Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  But the book he found particularly helpful was by Rosser Reeves: he discovered two terms in it - ‘penetration’ and ‘involvement’ - that proved very useful when it came to throwing curves. The first project he managed to design on the basis of these two concepts was for Nescafe Gold.

  ‘It has long been recognised,’ Tatarsky wrote just twenty minutes after he first learned about it, that there are two basic indicators of the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: penetration and involvement. ‘Penetration’ is the percentage of people who remember the advertisement. ‘Involvement’ is the percentage of people the advertisement has persuaded to consume the product. The problem is, however, that a brilliantly scandalous advertisement, capable of producing high-level penetration, is absolutely no guarantee of high levels of involvement. Likewise a campaign that cleverly demonstrates the virtues of a product and is capable of producing high levels of involvement is no guarantee of high-level penetration. Which is why we propose taking a new approach and creating a kind of binary advertising, in which the functions of penetration and involvement will be performed by different sets of information. Let’s examine how this approach would work in an advertising campaign for Nescafe Gold coffee.

  The first step in the campaign is directed exclusively at implanting the brand name ‘Nescafe Gold’ in the consciousness of the largest possible number of people (we start from the assumption that any means are justified to this end). For example, we organise the planting of fake bombs in several large shops and railway stations - there should be as many of them as possible. The Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Services receive calls from an anonymous terrorist organisation informing them that explosive devices have been planted. But the searches carried out by the police at the sites named by the terrorists produce nothing but a large number of jars of Nescafe Gold packed in plastic bags. Next morning this is reported in all the magazines and newspapers and on television, following which we can regard the penetration phase as complete (its success is directly dependent on the scale of the operation). Immediately after this comes phase two - involvement. At this stage the campaign is waged according to the classical rules: the only thing linking it with phase one is the basic slogan:

  ‘Nescafe Gold: The Taste Explosion!’ Here is the scenario.’or the advertising clip:

  A bench in a small city square. A young man in a red tracksuit sitting on it, with a serious expression on his face. Across the road from the square a Mercedes-600 and two jeeps are parked outside a chic town house. The young man glances at his watch. Change of camera angle: several men in severe dark suits and dark glasses emerge from the mansion - the security guards. They surround the Mercedes from all sides and one of them gives a command over his walkie-talkie. A small fat man with a depraved face emerges from the mansion and looks around in a frightened manner, then he runs down the steps to the Mercedes and disappears behind the dark-tinted glass of the car, and the guards get into the jeeps. The Mercedes starts to move off and suddenly there are three powerful explosions in rapid succession. The cars are scattered in flying debris; the street where they have just been standing is hidden by smoke. New camera angle: the young man on the bench takes a thermos flask and a red mug with a gold band out of his sports bag. He pours some coffee into the mug, takes a sip and closes his eyes in ecstasy. Voice-over: ‘He brewed it rough and dark. Nescafe Gold. The real taste explosion.’

  The term ‘involvement’ didn’t only come in useful at work. It also forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what and, most importantly of all, just who was involving him in what.

  He first began thinking about it when he was reading an article devoted to cult porn films. The author of the article was called Sasha Blo. To judge from the text, he should have been a cold and world-weary being of indeterminate sex, writing in the breaks between orgies in order to convey his opinions to a dozen or so similar fallen supermen/women. The tone adopted by Sasha Blo made it clear that de Sade and Sacher-Masoch wouldn’t even have made it as doormen in his circle, and the best Charles Manson could have hoped for would have been to hold the candlesticks. In short, Blo’s article was a perfectly formed apple of sin, worm-eaten, beyond a shadow of a doubt, personally by the ancient serpent himself.

  But Tatarsky had been around in the advertising business for a long time now. In the first place, he knew that the only thing these apples were good for was to tempt suburban Moscow’s kids out of the Eden of childhood. In the second place, he doubted the very existence of cult porn films, and was only prepared to believe in them if he was presented with living members of the cult. In the third place, and most importantly, he knew Sasha Blo himself very well.

