Ad Execs Self-Congratulate in Doug Pray's Art & Copy
“I like to think that [with my advertisements] I’m entertaining people, using my client’s products.”- Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.
"You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll-call forever. End of story. You're another corporate shill, you're another whore at the capitalist gang-bang... there's a price on your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink."- Bill Hicks, comedian
The most gorgeous, riveting span of cinema released in the past few months reveals at its close that it has an explicit purpose: it wants you to buy blue jeans. Blue Jeans from Levi’s, specifically, the American Institution. If you’ve gone to a multiplex for a movie recently, you’re probably familiar with the Levi’s Ad Campaign that bears the name “Go Forth.” It’s been on television, and it’s effective there, and stilled images of a similar quality grace billboards and posters on subway walls. Seen on the big screen, however, it is simply wondrous in its budget of sound and image. It is a more rapturous use of theatrical motion picture technology than any of the summer blockbusters released this year, with images made for a massive screen and a crackling soundtrack that begs high, immersive volume. In a series of slow, crisp black and white images, the texture of which recalls Robert Frank and Bela Tarr, the pace and content Terrence Malick, we see the American landscape and its denizens cascade proudly, unpretentiously before us. There are fireworks, muggy ponds, slums, trains, flags, corporate suits, rolling hills, interracial kisses, high rises, young muscles flexing and even some horseback riding. May sound kitschy, but these images have an undeniable power. On the soundtrack: the only known recording of Uncle Walt Whitman reading a particularly rousing passage from the poem "America" (1). Taken together, the images and sounds soar. All of this creates a yearning, a palpable emotion, and the Levi’s logo being stamped onto the image unceremoniously at the end inspires either a jarring emotional plummet or self-conscious laughter (“how could I have been so stupid?”). It’s the greatest short film that doesn’t really exist; it’s a trailer for a long-lost abandoned David Gordon Green film. What it is, really, is an attempt to associate these images of fantastic beauty and the most brilliant of American poets, and the sentiment constructed via their simultaneity, with a brand of pants. It’s an advertisement. And to those still sensitive to such things’ intrusiveness and cynicism, a beautiful, absorbing ad is still just a wolf in sheep’s clothing, definitely not to be trusted, and to be admired at one’s own peril. The director, Cary Fukunaga, has also released a well-regarded feature, Sin Nombre, released about the same time as the Levi’s campaign (2). It’s doubtless that he and his stunningly talented director of photography, Darren Lew, will go onto brilliant careers. But what will it have taken to get them there? (3)
The clip comes courtesy of the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, and both Dan Wieden and David Kennedy appear in Doug Pray’s new documentary on the advertising industry’s innovations of the last 60 years, Art & Copy. Considering the surging popularity of AMC’s drama Mad Men and with television commercials now uploaded by the millions on Youtube (that is to say, the willful consumption of advertisements), there has never been a better time to discuss the aesthetics and practices of marketing and the extent of its effect on our culture. Pray’s film, through its rosy-colored glasses, may embody contemporary attitudes on the ad men (and women) who provide us with much of our favorite (and inescapable) sounds and images, but he does his viewership no service with such an unthinking, uncritical portrait of the process.
Appallingly, though understandably, there aren’t any but massive, clear consciences and earnest smiles on display in Art & Copy. Each interview participant (all advertising bigwigs responsible for such indomitable memes as "got milk?" and “Just Do It”) offers a unique variation of Silverstein’s dubious justification and self-satisfaction, making them the most deluded, cynical group of documentary subjects since the Friedman family or Fred A. Leuchter, depending on one’s point-of-view (4). These tycoons have convinced themselves that they’ve only followed a calling, performing a useful, indeed, necessary, function in a society with the desperate need for market-place clarification. None offers any sort of meaningful self-awareness in admitting they’re essentially charged with manipulating consumers and promulgating corporate lies (about running faster, feeling better, looking better, eating better). In a society of seemingly infinite capitalistic choice, the public’s attention must be controlled, their manifesto goes. These are the individuals who’ve proven capable at directing the consuming populace at the behest of the highest bidder, but this relationship is curiously not portrayed as being problematic in the slightest. One surfer-turned-Ad Exec claims that his dog food commercials not only make you love his client’s dog food, but also make you love your dog more. The hubris runs rampant, and Pray struggles to keep up.
