The Manchurian Consumer
Excerpted from Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn
On America's Funniest Home Videos, two young men set up a high bench under the basketball hoop. Then one of them
comes racing into the frame, leaps off the bench, stuffs the ball and exits stage left, triumphant. The second fellow tries to
repeat the feat, with less luck. He barrels in, misses his footing and straddles the bench, hard. There is a roar of laughter.
People in the studio audience are literally doubled over with mirth. You suddenly realize you're chuckling too.
But what, exactly, is so funny? The pratfall was hardly surprising: Groin injuries are the very denominator of this show.
It's not Buster Keaton material. In fact, the stunt was so obviously set up, the hapless kid so obviously a dupe sacrificed at
the altar of brief nationwide TV exposure that the authentic response should probably have been pity. Or shame.
And yet you laughed. You laughed because all the cues told you to. The laugh track and the audience reaction shot
double-teamed you. Mostly, you laughed because some network executive in a corner office in Burbank gets paid
$500,000 a year to make sure you do. You laughed in the same places that the live studio audience laughed, give or take a
little after-the-fact digital modification. The bell rang and you salivated. (Network executives get very nervous about
comedies without the signposting of a computer- generated laugh track, which is why such shows are rare. "I come from a
place where getting a laugh from an audience is a rather sacred and holy thing," said writer Aaron Sorkin, while trying to
sell reluctant ABC brass on a laugh - trackless format for his new show called Sports Night. "To make one up by pushing
a button on a computer bothers me in a place I don't like to be bothered.")
Zap.
It's Friday night and you're watching that old classic Risky Business. A preposterously young-looking Tom Cruise is
wearing Ray.Ban Wayfarers, just like yours. Is this a coincidence? The movie came out around about the time your sense
of cool was embryonic. You don't remember making a conscious choice about eyewear. The fact is, though, that when it
came time to buy sunglasses, you chose Ray Ban. And you still wear them and you still think they're sharp. So you begin
to wonder about this product placement thing. Just how many other commodity signs are slipping into the Hollywood
image stream and influencing your purchasing decisions? The laptop computer you picked up last year. Isn't that the one
they used to save the world in Independence Day? The Dr Pepper you just bought on impulse. Didn't Forrest Gump drink
that stuff?
It used to be jarring to see an actor reach for a Heineken or bring home a tub of Baskin-Robbins ice cream. It meant that
reality was intruding on the generic dream world, and it broke the spell. But product placements are everywhere in movies
now. (Most people peg the birth of product placement as a full-blown trend to the trail of Reese's Pieces the little alien laid
down in ET, in 1982.) Yet because they're everywhere, they're nowhere. You don't really notice them. Just as you
probably don't notice brand names in novels or songs. All fictions grounded in the facts of our life are an easier sell. We'll
believe a character who drinks Miller before we'll believe a character who drinks "beer."
What this means is that we're now ripe for manipulation. We can be buzzed by logos without noticing. This is not so
different from being buzzed by a laugh track. We've backgrounded these things and - at least consciously - tuned them
out. We've given up mental control. To whom? To the dozens of entertainment marketing agencies in the US specialize in
moving products into (and out of) scripts before scripts are ever shot. They act as middlemen between culture and
commerce. They spin like lathes behind the scenes so that you don't even to ask why, for instance, there was only one
reference to Nike in Maguire - a movie shot through with the Nike ethos of athlete (The answer: because Reebok paid
Tristar Pictures a million and a half bucks for merchandising, advertising and promotion of its product.)
Some companies pay for placement, others don't. So you don't know if the Coke in the frame just happens to be there or if
someone $100,000 to put it there. You don't know how to distinguish between the story narrative and the corporate cultural narrative. What does it mean when you don't know? What does it do to your cultural stabilizers, your sense of
where, and who, you are?
Zap.
It's August 31, 1997. You catch the breaking news about the death of Princess Diana. Frankly, you couldn't care less about
the monarchy, there was something about plucky Di's style that you liked. You follow the saturation TV coverage: the
aftermath, the analysis, the condolences, the funeral. Elton John sings a lachrymose tune and you find self weeping in
front of your set. It's the middle of the night. The "people's princess" is dead.
Something very odd is happening. You're crying, but you can't the source of your tears. It occurs to you that you cried less
when real people you knew - friends and even family members - died. And yet you're crying now. It's crazy. And you're
not alone. The global "grieving" for Diana borders on mass hysteria. A lot of people, pressed to articulate why they're so
sad, admit they're not sad for Di so much as sad for the idea of being genuinely sad for someone like her - in that
teenagers will sometimes admit to being in love with being in love.
In death Princess Di has become a legend. More than that, she has become a cultural signifier, like the swoosh or the
Golden Arches. She has what French new-wave philosopher Jean Baudrillard called "commodity sign value." Her face
became paired in our minds with all the good things: compassion, humility, philanthropy, love. She had become the
quintessential heroine of our culture, what we all wanted to be. For fifteen years, she dressed herself for the media and
sold herself publicly, flirting with the camera (even as she claimed to despise the photographers), and for fifteen years we
consumed her. She created the unforgettable media moments that primed the tears we cried in front of the TV set. When
we bought Di, we bought the brand, not the product.
Zap.
Take stock of your life. Look around at what you drive, wear, eat, smoke, read. Are these things you? Would an
anthropologist, given a pile of all your material possessions, be able to assemble an accurate portrait of your personality?
Would that portrait reflect a true original or a "type"? That laugh you laughed while watching the basketball player get
nutted, and those tears you cried for Diana, were they real? Were they authentic?
If they weren't, you may find yourself wondering: What else about me isn't authentic? Do I really like diamonds? Do I
find my partner attractive? Do I actually prefer single-malt scotch? Why am I scared to travel to Egypt? Are the myriad
daily choices I make, apparently freely, truly the product of my own will?
Richard Condon's 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate - which was turned into a movie Pauline Kael called "the most
sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood" - tells the story of an American soldier who is captured
during the Korean War, shipped to Manchuria and groomed, via brainwashing, to become a robotic assassin programmed
to kill the US president upon a predetermined verbal command.
The subtext of the movie is that Americans are being depatterned by propaganda systems they may not understand or even
be aware of. The modern consumer is indeed a Manchurian Candidate living in trance. He has a vague notion that at some
point early in his life, experiments were carried out on him, but he can't remember much about them. While he was
drugged, or too young to remember, ideas were implanted into his subconscious with a view to changing his behavior.
The Manchurian Consumer has been programmed not to kill the president, but to go out and purchase things on one of a
number of predetermined commands.
Slogans now come easily to his lips. He has warm feelings toward many products. Even his most innate drives and
emotions trigger immediate connections with consumer goods. Hunger equals Big Mac. Drowsiness equals Starbucks.
Depression equals Prozac.
And what about that burning anxiety, that deep, almost forgotten feeling of alarm at his lost independence and sense of
self? To the Manchurian Consumer, that's the signal to turn on the TV.