Anthony Meyer

The Hypnotizing of American Society

There is a certain type of acceptable American Feng Shui. Some time ago, before I was born, the collective unconscious of Americans agreed upon a blueprint for a common furniture layout in American homes. The blueprint, that has since been reproduced millions of times, includes a couch, a coffee table, and a television.
“Walk through a suburban street in any developed country of the world, when the night is warm and the windows are open: in house after house you will see, shining through, the bluish flicker from a television screen,” writes Martin Esslin in Thinking Through Television. Indeed, television swept through the modern world like a plague. Americans in particular now presume that a television belongs in a home; that it is a piece of furniture, as defining to a ‘home’ as heat. Because television is ubiquitous and belongs in an American home, Americans watch television and do not question otherwise.

Picture this scene: an American man (as to not strain my imagination, say a White, middle class man of average income) arrives home from a day of work. He needs to relax, to unwind from his day and think of nothing in particular. After a meal, he plops down on his leather couch in his blueprint of a living room with an ice cold Budweiser in hand. This man has been conditioned over and over to perform a certain action upon sitting down on a couch for a moment of repose: of course he picks up the remote control and turns on the television. Something happens at this moment that is hard to define. The man enters a type of trance; his mind shuts off. The world around him fades away until the television demands his full attention. The television hypnotizes him. It hypnotizes him slowly. It hypnotizes him to a state of mind near sleep.

Television causes this man to lose his awareness of the world around him. He can concentrate fully upon the programming. His body rests while his mind accepts any information the television feeds him.

A commercial for a new electric razor flashes on the screen. The man absorbs it without much thought. The man in the razor commercial is like a sexier version of the man on the couch; the man on the couch perceives himself in the mirror of the screen on a subconscious level. In the commercial, the man shaves shirtless and in a white towel. The man on the couch notices this man’s muscular body, but does not stare; his mind is too deeply hypnotized. An announcer tells the sleeping man some arbitrary information about the razor. Then, a woman happens to walk in the bathroom. She is also draped in a white towel, but bathed in light. The man’s cleanly-shaven face catches her eye, and she throws her buxom body against his. She demands the attention of the man on the couch. His sleep-like state fills with hyper-sexualized dreams.

Although the hypnotized man may or may not realize it, the commercial functions to influence his purchases. Advertisers know this man and millions of others like him turn to their televisions every night. Their job is to separate these men from their money. They have a odious tool at their disposal for this task: the television. The television acts as a dreamscape, allowing the man to play out his fantasies. Like a villain who whispers in his victim’s ears, the television so unfairly whispers in the ear of its viewers. Its images specifically allow advertisers to turn hypnotized viewers into consumers. The hypnotized man views the electric razor commercial as a dream in which a beautiful woman caresses his face at the end.

These properties of television are not exclusive to the experience of middle class men idly watching razor commercials. Television alters the reality of Americans of both genders and all socioeconomic classes equally. When I examine television, however, I must do so from a perspective I am familiar with, that of a White, middle-class male. The conclusions that I reach may apply for all television viewers because as Ron Lembo distinguishes, “Television’s power can be understood to cut across virtually all domains of social life--work, home life, public culture, and private thoughts--and to touch virtually every social location that analysts deem important, including, class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and age, among others” (Lembo, 27).

Television drapes a veil of hyper-sexuality over the eyes of its male American viewers in order to transform men into consumers. The young men of my generation and I must learn to live in a world so predominately structured by television.
Social theorist Jean Baudrillard defines this problem through the relationship between mass media and consumption in The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. “In the consumer package,” writes Baudrillard, “there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other--and even more laden with connotations than the automobile, in spite of the fact that that encapsulates them all. That object is the BODY” (129). Indeed, the saying “sex sells” is one often repeated, but never closely examined. In a consumer society that relies on mass media such as television and where images are consumed rather than products, images of the ideal body have the ability to persuade those without ideal bodies to purchase just about anything. Baudrillard illustrates this principle by examining advertisers’ use of sexual symbolism:

Let us take an example from an advertisement for Henriot champagne.
A bottle and a rose. The rose flushes with color, begins to open, approaches the screen, swells, becomes tumescent. The amplified sound of a beating heart fills the cinema, accelerates, grows fevered, wild. The cork begins to rise from the bottle slowly, inexorably. It grows in size, moves towards the camera, its brass binding wires breaking one after another. The heart beats and beats, the rose swells, the cork again--ah, and suddenly the heart stops, the cork flies off and the foaming champagne bubbles out over the neck of the bottle, the rose grows pale and closes, the tension subsides (146).

