Hooked on a feeling

Absorbed as I am these mornings with Wilson Bryan Key and his work on subliminal messages in ads, I find myself not comprehending much at all in the photos he provides.  It could be the quality of reprint in the books, usually grainy and black and white. It could be me – I just do not relax well enough to allow the images to come through. I do easily see facial features and penises, but other things elude me.

I am, however, concerned with the idea that the ads reach our subconscious and leave the intended message. I’ve long noticed that ads, like the one above, are constructed in bursts, with the images lasting no more than a second. Each image imparts a message, and leaves no time to think. That’s why ads work. They cost a fortune to produce, and no such investment is allowed without ample rewards.

Sometimes the ads give us large and easily seen messages, like the one below:

The message Apple’s hugely successful award-winning campaign sent to us was that Macs were cool, PCs not. I don’t buy the message, but let’s not quibble, as it worked on its intended market. All PCs, no matter the brand, are the product of DARPA and were given over to various iconic nerds to carry on the illusion that the marketplace produces innovation. (If you wander down the beverage aisle of a supermarket you will see scores of brands selling flavored sparkling water. They are all the same, and yet each is using advertising to somehow distinguish itself. Macs and PCs are no different.)

But one idea that Keys is emphasizing that is working with me is that effective ads impart a feeling, and that the feeling is contained in the subversive elements of the ad – the obvious images, words, lighting, faces and yes, subliminal imagery. If advertising were to say “Hey, this is a good product, you should buy it,” it would not work.  While Keys is focused on magazine ads selling liquor, as I am currently reading him, television is the massive force behind selling products. Books are not a good medium to demonstrate that idea, but it is all Keys had at his disposal.

We do have a family member who spent his youthful career in advertising, and his company was involved in giving us the PacMan ad that I inserted at the beginning of this piece. It ran during Superbowl XLIX, 49 if you are not into roman monuments to memorialize the GOFOs, or games of fixed output. (I just made that up.) That game was played eleven years ago, and we were told in advance that the ad would be playing, and that it was a significant piece of work that we should watch.

I did watch it at the time, and thought “meh”, but for reasons unknown it stuck with me, and so came back to me last night as I was thinking about Key’s work. The ad has a quality about it that tells me it is loaded with subliminal messages. It’s a massive set and has hundreds of cuts in its 90-scond run. It cost a fortune to make.

So last night I ran it on my iPad, freezing it at various intervals. But it is like trying to find Waldo, except not so easy. The messages are there, and the feeling it imparts, on me anyway, is one of the occult, a magical mystery tour. But in terms of uncovering the images as Key does so well, I do not succeed. I ask readers to to that work for me, as I am too opaque in my view, and never in my beer-drinking years did I ever think twice about Bud Light. It’s watery and bland. Advertise away, and still you’ll never sell this bilgewater to me. What is the big deal?

I did freeze one image that I will pass along as a tease, not that I solved the mystery:

There is something going on there … sometheeeeng. The bottom of the foot is unnaturally pink, and seems reflected in the blue panel at two o’clock. The foot itself is something again, not a foot but rather an image lighted below and dense and rounded above with something sticking out of it. There is something going on in the less-bright circle below the foot. Oh, don’t go there. The panels on the left are clearly defined, while the ones on the right are curved and a bit fuzzier. That is hiding something.

Other parts of the ad show us the backs of shirts that look unnatural. They gray-haired man, whose face is distorted at times, with right ear turned black at times, is an imposing character, someone I do not like, as a wizard of sorts inviting us into his world.

A few years back, with some friends who are more attune to the music scene, we attended a 2019 concert at Red Rocks that featured Trampled by Turtles, Deer Tick and Dead South. My memories of the evening were that the musicians were very good and if they would tone it down a bit, might be enjoyable. But the volume was monstrously loud, enough to cause a tingling sensation in the ears. The crowd, mostly young, were a tribute to Baba O’Riley, a song by The Who about Woodstock with the repeated refrain “teen-age wasteland.” Indeed, the crowd that evening at Red Rocks was wasted on booze and pot, probably coke too, and other stuff I do not know about. It was disgraceful to watch. When I commented to that effect some time later to our friends, their attitude was that it was just youthful exuberance. No, it was an orgy.

The Bud Light ad above implies the same feeling, incredible noise, orgasmic joy and loss of self-containment. It’s a twenty-thirty-something wasteland. I realize I need to cut loose every now and then, but I cannot be part of that scene. I’m the classic stick in the mud. Back in the 1970s I attended a concert in Billings, Montana featuring Smith and Iron Butterfly. If you don’t remember the latter, they were famous for a fifteen-minute drum solo in their song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vita. To enjoy a drum solo like that, one must be high on pot, and I was not. Blame me, I thought it was boring. Later cocaine would be the drug of choice among concert goers, and out went pot, in came heavy metal. 

Enough … substance abuse is part of our culture, and tolerated. There’s no enlightenment to come with it, only muddled minds. Maybe that’s the objective, to prevent people from thinking. If so, it is working.

Please, if you’ve read this, Lucy, go back to the PacMan ad, and ‘splain it to me.