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| Sunday, 19 January 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The television ascendancy of the Beautiful People Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Commercials on television assail you at their strongest when one is watching Cricket (it being taken as axiomatic that we are all Cricket fans these days). For one thing the spot itself is short and one is not inclined to switch the channel and be distracted from the game. For another there are only a few commercials aired at regular intervals so that the senses are bombarded periodically by the electronic messages so subtly crafted by the hidden persuaders of the industry.
For what is crafted for us here is a synthetic sub-world wholly created by the imagination of the advertising copy-writers, directors, cameramen and technicians. Its underlying motive and theme is to make us, the audience, identify with the class and set of people who are created on the screen and flit across this shadowy electronic frame. Outside this frame they have no existence and by identifying with them we ourselves become part of that sub-world forgetting for a moment the petty tribulations and meanness of our own daily quotidian existence. frustrated ambitions At the beginning of television the advertisers aimed at creating a taste for their goods among the newly-opened up audience. The strategy was then to seduce the viewers into buying the goods, whether these were sausages or washing machines, by locating them in attractive settings. Thus new and largely unnecessary tastes were created among the people and it is worth finding out how much the social envy and frustrated ambitions of those who could not reach out for these good things of life contributed to the social dislocations of the last decade or more. If the popular slogan of the last JVP revolt was 'Colombata Kiri, Apita Kekiri' how much did the advertising of products which were beyond the reach of the lower middle classes contribute to a feeling of frustration and envy towards the privileged? Now that these unnecessary tastes have been induced and propagated the advertising industry would like us to feel that we are one happy family partaking of all the goodies which they have so benignly spread before us out of the kindness of their hearts. (We have, of course, to pay hard cash to buy them.) A close examination of most of the commercials these days will show that this Happy Family concept is induced by suggesting to us that we are all part of a set of Beautiful People. This cuts in two directions. For one thing most of these commercials are directed at the young who are anyway Beautiful People. For another, even the middle-aged or even the aging can participate in the aphrodisiac dream by partaking of the nectar which is touted so that a father with a paunch need only drink a particular brand of milk for him to reduce his figure to that of his attractive daughter. This is the formula of exploiting our hunger for remaining young and our fear of approaching old age. Take for example the commercial for a brand of soft drink being currently aired. Here we see a mixed group of young people drinking at an outdoor cafe. As we watch through their eyes we see an old man pushing a cart impinging on the frame. Next the cart collides with a posh car whose occupant, a brash young man, reprimands the labourer for his carelessness. Then we see the group of young people leaving their drinks aside to descend on the spot and help the old man to restore a pile of wood which had been upset by the collision back into the cart. In the last scene we see the old man seated as the centrepiece of the young group and pacified by them. What is suggested is that for these Beautiful People it is all in a day's work. commercial combines This commercial combines several themes. First it suggests that these are not the customary frivolous young people, the giggling adolescents of the popular stereotype. Evidently drinking their preferred soft drink has made them civic-minded and altruistic. Juxtaposed to them is the snooty brat at the wheel of the car, the villain to these heroes and heroines. This blackguard perhaps doesn't take this particular drink or perhaps takes a rival drink if not something stronger. Finally, who watching these civic-minded young who have a proper sense of values towards their elders, even though they may be humble labourers, will not be prepared to identify themselves with these Beautiful People? If the manipulation of the mind here is pretty harmless the one represented by an ad for instant Buriyani is grossly insidious. (Yes, Buriyani too can be instantly concocted these days.) This commercial shows a young girl who has played truant from her cookery class. When she is worried as to how she should answer her mother her boyfriend comes up with the answer. And the all-unsuspecting mother enjoys her errant daughter's expertise at instant cookery. advocates of censorship We are no advocates of censorship but surely there should be some standards and values adhering to what is propagated over television particularly when it has the power to touch formative minds? For here we have a commercial advocating 'cutting classes' in a society suddenly discovering the reality of violence in not merely universities but also schools and tuition classes. When students are killed through ragging, fights for desks and chairs in private tuition classes and violence spills into examination halls we pretend to be horrified and rebuke the student community en masse while propagating the most insidious values over the mass media. These Beautiful People are homogenous because whether they are young men or women they belong to a type and in their T-shirts and jeans there is little difference between them. They are well-scrubbed and well-brushed, smell nice and have good teeth all thanks to the favoured brands of soap, deodorants and tooth paste on the market. If they are male executives they are dressed in spotless shirt and tie and if they are working girls in elegant saris washed with the favoured washing powder which opens all doors to them. They shop at super markets and pay at restaurants with credit cards (all of the prescribed type). If they are married their children (again homogenous, son and daughter) drink the prescribed milk, eat the prescribed cereal and grow up healthy and strong to be launched through life on a raft of savings and life insurance schemes. It is uniformly a bright and sunny world but if you are unfortunate enough to kick the bucket you need not worry either for the corporate guardians will be there to look after your offspring and you would have become transmogrified into a photograph on the wall to attract tearful veneration. situation of bathos Sometimes the commercials draw on High Culture but only to invert it for their own purposes. Take for example the commercial involving the young couple studying 'Gamperaliya' but engaged surreptitiously in eating a brand of peppermints. The situation evokes memories of Piyal and Nanda in 'Gamperaliya' itself involving the English lesson. But the present day commercial is only a sorry caricature of the situation in the novel. The novelistic situation brings out not only the class distinction between Piyal and Nanda but also the teacher-pupil relationship between the two. The two relationships are both juxtaposed and inverted for in the class relationship it is Nanda who is superior to Piyal while in the teacher-pupil relationship this tie is reversed. What is more in the novel this situation is played out against the gaunt grandeur of the 'walauwe' while in the commercial the comic presence of a family retainer who becomes high on peppermints only underlines the situation of bathos. In fact in commercial television traditional authority figures are invoked only to be deflated. Hence the old guard Sinhala school principal in his cloth and tortoise-shell comb (where does one get this tribe today?) who enjoys the new-fangled biscuit and his urban counterpart the English language school principal in tie and coat who relishes a soft drink. That traditional authority figure on the Cricket field, the umpire, is reduced to a prancing clown in an ad for fast food. So are the school and the playing field, the traditional areas of authority and discipline, violated in this new gimmicky television age of the Beautiful People. |
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