REALIST CONVENTIONS

Questions of realism in the video world are always a matter of codes. Fiske (1987: 24) states that

realism does not just reproduce reality, it makes sense of it--the essence of realism is that it reproduces reality in such a form as to make it easily understandable. It does this primarily by ensuring that all links and relationships between its elements are clear and logical, that the narrative follows basic laws of cause and effect, and that every element is there for the purpose of helping to make sense: nothing is extraneous or accidental.

In the mid 1980s the slick polish of 'super-realist' photography gave way to exaggerated realist conventions. Color photo-realism emphasized the perfection of commodities. Along with glossy graphics, this style of color photography located the material desirability of objects on the page or screen itself - the commodity and the image merged and could no longer be differentiated. The ideal in commercial photography from the 1950s till the early 1980s was to flawlessly simulate material objects - aided by the airbrush, commodity images were made to appear perfect. The closer such photography got to its goal, the smoother it became, paradoxically, the less 'real' it seemed. Television ads had lost all sense of texture - they seemed too shiny, polished, glossy and smooth. Prompted by popular criticism of advertising as falsifying the conditions of daily life, advertisers sought a style of signification that would reintroduce a sense of everydayness. Advertisers moved to regain a sense of texture - a visually tactile roughness - that could be juxtaposed in semiotic opposition to 'glossy'. This motivated the recovery of graininess in photography.

Citibank Visa jumped on the real-people bandwagon with imagery like this to boost their authenticity quotient. This frame, taken from a 1990 Nissan tv ad highlights the effort to signify the perceptual experience of everydayness by stressing extra-grainy video, akimbo framing, and camera tilts.

Advertisers began venturing outside their studios to select subject-matter that connoted everyday life. Levi's pioneered this movement by presenting 'non-models' out in urban backgrounds. Levi's thus distanced themselves from what spectator-buyers had come to regard as the unattainable perfection of GQ and Glamour models. Esprit similarly invited real consumers to become models for a day. 'Real' people have since appeared in ads for cars, soda, burgers, detergent and beer. A second signifying strategy pictured everyday situations and 'unreconstructed' real-life situations (e.g., a Nissan ad showing children bickering and screaming in the backseat) that viewers might recognize as fleeting moments that occur spontaneously (unglamourously) in daily life. A related method represented scenes of minor conflict - a woman aggressively pushing a male suitor away; persons exhibiting anger, tension and anxiety. These moments of conflict become abstracted and isolated in the form of abbreviated signifiers (e.g., the female shoving away a male). Such decontextualized signifiers differed from previous styles that depicted a world of commodity signs that apparently insulated wearers from the conflicts of daily life. Advertisers next discovered that breaking the narrative flow permitted them to signify a different sort of realism. Ads for Lee jeans and Suave shampoo fractured and fragmented snippets of conversation and placed them against the background noises of daily life - e.g., a Suave ad takes place in a cafeteria amid the clatter of trays and glasses. By isolating, and amplifying, phrases of an actual conversation, advertisers turned them into hypersignifiers of real conversations.

The word 'Real' in lyrics and taglines grew so pervasive that its referent became uncertain and less credible. Miller Beer is a familiar brandname that pursued narrative and photographic codes of realism. Linguistically and visually, they positioned themselves as 'Real' - real draft beer and real social relationships. Their "It's Real" ad campaign featured an ethnic wedding party. Pulsing music and video cuts raced along at a frenetic pace, hurling viewers through a collage of images intended to connote real life and real male bonding as opposed to the 'hokey' and 'staged' male bonding that previous Miller campaigns had been media-lampooned for. Miller subsequently abandoned "It's Real" in favor of "Buy that man a Miller" which restaged valiant moments of "everyday heroes." The Miller campaign was then revised to star everyday heroes in ads about their own acts of bravery or honesty. The 'Real Heroes' campaign reenacted dramatizations like that of Eddie Turner of Catawba, N.C. who risked his life to dive down and pull the cord of a fellow parachutist, who had become unconscious. The ads chronicle the heroic act in the photographic codes of scratched and grainy video, but switch to the smooth color video of official television to salute the heroism and pay tribute with the beer.

Miller Beer commercials sought to fashion a simulation of extreme everydayness by relying on a heavily exaggerated realist photographic code. The goal here was to encode a reality that seemed to emerge from the texture of people's everyday lives, rather than connoting a staged concoction

Going Backstage: the spatial coordinates of realism & reflexivity

Tying together 'realism' and 'reflexivity' is a visual concentration on back regions. Goffman (1959: 112) distinguished between frontstages where performances are given off and "a back region or backstage...as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course." In the back region actors need not maintain a front as they prepare for performances. From 1986 to 1988 numerous ads featured the backstage region, showing viewers the actual process of production as the finished ad. One version of this made viewers privy to the process of producing the ad (e.g., ads by K-Mart and Le Tigre). These ads proposed that the finished text is secondary to the process of its construction; they exposed the texts as constructed artifacts whose polished appearance is contrived. Such ads accept the premise that the presentation of self is a deception that corresponds to the commodification of daily life. In a world dominated by appearances, the Le Tigre fashion ads purported to reveal the backstage arena where appearances are constructed. By showing us their dancers getting dressed in a restroom they confide in us about the fabricated side of ads, and thereby discredit arguments about their own involvement in promoting pseudo-individuality.² Don't be fooled they say. Appearances are usually not what they seem, but because they have shared this with you, you can trust that their motives are not contrived.