This puzzling effort from Doug Pray, most notably the director of two near-brilliant documentaries (the semi-obscure 1996 music movie Hype! and 2008’s acclaimed Surfwise) and a mediocre one sandwiched between (Scratch from 2001), broadly concerns the world of advertising in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In fact, the broad regard Art & Copy has for its subject may be the film’s greatest weakness, as it keeps the film from developing any sort of engaging through-line. One can stomach a film boasting offensive ideals and politics (and Errol Morris has made of career out of providing a forum to nauseating interview subjects) if the filmmaker manages a worthwhile form of execution or compelling argument. But this is a mixture of talking head interviews organized around no discernible narrative constraint, accompanied by frustratingly tangential urban tableaux with common-knowledge statistics pasted over them (ones concerning how much advertising the average American is exposed to in a given day, the cost of Super Bowl ads, etc.). The film bores on a narrative level and infuriates thematically.
Pray’s admiration for these soulless hucksters is alarming for a director whose first (and still best) film Hype! hilariously mulled the countless transgressions of corporate media and ad agencies while they disrupted and poisoned the once-vibrant Seattle music scene during Grunge Mania in the early 1990’s. Almost two decades removed from that debut, Pray has since evolved a dispiritingly amorous relationship with the very mechanisms he’d already convincingly dismantled with nothing more than a genial wit and a keen ear for his subjects’ emblematic commentary. All of that’s gone now, he’s sided definitively with Goliath, and it’s a bit ironic that this, his least appealing film, both visually and structurally, should focus on a business intent upon using images and tight narrative patterns successfully and aggressively in pursuit of profit.
In its strained-smile awkwardness, Art & Copy often resembles a touchy-feely corporate training video wherein ad execs promote a “creative/corporate lifestyle” that their graphic design flunkies can hope to obtain eventually, should their desperate salesmanship and unscrupulousness never falter. The attempts by the executives (several former longhairs) to masquerade their contradictory vocation as mere paradox are laughable, and the human interest subsections of the film in which they share the moments in which great ads occurred to them, or bureaucratic obstacles were overcome (casting themselves, the creatives, as puny Davids against the gray flannel Goliath) are reprehensible. Advertising junkies may swoon over the discourse, but those infuriated by the constant erosion of public space in favor of mega-budgeted ad campaigns will experience little but insult after insult.
The notion of advertising’s inherent “creativity” is proposed again and again, and the figures (with no objection from the doe-eyed Pray) each fancy him- or herself equal parts artist and entertainer. That each truly works as glorified salesmen is a fact buried deep within insipid personal narratives but never manages to reach the surface. Midway through the film we are privy to commentary on the transition from utilitarian advertising through the 1950s, which told audiences what the thing was and what it did, to a modern, smarter, graphics-infused form that sought to show and not tell, and thus inspire consumers to emotion response. The first half of the twentieth century’s ad men needn’t be celebrated either, but their craft was a little less shrill and definitely less pervasive than that of their progeny. The implication here is that selling things is so natural an endeavor that it hardly needs to be named in this context, thus its exclusion from the proceedings. The illusion of modern advertising is that it’s not selling, it’s providing. Providing entertainment, motivation, beauty, emotional stimulus, visions of celebrities, music, a sense of community and inspiration.
