A big thing in the 1970s - probably the immediately preceding decades too - was symbolism.
No one talks about it nowadays, do they?
No one says "such-and-such is symbolic of...". Or "how symbolic!" Or "the symbolism is obvious".
Maybe it was related to that uptake of Freudianism into the popular culture that happened post-WW2 - Marnie and that kind of thing. All of Hitchcock really. Splendour in the Grass.
Perhaps it was related to trends in literary criticism, or the way novels, plays, poems were taught in the classroom. I seem to remember reading someone or other (Nabokov? Kael?) railing against this middlebrow way of approaching art.
But I'm thinking psychoanalysis - and the popularity of dream diaries and dream analysis - that's where it mainly comes from. (Surrealism also would have been a conduit).
Advertising was full of it: on Madison Avenue, and whatever the British equivalent was, the copywriters were probably among the most avid readers of Freud and Jung and Adler (or bastardized versions thereof). At some point - I'm thinking post-WW2 but possibly slightly earlier - the admen and the marketing people realised they are not selling usefulness, value for money, or even attractive design. Their real business is peddling dreams, fantasies, desires, status (status symbols, another concept no one ever uses these days). Wish fulfillment via displacement, condensation, metonymy. Symbolism!
But yes if you are a teenager, the idea of symbolism - especially phallic symbolism - is very grabbing . You start to see it everywhere.
You feel like you've cottoned on to something. The code.
I remember seeing this play Double Dare by Dennis Potter - I would have been 13 when it aired in 1976 - and being shocked-thrilled by the bit where the serious playwright character is talking to a serious-aspiring actress who wants a part in whatever he's doing next. He brings up the fact that she appeared in a TV ad for a Fraggie Bar (a crumbly chocolate treat clearly modelled on Cadbury's Flake). The playwright can't stop himself, he simply has to ask her - did the commercial director, did he actually ask her to pretend it was a penis?
The scene is about 20 minutes in - and in the middle of it there's a pastiche of the Flake commercials of that time, which did edge into the Emmanuelle softcore erotica zone.
Today there's no need to bother with symbolism, is there? Or indeed innuendo and the double entendre. The very notion of suggestiveness is gone. You don't suggest, you show. You don't hint, you say.
Hence programs like Naked Attraction. Or Sex Education. Dick pix. Sexting. The pornucopia of the internet. The word "cunt" is virtually common parlance in TV drama and comedy. "Fuck" is nothing at all.
Everything's graphic, it's all out there in plain view.
Consequently, where would the need be to harness the hidden energies of Libido to sell products? In a post-repression society, surely these tactics would have little traction?
I can't say I've done an exhaustive scan of current advertising trends - like most people I should imagine, I skip through them as much as I can, fast-forward, or, if that's not possible, just look at my phone - or take a leak - until the ad break, the ads interruption, is over. I can't think of any current ads (apart from the ongoing Progressive campaign with Flo and her younger, gratingly-voiced new addition / rival) that are anything like all those commercials of our youth that were (forgive me) "iconic" - ads that we would reperform in the playground, just like we did with our favorite sketches from comedy shows. Ads where you'd sing the ear-worm jingle. Ads that would get spoofed on TV comedy shows (like with this Jaspar Carrott parody of the Flake commercials).
Even so, just catching TV ads out of the corner of my eye, I get the impression that sex is not something that advertising is trying to use to shift products nowadays.
Young people - so it's reported, based on surveys - are in fact having less sex than previous generations did. They are forming serious relationships much later in life. There's reduced interest in that whole area. Attraction has less attraction.
You once used to be able to explain pop music and rock'n'roll etc almost entirely in those terms. This was the gas in the engine driving it - the demand, almost volcanic, for "satisfaction".
But it seems to me that figures like Madonna, or Prince - whose whole shtick was based around unrepression and liberation, the bursting free of unbridled sensual pleasure - they are going to seem more and more inexplicable as time goes by. (They were already a bit dated in the 1980s, to be honest, given that Dr Ruth was on TV, while on the lower shelves in the newsagents you had your Cosmos and similar magazines with the monthly article on how to improve your sex life, detailed advice and instructions, etc).
