In hindsight, though, the Big Four’s spinal camel-straw had to have been V&V’s trio of deep-focus b&w spots for a tiny Wisconsin cooperative firm that sold tongue-scrapers by pre-paid mail. These ads just clearly crossed some kind of psychoaesthetic line, regardless of the fact that they single-handedly created a national tongue-scraper industry and put Fond du Lac’s NoCoat Inc. on the Fortune 500. 163 Stylistically reminiscent of those murderous mouthwash, deodorant, and dandruff-shampoo scenarios that had an antihero’s chance encounter with a gorgeous desire-object ending in repulsion and shame because of an easily correctable hygiene deficiency, the NoCoat spots’ chilling emotional force could be located in the exaggerated hideousness of the near-geologic layer of gray-white material coating the tongue of the otherwise handsome pedestrian who accepts a gorgeous meter maid’s coquettish invitation to have a bit of a lick of the ice cream cone she’s just bought from an avuncular sidewalk vendor. The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise. The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid’s face going slack with disgust as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers. The nightmarish slo-mo with which the mortified pedestrian reels away into street-traffic with his whole arm over his mouth, the avuncular vendor’s kindly face now hateful and writhing as he hurls hygienic invectives.
These ads shook viewers to the existential core, apparently. It was partly a matter of plain old taste: ad-critics argued that the NoCoat spots were equivalent to like Preparation H filming a procto-exam, or a Depend Adult Undergarment camera panning for floor-puddles at a church social. But Hal’s paper located the level at which the Big Four’s audiences reacted, here, as way closer to the soul than mere tastelessness can get.
V&V’s NoCoat campaign was a case-study in the eschatology of emotional appeals. It towered, a kind of Überad, casting a shaggy shadow back across a whole century of broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely, given the vulnerable psyche of an increasingly hygiene-conscious U.S.A. in those times.
The NoCoat campaign had three major consequences. The first was that horrible year Hal vaguely recalls when a nation became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an emergency backup tongue-scraper than they’d fail to wash and brush and spray. The year when the sink-and-mirror areas of public restrooms were such grim places to be. The NoCoat co-op folks traded in their B’Gosh overalls and hand-woven ponchos for Armani and Dior, then quickly disintegrated into various eight-figure litigations. But by this time everybody from Procter & Gamble to Tom’s of Maine had its own brand’s scraper out, some of them with baroque and potentially hazardous electronic extras.
The second consequence was that the Big Four broadcast Networks finally just plain fell off the shelf, fiscally speaking. Riding a crest of public disaffection not seen since the days Jif commercials had strangers shoving their shiny noses in your open jar, the Malone-Turner-and-shadowy-Albertan-led cable kabal got sponsors whose ads had been running as distant as seven or eight spots on either side of the NoCoat gaggers to jump ship to A.C.D.C. U.S. broadcast TV’s true angels of death, Malone and Turner then immediately parlayed this fresh injection of sponsorial capital into unrefusable bids for the rights to the N.C.A.A. Final Four, the MLB World Series, Wimbledon, and the Pro Bowlers Tour, at which point the Big Four suffered further defections from Schick and Gillette on one side and Miller and Bud on the other. Fox filed for Ch. 11 protection Monday after A.C.D.C.’s coup-announcements, and the Dow turned Grizzly indeed on G.E., Paramount, Disney, etc. Within days three out of the Big Four Networks had ceased broadcasting operations, and ABC had to fall back on old ‘Happy Days’ marathons of such relentless duration that bomb threats began to be received both by the Network and by poor old Henry Winkler, now hairless and sugar-addicted in La Honda CA and seriously considering giving that lurid-looking but hope-provoking LipoVac procedure a try. …
And but the ironic third consequence was that almost all the large slick advertising agencies with substantial Network billings — among these the Icarian Viney and Veals — went down, too, in the Big Four’s maelstrom, taking with them countless production companies, graphic artists, account execs, computer-enhancement technicians, ruddy-tongued product-spokespersons, horn-rimmed demographers, etc. The millions of citizens in areas for one reason or another not cable-available ran their VCRs into meltdown, got homicidally tired of ‘Happy Days,’ and then began to find themselves with vast maddening blocks of utterly choiceless and unentertaining time; and domestic-crime rates, as well as out-and-out suicides, topped out at figures that cast a serious pall over the penultimate year of the millennium.
But these consequences’ own consequence — with all the Yankee-ingenious irony that attends true resurrections — comes when the now-combined Big Four, muted and unseen, now, but with its remaining creditor-proof assets now supporting only those rapaciously clever executive minds that can survive the cuts down to a skeleton of a skeleton staff, rises from the dust-heap and has a collective last hurrah, ironically deploying V&V’s old pro-choice/anti-passivity appeal to obliterate the A.C.D.C. that had just months before obliterated the Big Four, bringing TCI’s Malone down on a golden bell-shaped ’chute and sending TBS’s Turner into self-imposed nautical exile:
Because enter one Noreen Lace-Forché, the USC-educated video-rental mogulette who in the B.S. ’90s had taken Phoenix’s Intermission Video chain from the middle of the Sun Belt pack to a national distribution second only to Blockbuster Entertainment in gross receipts. The woman called by Microsoft’s Gates ‘The Killer-App Queen’ and by Blockbuster’s Huizenga ‘The only woman I personally fear.’