With such a promising resume, it’s flabbergasting that Pray would dedicate an entire film to the veneration of what’s become a social menace. We’re meant to wait, sweating it out with bated breath, as they unspool the story of our most famous television clips, as though such backstage intrigue is somehow informative, inspiring or interesting. Detailing the process behind any industry or operation can generate interest (Georges Franju captured the beauty and terror of slaughterhouses in Le Sang des Bêtes, the Canadian documentary series How It’s Made turns syrup making into riveting spectacle, and the legendary Frederick Wiseman is apt to dedicate four or more hours to public housing offices or state legislatures), but the tenor of Art & Copy’s wonk narratives is disconcertingly grandiose. A similarly pitched documentary concerning the herculean effort to construct a similarly offensive product, like gasoline or shotguns, would be met with fierce resistance and accusations of corporate collusion on the part of the filmmakers. Speaking of which, sapping the film of its objectivity and independence of thought is the fact that the “original concept” for the film is credited to Gregory Beauchamp and Kirk Souder, the two founders of an advertising firm called Ground Zero (they also serve as executive producers). In light of this involvement, what else could one expect but a sterling portrait of the industry, Mad Men on Mad Men? How have we come to view advertising so innocuously? (5)
Pray offers us pristine examples of what we’re really talking about when we talk about an emergent “creative class”: mediocre art school alumni, sell-outs, burnouts and opportunists, who now design pretty methods of psychological manipulation on a mass scale and call it art. Pray cursorily opens up an ethical debate at picture’s end, but with no outside interference, the lunatics are left to police themselves at the asylum. The few times any of the myriad ill-effects of their vocation are voiced, any marketing malfeasance is quickly deemed “bad advertising,” and the conversation continues without a missed beat. “Bad advertising,” they all seem to be saying, is like pornography: they know it when they see it, and its distinguishing feature is a paucity of creativity when compared to the good guys providing us with the good advertisements. The thinking here goes: the business of selling and marketing is not itself crass, the corruption of public spaces isn’t a lamentable loss and tampering with children's education (all tangible effects of ad culture) is not itself a bad thing, but they become so in the hands of those lacking proper decorum. To treat an ethical and social question entirely in terms of aesthetics feeds an industry-wide delusion that’s spread beyond marketing boardrooms and into the mindset of a good chunk of the American people.
Art & Copy / USA / 2009 / Color / 89 min. / Directed by Doug Pray / “Original Concept” by Gregory Beauchamp and Kirk Souder, “Narrative Consultant” Timothy J. Sexton / Interview Subjects: Lee Clow, Jim Durfee, Cliff Freeman, Jeff Goodby, David Kennedy, George Lois, Hal Riney, Mary Wells, Phyllis K. Robinson and Dan Wieden
1 - To further illustrate the lack of artistic wherewithal of the Levi’s campaign, Whitman’s poem was itself written “in opposition to the commercial and material culture of America and the aggressively capitalist spirit of the time,” according to Betsy Erkkila in her book:
Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989
The power of Whitman’s invocation arises from his belief in an America whose future lay outside corporate strictures. This power is unsurprisingly, unforgivably utilized to commercial ends, and the head spins at the dialectic possibilities therein.
2 - A similar commercial, in color, features Whitmans “O Pioneers!” on its soundtrack. It lacks the startling beauty and wistfulness of the “America” spot, but it suffers from the same problems still. That the tone and imagery are strikingly similar despite a change in directors (the “O Pioneers” spot was helmed by M. Blash, whose debut feature was 2006’s Lying) would indicate that the true author of both pieces is Wieden + Kennedy as a firm, not either filmmaker as an artist.
3 - The fact that many of our premiere filmmakers (David Fincher, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Errol Morris, Wes Anderson and even David Lynch) have either gotten their start in advertising (the three former) or used it to pay the bills or as an outlet for short filmmaking (the three latter) ought to be upsetting, though it doesn’t seem to offend most. There is no real distribution of short films in this country, and the use of short films on television and in cinemas (as is done in other countries), might alleviate some of the pressure filmmakers experience to make advertisements. Possibly in the future we can look to OnDemand and Internet distribution as a way for filmmakers to create short work (a viable art form when not under the influence of multinationals) and not starve.
4 - This refers to the denial-plagued family combating charges of child molestation in Andrew Jarecki’s gripping Capturing the Friedmans (2003), and the execution-equipment engineer turned holocaust-denial poster child in Errol Morris’ Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (1999).
5 - Pray confusingly states his own ambivalence about advertising practices in an odd, contradictory interview at: http://blog.spout.com/2009/01/22/doug-pray-interview-art-copy-sundance-2009/. His ambivalence could have benefited the film, had he taken it with him into the editing room.