I can already anticipate finding this aspect of popular music hard to explain to my students. They won't be able to understand the impact in their time of Presley with his pelvis, the Rolling Stones's blend of effeminacy and virility, Jim Morrison with his "erotic politics", even Bowie.
Is there a current major pop star whose thing is based on sex?
It's not what Taylor Swift is selling - not at all.
Late breaking addition suggested by Lee in Comments - a Flake commercial by Jonathan Glazer that was rejected by Cadbury
"WAP" probably represents some sort of ideological terminus for sex & music - both in its explicitness and its acceptance by (liberal) culture gatekeepers (https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/934634998/the-100-best-songs-of-2020-page-5). It's impossible to "push boundaries" when all the fences have been dismantled.
ReplyDeleteAgainst that, Swift earns much of her popularity as a reactionary (I don't use that term disparagingly here - this public vulgarity grows tiresome). Unlike other reactionary acts of the past (think the trad jazz revival, the Beach Boys filling stadiums in the 70s and 80s, the - well, you wrote a book about this), Swift does incorporate significant elements of contemporary music (Max Martin production, bowlderised verses by Kendrick Lamar and Ice Spice), managing the extraordinary trick of being able to appeal to massive, culturally conservative audiences (from boomers to children) while retaining some measure of critical cachet.
Ah yes you right, raunch isn't completely vanished from the pop scene.
DeleteI wonder if "WAP" really is the terminus point?
I am sure I felt like pop-as-porno could go no further back in '92 when Madonna did the triple-whammy of the Erotica album / The Girlie Show tour / the Sex coffee table book.
But then in the early 2000s, there was the Jennifer Lopez video in which a young lad ogles her on his computer screen with a tube of moisturizer and a box of tissues in blatant view. There was "Slave 4 You" and Christina Aguilera.
And then in the 2010s we had Miley Cyrus miming analinctus in that Video Awards performance with the demented twerking etc.
The sexlessness of the last 10-15 years seem like a combination of tech's distancing people from the physical world and allowing it to sublimate its desires exclusively in the form of discretely consumed pornography. It's own form of deep, shame-inducing repression - sex is either something you swiftly indulge in when no one's looking or try not to mention or think about at all except in superficially crass joking. (Your Euphorias and Sex Educations are more like exceptions that prove the rule - the former is watched by teens primarily as camp, while the latter seems to be watched by far more adults than people the characters' age)
ReplyDeleteThis is the best essay I've read about it, though it's focused on superhero-era mainstream film https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
*DISCREETLY consumed
DeleteIt's a great title / headline for an essay.
DeleteNot read it yet - but I wonder, have those kind of movies ever had much of a sexual element to them?
DeleteIt's more about how the rise of the superhero genre provided a convenient pretense for minimizing sex in American movies - it gets into other areas, too
Delete"I seem to remember reading someone or other (Nabokov? Kael?) railing against this middlebrow way of approaching art."
ReplyDeleteMartin Amis (big Nabokov fan) satirises adolescent "being into symbolism" in The Rachel Papers (1973) – the protagonist is a William Blake fan.
A background factor in advertising is internationalisation – campaigns for the big multinational consumer products (Apple etc) have to be re-useable all round the world. So saucy symbolism is out (not going to work in Saudi or China), but so too is humour. It’s why there are so few funny or memorable TV ads in Britain now. Hovis/John Smith’s/Tango: it was too ‘national popular’ in the end to survive.
Ah interesting - I don't think I ever read The Rachel Papers, I think the earliest Amis for me was Success. But he would be bang on the money in satirizing symbolism as jejune interest, in the early '70s.
DeleteAnd interesting too about the internationalization of ad campaigns.
One of the odd aspects of ads as entertainment is that you could feel very positive towards a commercial without it rubbing off on the product itself. The "it's frothy, man!" ads didn't make me like Cresta (I think that's the fizzy beverage in question) any more, which was not at all. But then I suppose, they are largely to establish name recognition - or get you try a new product.
