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In the old buttoned-down days of the 1950s, advertising companies were old boy clubs of 'ingrown mediocrity.' But when Bill Bernbach took the revolutionary step of putting the art director in the same room as the copywriters, all hell broke loose, creativity became the key, and the world was never the same. Art & Copy (funded by the non-profit advertising organization One Club which Pray claims had no creative input into the film) heralds this shift of advertising gears as a watershed moment in the history of mankind, right up there with the parting of the Red Sea and Michael Jackson's funeral. And Pray rides the pizzazz express on creative advertising's greatness. But the question remains, should we be celebrating the big brother triumph of advertising or be looking for a stake to drive through its heart?
Pray interviews all the legends of the advertising world -- including Mary Wells (behind the Braniff Airline ads: 'The end of the plain plane'), who remarks 'people loved fun ideas and life was suddenly perky'; Hal Riney (the 'We've Only Just Begun' ads for Crocker Bank, the 'Morning in America' campaign for Ronald Reagan's reelection), Phyllis K. Robinson ('The Me Generation'), and the Rod Steiger-like force of nature George Lois ('I want my MTV'), who sums it all up by saying, 'I think advertising is poison gas -- advertising should cheer you up and maybe it should choke you. You should pass out when you are watching advertising.'
These advertising gurus freely admit that they are all geniuses and -- evil geniuses all -- they are smugly proud of their funny and diverting ads that say nothing about the product but all about The Big Lie brainwashing technique of branding, which seeks not only to divert attention from the product but takes it all to the next level, creating a preset Pavlovian attitude toward the logo of the company.
What is Pray saying here? Is he issuing a warning on the inundation of advertising or celebrating the stamping to death of the broken spine of humanity now in thrall to advertisers' messages? Because of Pray's exuberance and thin-air glee in which he presents these Hall of Fame creators, the balance is tipped easily in favor of the Lois, Wells, Riney, Dan Wieden, and Lee Clow. In the end, Art & Copy is, like the commercials, a breezy and sublime piece of marzipan designed to disguise the inherent lies involved in this flimflam.
Advertising is all around us. The advertising mantras have seeped into of the very structure of our DNA so that everything these days has an undercover agenda. Nothing is what it seems and everything is sponsored, owned, and spoken for by a mega-corporation's brand and product line -- thought, purity and innocence gone forever. Thanks to the pioneers highlighted in Pray's documentary, the media has poked into all of our heads like a rusty scalpel. But it is all, as Bob Dylan would say, 'too much of nothing.'
We have finally reached the point where the only honest and inviolate form of media is the clear, crisp, and untainted craft of online film criticism.
And by the way, Filmcritic.com is a branch of AMCTV and Rainbow Media, which brings you Mad Men every Sunday, sponsored by BMW with limited commercial interruptions.
Coulda had a V8.