Advertisers often employ subtle, phallic imagery to try to tap into their viewers unconscious desires. However, it seems that in my day and age advertisers have lost that type of creativity. I can turn on a television today and subject myself to far less subtle advertisements, the infamous Go-Daddy.com commercials during the Superbowl, for instance, where a busty woman in a skin-tight white tank-top convinces football fans to use the service she represents. Television advertisers cultivate a hyper-sexualized world and falsely suggest to consumers that if they just use their service, buy their electric razor, they too will indulge in this hyper-sexualized lifestyle. How then are young men, such as myself, able to even function in a society in which sex is only a product away? Because television viewers take in the world of television from a hypnotized state, this world is precarious for boys. If they internalize any of the suggestions television makes about sex, their views towards women will be inaccurate and their perceptions of reality will be distorted.

While Baudrillard examines how television misconstrues sexual perceptions in the name of consumption, Lembo argues that television is a social construction and therefore can remain ubiquitous in American society. Lembo correctly identifies a trend in American television viewing habits: he suggests that watching television is an activity in and of itself (101). Therefore, television is to the American boy of my generation what baseball was to the same boy of my grandfather’s generation. Furthermore, Lembo writes that a particular group of his test subjects so internalized television that they turned it on out of habit (156). Lembo asserts that this is the epitome of “mindless” behavior.

Because American society believes that television is an activity and habitually views television, one can infer that television is ubiquitous: Americans believe it belongs. However, the manner with which Lembo describes how Americans watch television resonates with the metaphor of television as hypnosis:
When it comes to television, for example, few if any of those [media theorists] currently watch, or have watched commercial programming for even several hours a day, let alone the seven hours that is average for American households. When they do watch, they probably focus attention on what they are watching and, as a result, are less likely to just have the television on for hours at a time…, a way of watching that has, in fact, become quite routine for many people (27).

Why then would Americans believe that television, a self-induced hypnosis for consumption, belongs in their life?

Lembo also contends that commercial interests mandate that only successful programming receives television airtime. Because programs are standardized, their thematics reoccur. This tendency cultivates the stereotypes that television so often portrays. These stereotypes alter television viewers’ perceptions of reality. In my case, I remember distinctly how the lifeguards at the pool were always on the verge of sleeping with me because of Baywatch.

In response to my earlier question, how then are young men, such as myself, able to even function in a society in which sex is only a product away, I argue that my generation knows no other way. Because television is ubiquitous and viewing it is habitual, one accepts that its presentation of the world is accurate; it is accepted as the norm.

Baudrillard and Lembo both notice a symbiosis between capitalism and mass media. The two complement each other so well that Marshall McLuhan once said about television that “the medium is the message.” In a sense television itself prompts consumption even when isolated from its programming. Capitalism and television are linked in such a way that I believe television programs are arbitrary breaks before the real meat of television, commercials.

Although television may be in part responsible for the mindlessness of consumption, it is also responsible for, as Mitchell Stephans argues, downright mindlessness. Television puts Americans to sleep and lulls them into a stupor of consumption through its programming and use of the image. Stephans questions how much people who inhabit this world constructed with television read. Indeed, the way people watch television, by digesting an image rather than working through the interpretation of a text, is emblematic of its encouragement of mindless consumption. Stephans notes how Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory allows for modern day Coca-Cola commercials tell stories in short periods of time. These commercial stories illicit an emotional response once reserved for the written word, but now have been construed to promote the agendas of television advertisers. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, television constricts its viewers’ vocabularies until they only perceive the world in narrow, repeated images. Because the “rise of the image” expedites the fall of intellectualism, television viewers revert to more rudimentary interests (206). Sex is a primary one. Advertisers prey on basic human instincts that people of all backgrounds share. In my experience, beer commercials (fittingly) target the sexual drives of young men; a beer commercial is not complete without an attractive woman around (Or how about that absurd commercial with a Heineken bottle parading around in burlesque?). What does it mean for a young man, such as myself, after thinking with a sort of cognitive dissonance about these commercials, to realize that his experience in life is reduced to consumption?