Convincing the rapacious skeletal remains of the Big Four to consolidate its combined production, distribution, and capital resources behind a front company she’d had incorporated and idling ever since she’d first foreseen broadcast apocalypse in the Nunhagen ads’ psycho-fiscal fallout — the front an obscure-sounding concern called InterLace TelEntertainment — Lace-Forché then went and persuaded ad-maestro P. Tom Veals — at that time mourning his remorse-tortured partner’s half-gainer off the Tobin Bridge by drinking himself toward pancreatitis in a Beacon Hill brownstone — to regather himself and orchestrate a profound national dissatisfaction with the ‘passivity’ involved even in D.S.S.-based cable-watching:
What matter whether your ‘choices’ are 4 or 104, or 504? Veals’s campaign argued. Because here you were — assuming of course you were even cable-ready or dish-equipped and able to afford monthly fees that applied no matter what you ‘chose’ each month — here you were, sitting here accepting only what was pumped by distant A.C.D.C. fiat into your entertainment-ken. Here you were consoling yourself about your dependence and passivity with rapid-fire zapping and surfing that were starting to be suspected to cause certain rather nasty types of epilepsy over the longish term. The cable kabal’s promise of ‘empowerment,’ the campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you’d sit there and open wide for. 164 And so but what if, their campaign’s appeal basically ran, what if, instead of sitting still for choosing the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what if — according to InterLace — what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what’s on at any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non–‘Happy Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four’s mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic pulses that fit directly on the new palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as ‘cartridges’? Viewable right there on your
trusty PC’s high-resolution monitor? Or, if you preferred and so chose, jackable into a good old premillennial wide-screen TV with at most a coaxial or two? Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a special low-finance-charge InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. households possessed of PC, phone line, and verifiable credit? What if, Veals’s spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?
The rest, for Hal, is recent history.
By the time not only second-run Hollywood releases but a good many first-run films, plus new sitcoms and crime-dramas and near-live sports, plus now also big-name-anchor nightly newscasts, weather, art, health, and financial-analysis cartridges were available and pulsing nicely onto cartridges everywhere, the ranks of A.C.D.C.’s own solvent program-pumpers had been winnowed back to the old-movie-and-afternoon-baseball major-metro regional systems of more like the B.S. ’80s. Passive pickings were slim now. American mass-entertainment became inherently pro-active, consumer-driven. And because advertisements were now out of the televisual question — any halfway-sensitive Power-PC’s CPU could edit out anything shrill or ungratifying in the post-receipt Review Function of an entertainment-diskette — cartridge production (meaning by now both the satellitic ‘spontaneous dissemination’ of viewer-selected menu-programming and the factory-recording of programming on packaged 9.6 mb diskettes available cheap and playable on any CD-ROM-equipped system) yes cartridge production — though tentacularly controlled by an InterLace that had patented the digital-transmission process for moving images and held more stock than any one of the five Baby Bells involved in the InterNet fiber-optic transmission-grid bought for .17 on the dollar from GTE after Sprint went belly-up trying to launch a primitively naked early mask- and Tableauxless form of videophony — became almost Hobbesianly free-market. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison. The more pleasing a given cartridge was, the more orders there were for it from viewers; and the more orders for a given cartridge, the more InterLace kicked back to whatever production facility they’d acquired it from. Simple. Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went.
And as InterLace’s eventual outright purchase of the Networks’ production talent and facilities, of two major home-computer conglomerates, of the cutting-edge Froxx 2100 CD-ROM licenses of Aapps Inc., of RCA’s D.S.S. orbiters and hardware-patents, and of the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little technology of HDTV’s visually enhanced color monitor with microprocessed circuitry and more lines of optical resolution — as these acquisitions allowed Noreen Lace-Forché’s cartridge-dissemination network to achieve vertical integration and economies of scale, viewers’ pulse-reception- and cartridge-fees went down markedly; 165 and then the further increased revenues from consequent increases in order- and rental-volume were plowed presciently back into more fiber-optic-InterGrid-cable-laying, into outright purchase of three of the five Baby Bells InterNet’d started with, into extremely attractive rebate-offers on special new InterLace-designed R.I.S.C. 166 -grade High-Def-screen PCs with mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards (recognizably renamed by Veals’s boys in Recognition ‘Teleputers’ or ‘TPs’), into fiber-only modems, and, of course, into extremely high-quality entertainments that viewers would freely desire to choose even more. 167