Coincidently, I've just read an Ian MacDonald essay on Nick Drake - the whole piece is an in-depth interpretation of the symbolism in Drake's songs. Arguing that the whole work is built around a mix of English nature symbolism and ideas from Buddhism. It's quite convincing, but highlights the how far things have shifted away from this, as you say.
DeleteNabokov despised both symbolism and psychoanalysis. Baudrillard wrote somewhere that the greatest of the great writers (I remember he listed Nabokov, Bunin and Svevo, along with two others I can't remember (Canetti maybe) and I've only read Nabokov) were united in their hatred of psychoanalysis, and said Freud grew to loathe psychoanalysis just as viciously.
ReplyDeleteYes he would go into tirades about the witch doctor of Vienna.
DeleteAnother quirk of Nabokov's is that he disliked music intensely. It got him all agitated. Which I think is something he shared with Freud, funnily enough.
And the appropriation of psychoanalysis by advertising goes back to the 1920s, due to Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew and the commonly-acknowledged father of PR. It was he who first presented smoking as a demonstration of liberty by having women smoke at a protest (phallicism ahoy!), all to open the market of fags for women. Bernays was also a complete pessimist regarding human nature, and believed humans had to be directed to suppress their baser instincts. Check out Adam Curtis' series of documentaries The Century of the Self, where Bernays plays a pivotal role.
ReplyDeleteAh, I did not know that.
DeleteHe started as a theater critic and said nazis used his techinques
DeleteThe Flake adverts were always a bit puzzling to me because the main consumers of the product were pre-pubescent boys. Would shurely have been a more effective advert commercially if it featured scruffy kids getting up to pranks, or some kind of cartoon. But the soft-focus smut does feed into the critique of Mary Whitehouse et al that the media were collectively engaged in social programming with commercial/artistic concerns merely secondary.
ReplyDeleteContemporary British advertising is mainly concerned with pushing multiculturalism with a pointed over-representation of ethnic minorities, which I interpret as being part of the ongoing panicked liberal-progressive response to Trump/Brexit/Europopulism etc.
But there is also the sense that the power of the media is fading anyhow. I remember when it was pretty outre to believe that the BBC was biased or even slightly untrustworthy, whereas nowadays that's a run-of-the-mill opinion, or even regarded as a truism. So I think that one of the reasons that shite like Naked Attraction can now exist is not just because social attitudes have loosened, but there is no longer the sense of a collective media commons that is worth preserving. It's just not worth caring about.
Why are you so sure that Flakes were largely eaten by pre-pubescent boys? Maybe it's because you were one and largely knew other pp-b's?
DeleteClearly they wanted to establish the Flake as a sort of sophisticated-woman mechanism of self-pleasuring - perhaps a chocolatey metonym for the vibrator?
But undercutting this would be the more mundane and definitively kiddy-oriented life of the Flake as part of the 99 confection - vanilla ice cream in a cone and with a mini-Flake stuck in it.
"shite like Naked Attraction" - it's the best thing on the telly! Or equal first with Gogglebox.
DeleteIt was the fact that on a recent holiday to UK, our whole family - me, missus, 22 year old son, 16 year old son - would end each day in the living room of our Air BnB, watching Naked, that first started getting me musing on the idea of a post-repression culture.
Compare to when I was my younger son's age - how you would stay up watching arty or foreign films on BBC2 in the hope of catching sight of a breast. The inexpressible thrillshock of nudity on I, Claudius, or Therese Raquin.
And how extremely difficult it was to come by information about the mechanics of sex, or sexual physiognomy. Pre-internet you relied on finding a porn mag under a hedge (me and my friends once found a cache half-buried in leaf mould up the woods). Or you might find some ancient 1930s manual on "successful marriage" in a jumble sale. Or a dour, clinical Pelican book on adolescence from the 1960s in the library.
Nowadays, though...