K-Mart ads likewise contrived to show models who are really just like us - insecure regular people who may be no more talented, no less self-conscious, just on stage. Stylistically, these ads resemble Wiseman's film "Model" (1982) which spelled out the tedium that goes into making ads, but is concealed in the finished product. But where Wiseman showed cultural production as work and thereby exposed the fetishism of commodities, the Le Tigre campaign turned the exposure of the ad's production into its own sign - le cool tigre is wise to the manufacture of cooked texts. Advertisers in the late 1980s tried stripping ads of their ideological masks as a means of preempting criticism.

A few ad campaigns actually let viewers in on the pre-production design process of the product itself (e.g., Nissan took us behind the scenes to ostensibly listen in on their automotive design process). Television ads rarely concern themselves with questions of workplace production relations. When they do, they normally depict the work group in a ritualized way (e.g., Ford, McDonald's). Just as important, since "back regions are typically out of bounds to members of the audience, it is here that we may expect reciprocal familiarity to determine the tone of social intercourse" (Goffman, 1959: 128). The Nissan ad's photographic style attempted to humanize the work group by connotatively locating it in everyday life - we recognize the room and its arrangement as representing the phenomenology of daily experience. The soundtrack included raw background sounds rather than the pure, cleansed sounds generated by skilled technicians in studios. And, what is more, these workers do not sing to us. The Nissan ad emphasized the informal nature of the work group - conveyed via their casualness, the absence of hierarchy, the humorous put-downs, references to family life, spontaneous interaction and brainstorming.

Ad campaigns examined questions of social performance and social identity by literally taking us backstage to see the unpolished/authentic side of performing. A Miller beer ad pulls us behind the scenes to visit a standup comic preparing to perform. He acknowledges his anxiety to a select coterie of friends who are drinking Miller beers. We are made a part of that coterie, admitted to the inner circle to participate in a male bonding ritual. Making us a team member, and letting us in on team secrets, boosts the ad's sense of authenticity. The campaign tagline, "As real as it gets," suggests that Miller beer possesses an authenticity and value that corresponds to the authenticity of the relationships seen in the ad. At least superficially, this positioned Miller against a previous procession of ads which made the commodity the ventriloquist. Here, the beer named Miller does not claim to speak or perform, except insofar as it functions as a signifying correlative for the experience of authentic comradeship. In a more glamourous vein, the technique of exposing the backstage shapes a Michelob ad featuring the 'real' Eric Clapton (not the arena performer, but the artist playing for his own aesthetic enjoyment). A sequence of images portrays Clapton finishing a concert performance before ambling down a night street to an intimate bar closed for the evening. Clapton straps on his guitar and jams with a few musician-friends. An alluring, unattached, female is seen watching and enjoying his play. His love of playing music, it would seem, is not for money or fame, but for simple aesthetic enjoyment. Ironically, while Clapton sold out to Michelob, he was presented precisely as authentic, genuine artist.³

The Miller and Michelob ads encouraged viewers to distance themselves from the viewing masses, positioning each viewer as a privileged viewer who is one up on the rest of the audience. These ads appellated viewers as not just another spectator but as part of the performance and its preparation. The backstage emphasis also gave a sense of depth to the experiences of daily life. Between 1950 and 1980, advertisements addressed viewers about their personal leisure lives, but rarely in the vernacular of the mundane routine of daily life. Daily life, according to advertisements, paled in comparison to the glamorous world of the visual spectacle. Going backstage offered 1980's advertisers a method for responding to the cynical and savvy viewers who claim to feel insulted by ads. The disparity between the spectacular ideal and everyday reality has always bred a certain resistance and doubt about what 'authenticity' meant. The first round of ads which 'went backstage' stood out from other ads, while also effectively denying that they were manufacturing the social relations they presented. After all, to go backstage is to see that the surface appearance of the performance is not the performance itself and does not take place by magic. However the backstage region is not shown as work, but is represented as 'fun.' Once again, negation is so carefully contrived that representations of production, tension and anxiety are turned to become signs of personal authenticity.

Many contemporary ads are predicated on the notion that viewers have become alienated from the appearances they consume. These ad campaigns are constructed to convey a sense of greater depth, but this is merely the appearance of depth, itself constructed. Meanwhile, during the same time period another body of advertising intermittently plays on a postmodern cultural theme that everything is surface - that there is no deeper layer - that all texts are therefore equivalent. It is easy to point to MTV style ads and their flattened voice, but this style does not require an MTV audience. A recent campaign for Chevy Trucks illustrates, as small town rural folks in Iowa recite a copywriter's words in obviously flattened monotones - e.g., grizzled old timers in a local diner comment on the aesthetics of the new Chevy truck. One man speaks of the "Bauhaus influence" while another mentions the "overstated simplicity" of its lines. A moment later, the entire group chimes in that "form follows function." Chevy's version of postmodernism for middle America is a bunch of rubes reciting the theoretical clichés of high modernist design and making fun of urbane talk.