After a long day at the office, I came home and found Iron Man on DVD on my coffee table (thanks roommate! Thanks Netflix!). A perfect end to a less than perfect day, I decided. I made dinner, kicked my shoes off and settled in for what I thought would be a pleasantly mindless two hours in front of the television. Mission accomplished, or so I thought for the first twenty minutes. I began to feel uncomfortable. Something was gnawing at the back of my mind. Something was out of place…or perhaps it was that everything was in it’s place – and a little too conspicuously. By the end of my two hours in front of the tv I had counted almost a dozen product logos and heard references to a few others… I can now say with all certainty that, superheroes and co.: use Hummers, BMW’s, Mercedes Benz’s, Audi’s and Rolls Royce’s to get to their destinations; tinker on dell computers; get a hold of their friends on the latest LG and Nokia phones; etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Now, I absolutely was not surprised by the looming corporate presence in this sure-to-be summer blockbuster. What disturbed me most, however, was the thought that, “For each product that I barely managed to identify, how many more did I only subconsciously register?”. I mean, it’s not like I set out to count ®’s and ©’s, and maybe I was a bit more keen on these things because of our recent class topics, but such marketing saturated entertainment really makes me question how much of what I do/buy is self-motivated.
I recently finished watching Merchants of Cool and I couldn’t help but be deeply affected by it. I am a part of the generation that was under that documentary’s microscope. At the time it was filmed (2001) I’m sure I fit some of the pop-cultural profiles/psychological landscapes they sketched out. And I’m sure this is no less true of someone outside that generation (no man is an island. We all react with/against our peers in some way), but it hit particularly close to home because I remember those particular popular phenomena as they occurred. Again, the question here really isn’t matter of taste (the 1960’s gave us the Beatles, while the 90’s gave us N’Sync, etc.) but of personal politics and how I transmit/absorb those ideas.
There was an interesting part of the documentary where they covered the work of “cool hunters” – people in marketing who go out and photograph what’s the hippest style of the moment. They report their findings to a client (for a fee, of course) and those clients, in turn, create an ad campaign based on this “newly discovered” trend. This is a system where the “underground” is exploited for profit, and the only reason we pay them any mind is because we see ourselves in the media.
If identities are fabricated and sold by near-omnipotent corporations, are we all a part of commerce whether we like it or not? And is there such a thing as a genuine expression of one’s self? The sad truth is, I don’t think there is. Our outfits are never truly unique because we’ve bought the clothing at a store. Every haircut has been had, every band has a following. We are all apart of some demographic.
So maybe the important thing isn’t trying to form an identity in spite of marketers, but finding others to identify with. Merchants of Cool spent a lot of time discussing the ways in which conglomerates benefit from our participation, but it seems as though there is at least one way we can benefit from our interaction with them.
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