Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique

CHAPTER 4. HUCKSTER FOREPLAY THE PROMOTION INDUSTRY

Advertising is an important factor in the way people attempt to satisfy their needs through the consumption of products. In fact . . . ‘‘it is not that the world of true needs has been subordinated to the world of false needs, but that the realm of needing has become a function of the field of communication .’’ An understanding of the communication industry that mediates needs is also a vital element in the understanding of the social role of advertising. — , The Codes of Advertising1 CHAPTER 4 HUCKSTER FOREPLAY THE PROMOTION INDUSTRY Having considered the two general categories of corporate versus entrepreneurial enterprise in film, as well as important issues of gender, class, and racial and ethnic identity, I wish to turn in these two closing chapters to films that address the two most significant trends impacting career and life in this age. The first is the promotional dimension of consumer capitalism, which is essential to it, and the second is communication technology, which is closely related to the first and increasingly determinative of every aspect of contemporary work experience and personal and cultural identity. No discussion of the success mystique in American business and career cinema would be complete without a close look at the arena that is the driving force of consumerism and most responsible for determining the cultural understanding of success —advertising and public relations. Those who work in this regime are closest to the kinds of thinking meant to arrest public attention, not only for products and companies, but for social attitudes, styles, and finally political economic and ideological orientations. Media advertising and entertainment have also had a long and symbiotic relationship . Motion picture entertainment, for example, which once supplied boundless resources to the dull techniques of early advertising, can be seen in recent decades to have adopted some of the styles and flavor of advertising. In contemporary media generally, the relationship of promotions to information as well as entertainment programming has become symbiotic. This chapter looks at the cinema world in which  :    147 promoters ply their trade, with specific attention to the social forces and contradictions that create them and that they create. From the beginning, Hollywood cinema has represented the advertising and public relations industry with conventional protagonists, plots, and themes, but also largely with mistrust and sometimes ridicule . Only recently, however, has it touched upon this industry’s massive impact on society. The historical predominance of ad/PR comedies may suggest a general cultural unwillingness to take the industry’s economic and cultural impact seriously. Early silent comedies set the tone for this business film subcategory, which was followed in the classical period with more of the same. It is mainly in the extension of comedy into edgy satires stretching from Putney Swope () to Wag the Dog () that American cinema has suggested the greater cultural and ideological influence of promotional culture. For Sut Jhally, it is advertising more than any other single industry that most influences and defines American business and culture. Modern and late capitalism has required a huge investment in promotions and sales— billion in the United States in —in order constantly to reinforce and magnify consumer demand.2 And it is this gargantuan expenditure that supports the high costs of media outreach. Advertising in particular pays for the distribution of almost all of the cultural and informational data that reaches the public through the media. This means that contemporary capitalism would be unthinkable without it. More than the constant advances in technology, advertising is the linchpin of what has been called the information age, which should really be called the Age of Promotional Sign Culture. In this contemporary cultural setting, the media sign or simulacrum is continuously imbued with market connotations influencing its very existence, content, and form. To understand contemporary capitalist culture is to understand advertising ’s full range of impact on cultural production and content as well as distribution and consumption. The specific effect of particular ads on particular audiences is only a small part of advertising’s overall influence. It has become a central, assumed, and therefore almost unconscious part of everyday life through the way it conditions, among other things, the scheduling, organization, and design of the media. More importantly, it imposes itself as a part of the stories and myths that constitute national ideology by encouraging a certain kind of outer-directed ‘‘individual’’ identity, which requires perpetual confirmation through constant expenditure and consumption. As suggested, advertising’s overall in...