The Image (37 page)

In the simpler years of the depression of the 1930’s, Will Rogers said the United States might be the only country in history to go to the poorhouse in an automobile. We had not then yet discovered the deeper, scientifically distilled poverty of our abundance. If Will Rogers were alive today, he might add to his portrait the paradox of a people taking pictures of themselves—even on their way to that same poorhouse.

How escape? How avoid a life of looking in and out of picture windows?

Here enters a providential peculiarity of our ailment. In the last stages of Albert Camus’
Plague
, Dr. Rieux remarks that a man “can’t cure and know at the same time.” Dr. Rieux says that his job, the more urgent job, is not to know but to cure. Our plague, our disease of extravagant expectations, is different. To know our disease, to discover what we
suffer from, may itself be the only possible cure.

“Discontent,” Oscar Wilde once observed, “is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” This is surely true today. Our problem is complicated by the fact that the prescriptions which nations offer for themselves are also symptoms of their diseases. But illusory solutions will not cure our illusions. Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself. Though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudo-events, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.

While we have given others great power to deceive us, to create pseudo-events, celebrities, and images, they could not have done so without our collaboration. If there is a crime of deception being committed in America today, each of us is the principal, and all others are only accessories. It is dangerously tempting to treat our illusions by compounding them. To try to cure the ills of advertising by creating a more favorable image of advertising. To salve mediocrity by mediocre appeals for “excellence.” To drown our illiteracy in illiterate appeals for literacy. To hide our individual purposelessness in the purposelessness of a committee fabricating an attractive image of the national purpose.

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or to imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside
notions. Notions of which neither we nor the Communists have ever dreamed and which we can never see in our mirror. One of our grand illusions is the belief in a “cure.” There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning.

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

The first edition of
The Image
was published in 1962, the year after I was born. John Kennedy was yet to be assassinated, LSD was yet to reach Harvard University, and the French postmodernists were yet to begin their deconstruction of America’s television-driven culture.

Ironically perhaps, like most readers coming to the book today, my main access to the sensibility of this era comes from television shows such as
Mad Men
, which, for all its slick characters, cigarette smoking, and cynical dialogue, actually depicts a kind of innocence: the last moment in our history before the images created on Madison Avenue overtook reality. From our current perspective within the chaotic onslaught of tweets, status updates, and social marketing, the discussions between ad men about what slogans might best sell pantyhose seem almost quaint. Though rather devious in its intent, there was an art to the manufacturing of images that could touch the untapped recesses of human psychology. This was a craft that could be mastered by one set of human beings to influence the behaviors of another.

Our widespread fascination with this era—with its styles, appliances, and values—points to our own sense that something has been lost since then. Yes, the triumphant, postwar American narrative was irreparably interrupted by a series of brutal assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the massacre at Kent State. But if we reach back just a bit further than this, to the time of Pan Am, the World’s Fair, and the
Dick Van Dyke Show
, we find an America already undergoing a deep, radical transition from one culture into another, from what Boorstin
would consider the world of language and text, to the world of the image.

A conservative at heart, Boorstin saw this as a shift away from considered thought to one of superficial understanding. While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart.

Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values. Though Boorstin introduces this idea in relation to the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates in 1960, in which the telegenic Kennedy came off the victor, this new media reality ultimately served the left no better than it did the right. Reagan would come to depend even more on the intentional manipulation of visual imagery than Kennedy did, and modern conservatives have learned to exploit the thought-quelling immediacy of television as well as any liberal Democrat has.

Where Boorstin proved the most prophetic and relevant to our age, however, is in his prediction about the extent to which manufactured imagery would be able to supplant reality itself. In a process he saw as beginning in his own time, the imagery that was being created, as well as the media that was used to disseminate it, began taking on lives of their own. That’s why the era of the Mad men is so intriguing, even nostalgic for us today. There were still human beings utilizing their creativity. The Mad men were actively concocting the logos of banks, the brand myths of soaps, and the characters on cereal boxes. There was a creative innocence fueling all this cultural production and reproduction, and a real excitement about the potential of the new technologies. The magic of color TV would be as spectacular as the race into space.

But as Boorstin had begun to observe, the novelty of television
was soon superseded by its ubiquity. The hypnotic lure of these simulated realities became the seamless wash of Muzak and strip malls. Innocence and awe was giving way to sensory overload and unconsciousness. As Baudrillard would later explain, we lost touch with any of the creative origins of these media as the simulations they rendered became the new reality. The first symptoms of this cultural disconnect appeared to Boorstin as the precursors to a much greater disease of widespread self-deception and discontent. Unlike Marshall McLuhan, who would later codify these changes in less judgmental terms such “hot and cool,” or “obsolescence and retrieval,” Boorstin made no secret of his concern and disdain for the direction in which the American experience and its discourse were going.

