FILM CHRONICLE
107
make-believe that is acted out often enough attains a special status:
it becomes a real part of our experience. (Films like
Quo Vadis, Th e
Prisoner of Zenda, Showboat, The Merry Widow
have been made so
many times that to the mass audience they have the status of classics;
are they not immortal if three generations have seen them?) Advertising,
using the same appeals-the familiar with the "new" look, also depends
upon repetition to make its point.
If
we
believed
an advertising claim,
hearing it once would be enough.
It
is because we do not believe that
advertising uses repetition and variation into infinity to get its claims
accepted.
The suggestion that politics as used in melodrama is advertising
decor is not intended metaphorically. I wish to suggest that films (and
other forms of commercial entertainment) are becoming inseparable
from advertising, and that advertising sets the stage for our national
morality play.
Advertising has been borrowing from literature, art, and the theater;
films meanw.hile are taking over not merely the look of advertising
art-clear, blatant poster design-but the very content of advertising.
Put together an advertising photograph and a movie still from
How to
Marry a Millionaire
(another Nunnally Johnson production) and they
merge into each other: they belong to the same genre. The new young
Hollywood heroine is not too readily distinguishable from the model
in the Van Raalte ad; if the ad is a few years old, chances are this
is
the same girl. In a few months she will be on the front of movie maga–
zines and on the back of news magazines endorsing her favorite cigarette.
She is both a commodity for sale and a salesman for other commodities
(and her value as one depends upon her value as the other). In any
traditional sense, Gregory Peck is not an actor at all ; he is a model,
and the model has become the American ideal. Advertising dramatizes
a way of life with certain consumption patterns, social attitudes and
goals, the same way of life dramatized in films; films are becoming ad–
vertising in motion.
Is
Executive Suite
l
in substance any different from an institutional
ad-"This Company Believes in the Future of America"? Break it down
1 In contrast with the situation in the film, some of the actual problems
of furniture manufacturers might provide material for farce : how to make fur–
niture that will collapse after a carefully calculated interval (refrigerator manu–
facturers are studying the problem of "replacement"- i.e., designing refrigerators
that will necessitate replacement in
I
0 years rather than 15 or 20 years) or that
will be outmoded by a new style (automobile manufacturers are wrestling with
consumers' lag-people just don't yet understand that the 1950 car is to be
discarded with the 1950 hat). The designer-hero of
Executive Suite
can be a
real menace to American business: good designs last too long.
