efforts
like Mystery Science Theatre 3000, The Atomic Café and Woody Allen’s
What’s Up, Tiger Lily? The Other Cinema company is currently at the forefront
of the alternative side of the found-footage spectrum; it grew out of a series
of popular Bay Area screenings organized by Craig Baldwin, whose 1991 film Tribulation
99: Alien Anomalies Under America, a gonzo “secret history” of American
foreign policy, is one of the classics of the genre.
“It’s like recycling,” says McCormick. “So much of this
stuff was created with the idea that it would be disposable, and I think there’s
something interesting about that. I mean, a lot of work and energy and resources
go into making a moving image, so that even something that was created decades
ago still can have value to it. And I think the embarrassing moments are just
as important as the victorious ones.”
What the ‘70s Really Looked Like isn’t just an exercise in camp,
although the ridiculous ads for Blatz Beer and Savage cologne are certainly
pretty hilarious; as the title implies, it’s also an exercise in cultural
anthropology, a lesson in the evolution of mass communication and a telling
glimpse at the obsessions and unconscious social and sexual assumptions of a
bygone time. As found-footage director Ken Jacobs once said, if movies and television
represent the “dream life” of North America, then the process of
assembling these kinds of films is sort of like psychoanalysis—finding
pop culture’s strangest buried memories and airing them for the first
time in decades.
Like Howard Carter unearthing the tomb of Tutankhamen, McCormick and Currie
found almost all the material in What the ’70s Really Looked Like in a
single place. “I got started as a filmmaker making a lot of found-footage
stuff,” McCormick explains, “and as I became known for those projects,
people started to be on the lookout for that kind of material for me. And I
got a tip that there was a whole bunch of TV commercials that were sort of rotting
away in the basement of a TV station in Portland and were going to be thrown
away.” An employee at the station asked McCormick if he’d like to
have it, and soon he found himself the new owner of boxes and boxes of 16-millimetre
film containing, he estimates, something like 30 or 40 hours of footage.
“It took me years to get into it,” McCormick says. “Initially,
I used the footage just as fodder for my own films—recutting it and collaging
it to my own ends. But then, at a certain point, I became more interested just
in preserving it instead. I eventually realized that so much of this stuff was
interesting and funny already, I didn’t need to do anything to it; it
was better just to show it the way it was.”
Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more quintessential ‘70s ad than
the one that opens the collection, in which a square-jawed dude (“an ordinary
guy with an independent mind,” as the accompanying jingle describes him)
races his snowmobile through the woods, stops to take a deep, satisfying drag
on an Old Gold cigarette, hands the coupon to his girlfriend (“She saves
’em,” he remarks to the camera. “It’s the flavour I’m
after!”) and then hops back onto the snowmobile and speeds away. There’s
a anti-drug PSA starring poor old Henry Fonda, alienating himself even further
from his dirty-hippie children. There’s an Oscar Mayer PSA reassuring
consumers that, contrary to what they may have heard in the news, hot dogs are
made from only the highest-quality meat and the healthiest additives. And there’s
a couple of bizarre Air Force recruitment ads targeting women, and which seem
bent on reassuring them that they can bring their cosmetics along to the job.
But McCormick says not all these ads deserve our mockery. “There’s
definitely kitsch value to the collection,” he says, “but if you
look further, you’ll see that there are some real big differences between
ads then and ads now. The thing I was really surprised by was that, compared
to television nowadays, it seems far less politically correct but at the same
time, much more progressive. Some of those public service spots are really challenging:
they’re pushing ideas like mass transportation, hiring ex-cons—even
the famous ‘crying Indian’ ad. Some of the religious ones are amazing,
like the Baha’i ad that asks, ‘Do you feel it’s wrong for
people to be extremely rich and extremely poor?’ You really don’t
see stuff that gets in your face like that anymore—public service ads
nowadays are these feel-good ads about volunteering or teaching your kid to
read, nothing that really challenges you to change your attitude about the world.”
At the same time, there’s a goofy straightforwardness to the sales pitches
in these ads that makes you realize how much the world (or at least the media
landscape) has changed in the last 30 years—not necessarily for the better.
When you watch Jack LaLanne, for instance, hawking some kind of cockamamie,
hilariously low-tech piece of exercise equipment, his faith in good, old-fashioned
American salesmanship seems almost touching in this age of ultra-slick Nike
ads. “We can’t be tricked in the old ways,” McCormick says.
“These days, when you see that Tab ad trying to manipulate you, it just
seems so clumsy; it’s easy to see through it. We’re always evolving
as a society. It’s like the old Commodore 64 computers—they look
dumb now, but when they first came out, they seemed pretty mind-boggling. So,
30 years from now, will people look at ads from today on a DVD called What the
‘90s Really Looked Like? and will they seem as silly? They probably will.”
A glamourous brunette sits at her makeup table, inserting her earrings and
putting the finishing touches on her hair before heading out on a fun date.
“Today you’re all girl—and today being a girl was never nicer!”
enthuses a female announcer in friendly but official tones that make her sound
like a cross between a next-door neighbour and a guidance counselor. “That’s
because this is the age of FDS. FDS was created for a uniquely feminine need.
FDS—the first feminine deodorant hygiene spray! Lets you feel as fresh
and feminine as you look!” The doorbell rings, and the woman rises, unhurried,
to answer it, the picture of beauty and style. “Enjoy being a girl. Enjoy
that feeling of confidence every day. Because this is the age of FDS!”
V