But there were — could be — no ads of any kind in the InterLace pulses or ROM cartridges, was the point Hal’s presentation kept struggling to return to. And so then besides e.g. a Turner who kept litigating bitterly via shortwave radio from his equatorial yacht, the true loser in the shift from A.C.D.C. cable to InterLace Grid was an American advertising industry already reeling from the death of broadcast’s Big Four. No significant markets seemed in any hurry to open up and compensate for the capping of TV’s old gusher. Agencies, reduced to skeletal cells of their best and most rapacious creative minds, cast wildly about for new pulses to finger and niches to fill. Billboards sprouted with near-mycological fury alongside even rural twolaners. No bus, train, trolley, or hack went unfestooned with high-gloss ads. Commercial airliners began for a while to trail those terse translucent ad-banners usually reserved for like Piper Cubs over football games and July beaches. Magazines (already endangered by HD-video equivalents) got so full of those infuriating little fall-out ad cards that Fourth-Class postal rates ballooned, making the e-mail of their video-equivalents that much more attractive, in another vicious spiral. Chicago’s once-vaunted Sickengen, Smith and Lundine went so far as to get Ford to start painting little domestic-product come-ons on their new lines’ side-panels, an idea that fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and Marlboro caps perversely refused to invest in ‘cars that sold out.’ In contrast to just about the whole rest of the industry, a certain partnerless metro-Boston ad agency was doing so well that it was more out of ennui and a sense of unlikely challenge that P. Tom Veals consented to manage PR for the fringe candidacy of a former crooner and schmaltz-mogul who went around swinging a mike and ranting about literally clean streets and creatively refocused blame and rocketing people’s waste into the forgiving chill of infinite space. 168
30 APRIL / 1 MAY
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Marathe did not quite sleep. They had remained on the shelf for some hours. He thought it a bit of much that Steeply refused even for a brief time to sit down upon the ground. If his persona’s skirt rode up above his weapon, what was the difference? Were grotesque and humiliating undergarments also involved? Marathe’s wife had been in an irreversible coma for fourteen months. Marathe was able to refresh himself without quite sleeping. It was not a state of fugue or neural relaxation, but a type of detachment. He had learned this in the months after losing his legs to a U.S.A. train. Part of Marathe floated off and hovered somewhere just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn.
At some times on the outcropping Steeply went farther than crossing his arms, almost embracing himself, chilled but unwilling to comment on the chill. Marathe noted that the gesture of self-embrace appeared convincingly feminine and unconscious. Steeply’s preparations for his returning field-assignment had been disciplined and effective. The feature of complete unswallowability about M. Steeply as a U.S.A. female journalist — even a massive and unfortunate-looking U.S.A. female journalist — was his feet. These were broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque, the ugliest feet Marathe had observed anywhere south of 60° N, and the ugliest supposedly female feet of his experience.
Both men were strangely reluctant, somehow, to broach the subject of plans for getting down off the shelf in the utter dark. Steeply didn’t even waste time wondering how Marathe could have gotten up (or down) there in the first place, short of some sort of helicopter drop, which capricious winds and the proximity of the mountainside made unlikely. The dogma around Unspecified Services was that if Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had one Achilles’ heel it was their penchant for showing off, making a spectacle of denying any kind of physical limitation, etc. Steeply had field-interfaced with Rémy Marathe once on a rickety-feeling Louisiana oil platform 50-plus clicks out of Caillou Bay, covered the whole time by armed Cajun sympathizers. Marathe always disguised the boggling size of his arms under a long-sleeved windbreaker. His eyelids were half-closed whenever Steeply turned to look. If he (Marathe) were a cat he would be purring. One hand stayed below the blanket at all times, Steeply noted. Steeply himself had a small and unregistered Taurus PT9 taped to his shaved inner thigh, which was the main reason he was reluctant to sit down on the outcropping’s stone; the weapon was unsafetied.
In the faint lume- and starlight Marathe found the four-limbed American’s high-heeled feet compellingly grotesque, like loaves of soft processed U
.S.A. bread being slowly squeezed and mangled by the footwear’s straps. The meaty compression of the toes at the shoes’ open tips, the leather faintly creaking as he bobbed up and down, hugging himself chillily in the sleeveless summer dress, his fleshy bare arms webbed redly with mottle in the chill, one arm luridly scratched. The received wisdom among Québecois anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des Services sans Spécificité’s assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives — casting men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, heterosexual men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, healthy males as degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women operatives as hydro-cephalic boys or epileptic public-relations executives, nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for the realism of their field-personae. Steeply, silent, rose and fell absently on the toes of these feet. The feet were also visibly unused to high U.S.A. women’s heels, for they were mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and abundantly blistered, and the smallest toes’ nails were blackening and preparing, Marathe noted, in the future to fall off.
But Marathe knew also that something within the real M. Hugh Steeply did need the humiliations of his absurd field-personae, that the more grotesque or unconvincing he seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and actualized his deep parts felt in the course of preparation for the humiliating attempt to portray; he (Steeply) used the mortification he felt as a huge woman or pale Negro or palsied twit of a degenerative musician as fuel for the assignments’ performance; Steeply welcomed the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very rôle that offended his dignity of self… the psychomechanics became too confusing for Marathe, who had not the capacity for abstractions of his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and Broullîme. But he knew this was why Steeply was one of Services sans Spécificité’s finest field-operatives, once spending the better part of a year in magenta robes, sleeping three hours nightly and allowing his large head to be shaved and teeth removed, shaking a tambourine in airports and selling plastic flowers on median strips to infiltrate a cult-fronted 3-amino-8-hydroxytetralin 169 -import ring in the U.S.A. city Seattle.
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