ABSTRACT
At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1971, more than two decades of cigarette advertising on television came to an end. With it vanished almost $230 million in advertising revenue (Brandt 2007, 271) and the daily specter of men and women puffing away on the small screen. During these decades of “saturated” television promotion, viewers witnessed tens of thousands of cigarettes caressed, savored, and inhaled (Pollay 1994), and the percentage of US smokers reached record highs (Brandt 2007, 309).1 In a promotion that appeared in Advertising Age in 1962, the CBS network touted television as the “greatest cigarette vending machine ever devised” (quoted in Pollay 1994, 130). This chapter investigates the corporeal appeals in TV’s cigarette commercials, drawing upon theories of “synaesthesia” and “sense memory” from the field of phenomenology and, in so doing, demonstrating how television history can be re-evaluated beyond the audiovisual. Although my emphasis is on tactility, taste, and somatic sensation, this approach does not preclude theories of gender. As Vivian Sobchack reminds us, the body is “always also a lived body-immersed in, making, and responding to social as well as somatic meaning” (2004, 139). While feminist scholars have pondered the theoretical links and discontinuities between phenomenology and feminism (Fisher 2000, 1-38), my analysis acknowledges the body as “materially acculturated,” in Susan Bordo’s words, conforming to “social norms and habitual practices” of femininity and masculinity (1993, 288).2 Analyzing historical television texts with the gendered body in mind provides access to the lived experience of men and women from the past-in the case of advertising, expressed as an ideal. As Bordo explains, “[h]omogenized images normalize . . . [T]hey function as models” for the self (1993, 25). Moreover, attention to the somatic can serve to mark social stagnation or social change. The gendered body is always historically situated,3 and the comportment and sensual range of televised bodies can demarcate cultural shifts. Theories of synaesthesia and sense memory newly gaining currency in film studies are particularly useful in understanding the full force of cigarette
advertising. While clinical synaesthesia describes a patient’s literal cross-modal perception of stimuli-the sound of laughter registering as a golden-brown color, for example-Sobchack argues that all of us are synaesthetes in our ability to readily experience films across the full range of our senses (2004, 68, 71): “Our fingers, our skin and nose and lips and tongue and stomach and all the other parts of us understand what we see” (84). In Laura Marks’s work on synaesthesia, she explores the evocation of “sense memories” in cinema viewing (148)—“All sense perceptions allow for, and indeed require, the mediation of memory” (2000, 202)—and she suggests that viewing an image with the eye activates the full circuit of sense memory, including the “tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions” (162). Just as Marks devotes her study to the ways cinema “can appeal to senses that it cannot technically represent” (129), the study that follows reconsiders the full circuit of sense memories awakened by cigarette advertising’s overdetermined aural and visual stimuli, agreeing with Sobchack that synaesthetic perception “is the rule” (2004, 70). I will discuss tactility as centered on hands and lips; the “taste” of cigarettes-“rich,” “fresh,” “mild,” “smooth,” and “cool”; and, finally, the kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensations of inhalation, exhalation, and the accompanying kick of a nicotine high. How the film and television media differ is a crucial question, particularly regarding the past emphasis on the distracted nature of television viewing. Yet cigarette commercials were costly film productions, and, as John Caldwell suggests, the stylistic impact of film techniques cannot be minimized (1995, 50). While Caldwell notes that in the 1950s the importation of cinematic style was “muted and constrained” (51), by the late 1960s and 1970s filmed commercials had learned to engage viewers “through the lower sensory channels,” exploiting “nonverbal mechanisms” (94). Regarding distracted reception, since television commercials are characteristically overcoded and repetitive, they may be potentially more powerful in stimulating the full sensorium. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the entire range of corporeal sensation may be more readily triggered in a distracted state through the kind of repetition TV ads depend upon, as the total experience seeps into our bodily memory little by little. (An example would be when we learn an ad jingle “by heart” without making any effort to memorize it.) As Steve Shaviro says, television “colonizes us obliquely, by distraction. It allures us, willy-nilly, into getting connected” (2003, 6). A marketing research study conducted in 1970 appears to confirm somatic over cognitive recollection. In a day-after recall survey, only 4 percent of respondents could remember that a Kent commercial talked about the cigarette’s filter, the cognitive message of the ad. But in “verbatim” responses, viewers did recall a “girl and fellow . . . running with a kite” on a beach, a
“lady” taking a cigarette “out of a man’s hand,” and phrases about “refreshing,” “mild” and “smoother” taste, each example a trigger for sense memory (“Beach” 1970). A 1967 commercial for Newport cigarettes even directly confronts the distracted nature of television viewing. As a middle-aged man watches a Western on television, he appears to doze off, then sees on the screen an attractive couple waving at him from the beach. The young figures in beach clothes jump out of the television set into the man’s living-room. The beautiful blonde sits on the arm of his armchair and sings the praises of Newport’s taste, while the young man lights his cigarette. At the climax of the narrative, the armchair viewer delights in deep inhalation. This ad makes literal the way in which the cigarette commercial on television was strategically designed to leap off the screen and activate the sense of touch, taste, and breath in the viewer’s body, even in a groggy, semi-distracted state (YT).4
