It was mystery enough to freeze me for a moment in front of the cooler, trying to figure it out. And in that brief moment of soul-searching, the sudden knowledge that I’d been duped hit me on the noggin like the rear-end of a south bound bumble-bee meeting a north-bound wind-shield at 100 clicks.
That summer, 7-Up had started a new advertising campaign, which those of you who were teens in the 80s may remember as well as I do. There were 4 or 5 different spots, but the storyline was always essentially the same. A young, free-spirited, and gorgeous (I can only assume from the way girls threw themselves at him) dude driving around in a green convertible finds himself in a spot of trouble, which resolves itself through some ironic twist or other that leaves him with a pretty girl on his arm and a can of celebratory 7-Up in his hand.
In one spot, for instance, he pulls up to a crossroads next to a guy and his girlfriend riding “two up” on a racing bike. The biker gestures ominously that he wants to race, and our hero gives his engine an aggressive roar or two to accept the challenge. The girl, a pretty read-head, we learn when she gets off the bike and removes her helmet, pulls a bandana from her back pocket to serve as a starting flag. Engines roar, the flag drops, and when the dust clears we discover: the green car sitting unmoved at the crossroads and the biker nowhere to be seen. Our hero grins rakishly at the girl, who smiles knowingly in return and sidles into the passenger seat. As they share a 7 up in the closing frame, the tag line is heard over a rocked-up 80s theme song: “Are you up for it?”
In case this isn’t jarring any memories, I did track down one of the spots on YouTube, which I offer here for posterity’s sake (and for the sake of the cringing it’s likely to induce):
The semiotic associations here are so blunt they barely merit the term “subliminal”: irresistible chick-magnets who are too-cool-for-words drink 7-Up; ergo, to become one yourself, make 7-Up your soft-drink of choice. To a 38 year-old, the message is laughably transparent, but to a 14 year-old boy—a relatively new and terribly self-conscious immigrant to that strange land called Pubescence—a fourteen year-old boy for whom the idea (let alone the possibility) of being an irresistible chick-magnet had only just appeared on the horizon of consciousness, for a fourteen year-old boy, like I say, the implications were almost mythopoeic. What separates you from stunning sexual success is simply a matter of the soft-drink you consume.
So drink 7-Up.
And I did, for about 4 months, even though I hated it and didn’t know why, until that day I caught myself in the act and understood: I was trying to buy the sexual self-assuredness that those ads had promised me in 7-Up. I didn’t use those words at 14, of course, but I realized that I was trying (vainly) to become the man in those commercials by drinking the soft-drink he was hawking.
Now, it’s not just because of the undertones in the commercial’s tag line (“Are you up for it?”) that I’m thinking about 7-Up and Freud today. I watched a documentary called “Century of the Self” a while ago, which was about the work of Sigmund Freud’s nephew back in the 1920s. Though Edward Bearnaise’s name is not nearly as household a word as his uncle’s, he was the first person to take uncle Sigmund’s psychological theories about our subconscious impulses and apply them in an intentional way to manipulate the masses. In particular, he was the guy who showed corporations that they could get people to want things they didn’t need by linking products to their unconscious desires. Those 7-Up spots are the direct heirs of Eddy Bearnaise’s legacy.
But here’s the really fascinating part of this story, and the reason for my little stroll down memory lane to the local Mac’s store. Besides the obvious benefit of making money, one of Bearnaise’s motives in bringing depth psychology to bear on marketing the way he did was to control the masses. He believed (and many politicians of the time believed along with him) that the mass of society was fundamentally irrational and volatile; and in 1924, they had, of course, the evidence of the First World War to prove it. According to Bearnaise, the best way to manage the “irrational force of the masses was to stimulate people’s inner desires through advertising and then sate them with consumer products.” This would keep them happy, docile and, consequently, cooperative. He called it “the engineering of consent.”
In layman’s terms: if subconsciously I believe a can of 7-Up will satisfy my “natural impulse” to be a rebellious, self-asserting rakehell, then I am far less likely actually to be rebellious, self-asserting or rakish. And as long as we all sublimate our impulses like this, society holds together and we all get along.
Not to put it too bluntly, but Bearnaise was one of the first people to propose the idea that we could save ourselves by buying stuff. Quite literally, in the Bearnaisian ideology, consumerism is salvation, products are saviour, and advertising the divine vision that mediates it to us.
Here’s the whole movie, if you’re interested (or skeptical):
Well: I don’t drink 7 Up anymore—too sharp for that old trick—but the other day I was in a local Christian mega-store, and I caught myself in mid-reach for the latest DVD Curriculum produced by some miraculously-huge mega church in the States, offering a “spiritual experience” that would “revolutionize my church’s ministry.”
At 38, of course, I wasn’t taken in by the promises, but the thing is, I don’t really have to be. I live in a world that has believed (sometimes quite explicitly and earnestly) for almost a century now that salvation—the saving of our society, our sex-lives or our churches—is simply a matter of buying the right product. And whether I like it or not, I am so steeped in this worldview that it’s become subliminal, in the Freudian sense: the solution is as simple as a purchase.
Of course, buying the latest book on prayer, or the next big purpose-driven media campaign, or the new small-group “experience guide,” or attending the next big worship event, or whatever it is won’t save anyone’s church, anymore than 7-Up made me an irresistible super-stud. And when we reach for these things thinking they will, whether we articulate the belief or not we are reaching for an idol.
Sometimes when preachers get going on the old epic struggle between Baalism and Yahwehism as it’s recorded in the Old Testament, they say a lot about materialism: the condo in Florida, the unnecessary mid-life- cruise, and so on. But I’ve almost never heard anyone draw a line between Baal and, say, the Prayer of Jabez (TM), the Passion of the Christ (TM), Courageous: The Movie (TM) or the next big what-have-you out of Willow Creek. Of course, ministry resources are often just a matter of practicality, I realize that, but I also realized, that day in the bloated Christian marketplace, that the idols of our day are far more comfortable in our churches than we want to admit.
Lord have mercy.
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