Naked Attraction is of course utterly unsexy. Part of the interest for me, alongside the sheer variety of body parts, is the way phlegmatic Englishness completely flattens the potential for titillation. Pubes and "tidiness" in the region assessed with words like "decent". The bathetic verbal tic of "to be fair", or worse, "fair play".
And then the show's premise is proven false almost every episode as nearly all the clothed dates fail to spark to life and 98 percent of pairings do not lead to a relationship, or even a one-off sexual encounter.
I gave a detailed response Simon but this blog has started eating my comments, and I don't want to type it out again!
DeleteI mourn the loss of the micro-essay
DeleteMy recollection as a British late-90s adolescent: that was the era of Eurotrash and Channel 5 basing its whole policy around gratuitous nudity (it was thanks to Channel 5 that I first saw Russ Meyer, and I'll happily acknowledge the merits of his work). It was also the peak of the lad mag phenomenon, with their photoshoots of Big Breakfast presenters flashing their spiders' legs and half the issue taken up by ads for ridiculously expensive clobber solely for the editor to wrangle a few free suits. The lad mag was supposedly sold as aspirational for the contemporary British 20something man, yet the primary readership was clearly teenage boys seeking onanist fuel but too scared to buy a proper porny mag. One curious point is the overt cynicism of all involved in the lad mag, producers and consumers alike. An article on watches costing north of two grand will mean nothing to a 14-yr-old just wanting a photospread of Kelly Brook in a bikini (nor to the hypothetical 24-yr-old the mag was apparently pitched at; surely he'd be more concerned in sorting out the rent that month?). Naked Attraction, with its mantra of body positivity, is at least trying to mask or deny its cynicism. Is that an improvement?
DeleteThe tl;dr of my munched comment was that Naked Attraction is like The Simpsons - too visually repellent for me to tolerate. But this extends to a lot of media nowadays - a general abandonment of aesthetics, or at least what I used to understand as aesthetics.
DeleteRumour has it that the female contestants on Naked Attraction ask for the temperature in the studio to be turned down for the poky nipple effect, while male contestants request the opposite, so as to avoid what George Costanza referred to as " shrinkage ".
ReplyDeleteIt is a bizarre programme - the actual date scenes are invariably awkward. How can you relax with someone when you've already seen their private parts, appraised their bare buttocks, etc? The pairings soon come to realise why agreeing to a date based on nothing apart from physical titillation is a desperate idea.
It's a far cry from our Cilla and " what'syer name, number three, and where do you come from? ". That's for sure.
I think its some sex getting unrepresed and other things getting more represed. For example, in pop culture a man walking up to a girl/woman in a bar is considered an aggression. I ve seen many examples. I think that´s because of the internet, suitors cant just talk to a woman just like that, they have to be preapproved online. I read a woman recently saying just that, that meeting people in bars is stupid because its random and while drunk and the reasonable thing to do is using dating apps.
ReplyDeleteAlso relationships in the office, and student - teacher affairs etc. As an old movie buff I see many things in 70´s movies that would not get into screens nowadays. And its not only 70s machismo, there´s lots of that for sure, but i think its not only that. For example in so called art movies nowadays there are not as many hetero sex scenes, I think because that would be considered sexist, yes there´s Gaspar Noe, and more homosexual sex, but theres a lot of sex scene avoiding films. I recently saw a french movie about a woman that championed uncommitted casual sex, and didn´t had any sex scenes! Finally, 30´s movies are sipped in psychoanalysis, i don´t think it´s a post war thing but more likely the popularity of psychoanalisis just fading in the latter half of the last century
¿Sex in TV? Well of course thats unrepressed now. For obvious reasons.
There are also statistics showing american men are now getting less sex than ever, the culprits according to some are porn, but more importantly the internet date market where fewer men get more women
ReplyDeleteSimon, have you seen Jonathon Glazer's amazing contribution to the Flake cannon? It ditches the symbolism for a story of everyday succubi. Cadburys said no thanks:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uxnpc-JQ3o