I can process the preceding arguments cognitively in my head, twisting and turning them, interjecting my own opinions; however, in my heart, I still find the lullaby music of television comforting. There is something appropriate and satisfying about making oneself a vegetable for a few hours to unwind; it is my right as an American. There is a point after watching a certain number of hours of March Madness when I know I need to turn off the television and walk away (I started singing “This is our country,” from the Chevrolet commercials because I had seen the commercial so many times). Sometimes I wonder how much resemblance I bear to the hypnotized man I described in my introduction. There are times when I convince myself that maybe I need to introduce Axe body spray into my life, times when all the social theory about television and advertising manifests itself in my decisions.

Television had remained ubiquitous throughout most of my life; I never questioned its place in my family’s blueprint of furniture. However, in my junior year of high school, I realized what kind of tool a television is.

My most vivid memories of my junior year theology class are the discussions following a movie titled The Merchants of Cool. The film is a horror movie, a plain-and-simple kick to the stomach that jolted twenty young men’s perceptions of the world around them. It documents the world of advertising.

Mr. Sciuto, a short, gray-headed man with a reputation for intense lectures and parsimonious grades, taught the class. My classmates and I used to make fun of his incessant sweating during class. Mr. Sciuto chose the most disconcerting movie to show upper-middle class boys who all turned on the television as soon as the arrived home from school. The Merchants of Cool exposed the world of advertising and the irrational quirks of marketing and product placement that characterize the world that my classmates and I inhabited. Sitting on the edges of our seat, sweating ourselves now, we questioned Mr. Sciuto. The theory that the modern world was a construction of advertisers floored us. We realized that mass media can reduce the lives of its viewers to something base. We did not want our lives to become, as The Merchants of Cool and Mr. Sciuto suggested, a race for money to buy arbitrary products.

I have become an outsider in a sense. Because television is no longer ubiquitous for me, I can look somewhat objectively at people’s viewing habits. I have a ten-year-old sister, for instance, whom I try to persuade to watch as little television as possible. She is such a smart, bright child; everyone around her cannot help but love her. So, I was incredibly distressed to learn that she picked up the habit of watching American Idol every Tuesday night. Her mind should not be subjected to that, I thought. This is what scares me most about the world: when the next generation adopts the social misgivings of the preceding. Although the experience of a young women differs from that of a young man, I do not want my little sister, or any child to grow up nourished by television.

Although I agree with Baudrillard, McLuhan, Lembo, and Stephans that television reduces human beings to consumers, I believe that human being can choose otherwise.
Journalism professor David Amor closes every email he writes with a distinctive signature featuring three quotes. The orator Cicero and civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exude their wisdom in the first two quotes, but the last quote affected me more than the statesman and the dreamer did. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” --Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters. Gramsci captures my ultimate opinion about television: although television is a societal evil that hypnotizes Americans into mindless consumers, one does not have to concede his life to it. Furthermore, American culture does not have to reduce to consumption. There is still room for art in a world constructed with television; the two are not related.

My answer to the problem of living with television as a young man in the twenty-first century is the Chaplain’s answer at the end of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: I have to persevere. Knowing how television operates and cultivating a pessimistic intellect towards it tempers my optimistic will. I do not have to subject myself to its hypnosis. All young men need not fall victim to the fallacies of television commercials. Although it may appear obvious, young men must know that drinking a certain beer or shaving with a certain electric razor will not improve their sex lives, as television advertisers would have them believe. One must persevere and not internalize the message of the medium. So drink your beer and shave your faces, young men; however, make sure you do so awake.