  He was a fat, bald, sad, middle-aged father of three, and his name was Ed. In order to pay the rent on their flat, he wrote simultaneoulsy under three or four pseudonyms for several magazines on any topic. He and Tatarsky had invented the name ‘Blo’ together, borrowing the title of a bottle of bright-blue glass-cleaning fluid they’d found under the bath (they were looking for the vodka Ed’s wife had hidden). The word ‘Blo’ summoned up the idea of inexhaustible reserves of vital energy and at the same time something non-humanoid, which was why Ed used it carefully. He only used it for signing articles imbued with such boundless freedom and ambivalence, so to speak, that a common signature such as ‘Ivanov’ or ‘Petrov’ would have been absurd. There was a great demand for this ambivalence in Moscow’s glossy magazines, so great indeed that it posed the question of just who was controlling its penetration. To be honest, even thinking about the topic was a bit frightening, but after reading Sasha Blo’s article, Tatarsky suddenly realised that it wasn’t being implanted by some demonic spy or some fallen spirit who had assumed human form, but by Ed and himself.

  Of course, not just by them alone - Moscow probably had two or three hundred Eds, universal minds choking on the fumes of the home hearth and crushed under the weight of their children. Their lives were not one long sequence of lines of coke, orgies and disputes about Burroughs and Warhol, as you might have concluded from their writings, but an endless battle with nappies and Moscow’s own omnipresent cockroaches. They weren’t obsessed with arrogant snobbery, or possessed by serpentine carnal lust or cold dandyism: they demonstrated no tendencies to devil worship, or even any real readiness to drop a tab of acid occasionally - despite their casual use of the term ‘acid’ every day of the week. What they did have were problems with digestion, money and housing, and in appearance they resembled not Gary Oldman, as the first acquaintance with their writing led you to believe, but Danny de Vito.

  Tatarsky could not gaze trustingly into the distant expanses sketched for him by Sasha Blo, because he understood the physiological genesis of those expanses in the bald head of downtrodden Ed, who was chained to his computer in just the same way as they used to chain Austrian soldiers to their machine-guns during the First World War. Believing in his product was harder than achieving arousal from telephone sex, when you knew that the voice hoarse with passion speaking to you didn’t belong to the blonde promised by the photograph, but to an old woman with a cold who was knitting a sock as she read off a set of standard phrases from a crib soaked by the drops falling from her running nose.

  ‘But how do we - that is, Ed and me - know what to involve other people in?’ wrote Tatarsky in his notebook.

  From one point of view, of course, it’s obvious: intuition. No need to inquire about what to do and how to do it - when you reach a certain degree of despair, you just start to intuit things for yourself. You sense the dominant tendency, so to speak, with your empty stomach. But where does the tendency come from? Who thinks it up, if - as I’m convinced - everyone in the world is simply trying to catch it and sell it, like Ed and me, or to guess what it is and print it, like the editors, of those glossy magazines?

  His thoughts on this theme were morose and they were reflected in his scenario for a clip for the washing powder Ariel, writ
ten soon after this event.

  The scenario is based on motifs from Shakespeare. Loud music, solemn and menacing. The opening shot shows a cliff on the seashore. Night. Down below, menacing waves rear up in the dim moonlight. In the distance is an ancient castle, also illuminated by the moon. Standing on the top of the cliff is a girl of incredible beauty. She is Miranda. She is wearing a medieval dress of red velvet and a tall pointed cap with a trailing veil. She raises her arms towards the moon and utters a strange incantation three times. When she pronounces it for the third time there is a rumble of distant thunder. The music grows louder and more menacing. A wide beam of light emerges from the moon, which is visible in a break in the clouds, and extends until it reaches the rocks at Miranda’s feet. Her face expresses confusion - she is clearly afraid of what is about to happen, and yet she wants it. A shadow slides down the beam of light, coming closer, and as the melody reaches its climax, we see a proud spirit in all his evil beauty - his robes are flowing in the wind and his long hair is silvered by the moonlight. On his head is a slim wreath set with diamonds. He is Ariel. He flies close to Miranda, halts in mid-air and holds out his hand to her. After a moment’s struggle Miranda reaches out her own hand to his. Next frame: close-up of two hands approaching each other. Lower left - Miranda’s pale weak hand: upper right - the spirit’s hand, transparent and glowing. They touch each other, the spirit instantly transforms into a box of Ariel and everything is flooded in blinding light. Next frame: two boxes of washing powder. On one it says Ariel. On the other, in pale-grey letters, it says Ordinary Caliban. Miranda’s voice-over: ‘Ariel. Temptingly tempestuous’.