Most famously, he coined the term “pseudo-event” as a way to describe the public relations-driven, over-dramatized media moment. He saw events and ideas enjoying dissemination and attention based on little more than their appropriateness to a sensationalist media. These synthetic events distracted us from the issues that mattered, and recast everything in the language of image. He feared presidential debates becoming too much like quiz shows, and coverage drifting from issues that matter to discussions of the candidates’ television performances. The pseudo-event highlights only pseudo-qualifications.

He worried about the tendency of Hollywood to recycle the stories of novels, creating the illusion that the forms were interchangeable and that people could truly get the gist of a book simply by seeing the movie. (What might Boorstin say of today’s college students who get the “gist” of
Hamlet
by reading a two-paragraph summary on
SparkNotes.com
?) And while movies are capable of representing panoramic sweeps and many kinds of spectacle, they are generally limited to “speaking out” on issues. Novels, on the other hand, have the ability to “speak
in
” and address a more interior drama, by engaging with individual readers’ minds over longer periods of time. In a world dominated by the image instead of the word, interior life gives way to exterior show. Substance gives way to simulation.

Pseudo-events, in turn, give rise to a new kind of celebrity: people who are famous for being famous. Boorstin was thinking of the Hollywood star system, how it manufactured “types” whose very casting in a part communicated pretty much everything one needed to know about the character. But he was also getting at least a vague premonition of most of today’s “reality” television, where any sort of talent is not only superfluous, but actually a hindrance. The kids on MTV’s
Real World
, for example, excel most for their ability to behave like
Real World
cast members. The
Real World
season, like that of any other reality show, is itself a pseudo-event, absolutely manufactured and all the more successful for its refusal to do anything other than be itself.

On such a pseudo-stage, celebrity becomes not just what Boorstin called a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” but a self-referential vacuum. The purity of celebrities is measured and confirmed through their ability to prove their incompetence in all real things. Paris Hilton, for example, is famous precisely because she is not qualified to do anything other than be famous. Her hit reality TV series followed her and her friend through America as they failed at doing basic tasks, either through laziness or incompetence. Likewise, Charlie Sheen reaches the highpoint of his own celebrity not by performing well on his television sitcom, but by sharing his manic delirium with the world through social media. Even his fictional television role was more of a tongue-in-cheek comment on his pseudo-event real-life debauchery than an acting performance.

Although Boorstin predated the net, he did foresee the direction in which we were going, and longed to alert us to both the humanity and intellect we would be destined to leave behind as we leaped headlong in a world of image. What he may not have realized, however, is the extent to which the emergence of peer-to-peer networking technologies might eventually challenge the preeminence of the image factory from which he recoiled. By making images for one another instead of just consuming those of corporate America, we could begin to reverse the process
through which we are, in Boorstin’s words, being “programmed” by advertisers.

He also seemed somewhat oblivious to the role of the market economy in fueling all this image-making and meaning-taking. As we understand now, media does not act independently of other social institutions, but as part of a greater ecology of forces and technologies. Television did not cause the pseudo-event any more than Facebook caused the Arab Spring—even though the biases of these media types certainly contributed to kinds of outcomes they yielded.

In the case of America in 1962, corporate capitalism was understood as a given. The only question at the time was what might be the best method for promoting its values and products to America. The advertisers of Madison Avenue believed they could create a mythical landscape in which brands and consumption would feed both our corporate coffers and our unconscious desires. Boorstin saw such efforts as not only dangerous, but also an admission of defeat. Why do we need the lies of an advertising industry unless we are covering something up? By surrendering to the disingenuous image-maker, we were acting as if we had something to hide. In hindsight, perhaps we did.

Whether or not a truer American dream may have been realized without the manipulations of the advertising industry, there is little doubt that we descended into a dream nonetheless. It was a dream we built ourselves in a spirit of optimism and infinite possibility, from Detroit to Levittown, in offices and bedrooms furnished by Eames and Heywood-Wakefield, and televised by NBC and Philco. If we are inclined look back at that era with fascination and longing, it may be less for the mid-century furniture and fashions than to comprehend the consciousness with which they were created and used. Those last wonderful moments before we drifted off to sleep.