Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

Introduction: Branding the Authentic

|| 1 INTRODUCTION BRANDING THE AUTHENTIC If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word “authentic.” Maurice Blanchot1 Welcome to the future of Los Angeles. It is a city made up entirely of brands, logos, and trademarked characters. Every visual landmark in the city has been stamped with a brand. Every resident is a branded or licensed character : Ronald MacDonald wreaks havoc on the city, the cops are the rounded, treaded lumps of the Michelin tire logo, crowds of people are depicted as the America On-Line instant message logo, Bob’s Big Boy is taken hostage and finds a love match in the Esso girl. Anonymous individuals walk around the city with the trademark symbol ™ hovering about their heads. Scanning the skyline, we see the U-Haul building, the Eveready skyscraper, the MTV apartment building. Corporate logos—Microsoft, BP, Enron, Visa, and countless others— blanket the city’s infrastructure, including the roads, cars, and even the city zoo. The animals in the zoo are also brands: the lion of Metro-GoldwynMayer film corporation, the alligator from Lacoste clothing company, and Microsoft Window’s butterflies, with the zoo tour bus driven by the iconic Mr. Clean. 2 || BrAnding the Authentic This is the world of Logorama, a sixteen-minute animated short film written and directed in 2009 by the French creative collective H5, composed of François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, and Ludovic Houplain.2 The film’s simple and familiar narrative—which replicates an age-old trope of good versus evil—takes place in a futuristic, stylized, war-zone Los Angeles, where a homicidal psychopath armed with a gun takes people hostage, wreaks havoc on the city, and leads the police in a prolonged, violent chase. After the hostages escape, a natural apocalypse ensues: an earthquake destroys LA, and Logorama’s brand landscape. Ronald McDonald holding Bob’s Big Boy hostage. BrAnding the Authentic || 3 what is left is immediately drowned with a tidal wave of oil. Logorama, in its own quirky, campy way, is a warning about the future. What are we warned about? Brands. The motivation behind Logorama, according to the filmmakers, is to demonstrate the extent to which brands are ubiquitous, embedded in every aspect of our lives and relationships. The violent film, crafted entirely out of brands (more than 2,500 are used in the film), is an indictment of their ubiquity. The filmmakers intend the film as a critique of how a rabid consumerism is now taken for granted in Western culture. In their “alarming universe,” they collapse the distinction between (and thus reinforce the connection between) brands and individuals, brands and violence, and brands and natural disasters.3 In some ways, the subject matter of Logorama is also the subject matter of this book. The critique of consumer culture that is the heart of Logorama is also a critique of something else, equally important but perhaps even harder to define: the loss of a kind of authenticity. In the US, the 21st century is an age that hungers for anything that feels authentic, just as we lament more and more that it is a world of inauthenticity, that we are governed by superficiality . People pay exorbitant rents to live in the part of town that is edgy and “real,” that has not yet sold out to bland suburbia; we go to extraordinary lengths to prove we are not “sellouts”; we defensively define ourselves as “authentic.” Throughout, there is the looming sense that we are not real enough, that our world is becoming more and more inauthentic, despite our endless efforts to the contrary. Logorama fulfills our dark fears, epitomizes our great laments: it is a world where brands are everywhere, where even culture has been branded, where even authenticity has been trademarked. I became interested in brand cultures because I was thinking about what consumer citizenship means within contemporary capitalism. In my previous work, I examined consumer citizenship from a variety of vantage points, such as postfeminist culture and the television industry, but the current moment felt different to me. Business models were now being used as structuring frameworks for cultural institutions such as the university, as well as for social change movements. My own students, eager for career advice, were now asking me about how to build a “self-brand.” I was struck by the use of market language in US politics, from...