  Possibly the specific elements in this clip were inspired by a black and white photograph that hung above Tatarsky’s desk. It was an advertisement for some boutique, showing a young man with long hair and carefully tended stubble in a luxurious wide-cut coat carelessly hung across his shoulders - the wind filled out the form of the coat so that it echoed the sail of a boat visible on the horizon. The waves breaking against the rocks and splashing up on to the shore fell just short of his shiny shoes. His face was set in a harsh, sullen grimace, and somehow he resembled the birds with outstretched wings (maybe eagles, maybe seagulls) soaring into the twilit sky from a supplement to the latest version of Photoshop (after taking a closer look at the photograph, Tatarsky decided that the boat on the horizon must have come sailing in from there too).

  After contemplating it for days Tatarsky finally understood: all the cliches to which the photograph was alluding had been born together with romanticism in the nineteenth century; their remains, together with those of the Count of Monte Cristo, had survived into the twentieth, but on the threshold of the twenty-first the count’s legacy had already been completely squandered. The human mind had sold this romanticism to itself far too many times to be able to do any more business on it. Now, no matter how sincerely you wished to deceive yourself, it was virtually impossible to believe in any correspondence between the image that was being sold and its implied inner content. It was an empty form that had long ago ceased to mean what it should have meant. Everything was moth-eaten: the thoughts provoked by the sight of the conventional Niebelung in the studio photograph were not about the proud Gothic spirit implied by the frothing waves and sideburns, but about whether the photographer charged a lot, how much the model got paid and whether the model had to pay a fine when his personal lubricant stained the seat of the trousers from the company’s spring collection.

  Tatarsky’s deductions led him into a state of total and utter confusion. On the one hand, it seemed that he and Ed crafted a false panorama of life for others (like a battle scene in a museum, where the floor in front of the spectator is scattered with sand and worn-out boots and shells, but the tanks and the explosions are only drawn on the wall), guided solely by their intuition as to what the punters would swallow. On the other hand, his own life was a frustrating attempt to move a bit closer to the contents of this panorama. In essence it was an attempt to run into the picture drawn on the wall. Being a co-author of this picture made the attempt more than grotesque. Of course - or so it seemed to Tatarsky - a rich man could escape the bounds of false reality. He could move beyond the limits of the panorama that was compulsory for the poor. Tatarsky didn’t actually know much about what the world of the rich was like. There were only vague images circling around in his consciousness, cliches from advertising, which he himself had been rebroadcasting for such a long time he couldn’t possibly believe in them. What was clear to him was that you could only find out what prospects opened up to a man with a substantial bank account from the rich themselves, and on one occasion - by pure chance - Tatarsky managed to do just that.

  While he was drinking away a small fee in the Poor Folk bar, he eavesdropped on a conversation between two TV chat-show hosts - it was after midnight and they were continuing a drinking spree begun earlier somewhere else. Tatarsky was sitting just a couple of metres away from them, but they paid no more attention to him than if he’d been a stuffed model of a copywriter nailed to the counter in order to brighten up the decor.

  Although both of the showmen were thoroughly drunk, they’d lost none of that strange holographic gleam in every fold of their clothes, as though their physical bodies were not actually sitting at the next table but were simply being shown on a huge television standing next to Tatarsky. When he noticed this inexplicable but undoubtedly real effect, Tatarsky found himself thinking how long it would take them in limbo to scrape away all the human attention that had eaten into the pores of their souls. The showmen were talking shop, and Tatarsky gathered that one of them was having problems with his contract.

  ‘If they’d just extend it for next year.’ he said, clenching his fists.

  ‘Say they do,’ the other replied. ‘At the end of the year it’ll be the same thing all over again. And you’ll be living on tranquillizers again… And then what?’

