Aug. 10, 2005 - Issue #512: The Illuminati
You’re soaking in it!
The ‘70s Dimension plunges viewers into the strange, kitschy
world of vintage TV commercials
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
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