  ‘Then what? Then I’ve got a serious plan.’ He slumped over the table and poured himself some vodka. ‘I’m just five hundred thousand short,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve got to make.’

  ‘What plan?’ ‘You won’t tell anyone? Listen…’

  He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, rummaged around for a long while and finally pulled out a sheet of glossy paper folded into four.

  ‘There.’ he said, ‘it says it on here… The kingdom of Bhutan. The only country in the world where television is forbidden. Unnerstand? Completely forbidden. It says here that not far from the capital they have an entire colony where big TV moguls live. If you spend all your life working in television, the very coolest thing you can do when you retire is move to Bhutan.’

  ‘Is that what you need the five hundred grand for?’

  ‘No, I need the five hundred grand so no one will come looking for me in Bhutan afterwards. Can you just imagine it? Forbidden. Not a single television set anywhere except in counter-espionage! And the embassies!’

  His companion took the sheet of paper from him, unfolded it and started reading.

  ‘You unnerstand?’ - the first showman carried on speaking regardless - ‘If anyone is keeping a television at home and the authorities find out about it, the police come round, unnerstand? And they cart the queer fucker off to prison. Or maybe they even shoot him.’

  He pronounced the word ‘queer’ with that sabre-whistle intake of breath you only ever hear from latent homosexuals who have deprived themselves of the joys of love in the name of a perverse misinterpretation of the social contract. His companion understood everything and didn’t take offence - he was looking through the article.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘out of a magazine. It’s interesting all right… So who wrote it? Where is it now… Some guy called Edward Debirsian…’

  Tatarsky almost knocked over his table as he stood up to go to the toilet. He wasn’t surprised that TV personalities should feel that way about their work, although the degree of these people�
�s spiritual degradation did make it possible to allow that some of them might actually like their jobs. It was something else that had finally finished him off. Sasha Blo had a particular foible: any material that he liked, he would sign with his own real name. And what he liked more than anything else on earth was to pass off the products of his own untrammelled imagination as a narrative of real events - but it was a luxury he allowed himself only very rarely.

  Tatarsky laid down a line of cocaine on the cold white cheek of the toilet tank and, without even bothering to crush the lumps, snorted it through a rolled-up hundred-rouble bill (he was already out of dollars), then took out his notebook and wrote:

  In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately, the author of this fragment will again be Ed-but even that is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?

  He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: ‘Trapped? Masturbate!’

  Going back to the bar, he sat further away from the TV personalities and attempted to lean back and enjoy it. But it didn’t work for him - it never did. The repulsive Moscow cocaine, cut almost to nothing by the unwashed hands of a long chain of dealers, deposited an entire bouquet of medicinal smells in his nasopharynx - everything from streptocide to aspirin - and triggered an intense, stressful trembling in his body. They did say the powder they took a hundred and fifty dollars a gramme for in Moscow was not cocaine at all, but a mixture of Estonian speed with an assortment of Russian pharmaceuticals. As if that wasn’t enough, for some reason half of the dealers always wrapped the powder in a glossy advertisement for the Toyota Camry cut out of some magazine, and Tatarsky was tormented by the unbearable suspicion that they made a fat living not just at the expense of other people’s health, but by providing a PR service as well. Every time Tatarsky asked himself why he and others paid all that money in order to subject themselves once again to a humiliating and unhygienic procedure, the only explanation he could come up with went as follows: people weren’t sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important than the powder itself. If cocaine was sold in chemists’ shops for twenty kopecks a gramme as a mouthwash for toothache, he thought, then nobody but punks would sniff it - the way it was, in fact, at the beginning of the century. But if some ether-based glue sniffed by juvenile junkies cost a thousand dollars a bottle, all the gilded youth of Moscow would be delighted to sniff it, and at presentations and buffet luncheons it would be tres chic to waft the volatile chemical vapours around yourself, complain about your brain neurons dying off and disappear for long periods into the toilet. Youth fashion magazines would devote revelatory cover stories (written, of course, by Sasha Blo) to the aesthetics of the plastic bag that was placed over the head for this procedure.