Such potential irony was not missed by the Scottish Health Education Unit. In 1978 they attempted to turn the image on itself (Taylor 1985, pp. 38-39). A set of a graveyard was built in a London studio and used to photograph a golden cigarette packet with the health warning on the side, being lowered into the ground. The original caption was meant to be, Some people have been known to die in the search for gold. The campaign was a closely guarded secret, but Gallaher found out. They complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that it was a pastiche of their brand. The original posters had to be shredded. A substitute was made where the coffin was pinewood. Gallaher s gold remained untarnished. Shortly it became Britain s best-selling brand for four years running.
Silk Cut? Not Moron, but Wife
What does cut silk say? Opulence to the point that you can afford to destroy it; opulence you can send up in smoke? And what else?
In their book of the top 100 advertising posters of all time, Morris & Watson (1993) wrote of the 1983 slashed silk image described above:
This poster is proof that simple ideas are the strongest and that powerful branding comes out of the size of your idea, not the size of your logo. As David Ogilvy once said, ‘The consumer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife’.
Verging as it does on the phallic, such language fits a campaign which, with its vaginal slit and purple labial folds has been dubbed by some in the industry as “Silk Cunt” (Collier 1995, pers. com.) and caricatured as Silk Slut.
Sex and cigarettes. The Freudian Eros. We can mostly spot it coming, handle it, enjoy the “smart Alex surrealism” of recognising which brand each nameless ad is for, and keep things in proportion … even old Uncle Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
But the fascination of these ads cuts deep. People stand and stare at them. Are we talking sex and just sex here, or is there more to them than what we would normally imagine?
The shower curtain advertisement was proposed for a poster advertising industry award. A advertising executive who held one of the presiding roles at the event told me, “Everyone was unanimous that it was the best ad of the year. But I felt distinctly uncomfortable. You knew that the scene was Hitchcock’s Psycho. The woman was about to be raped and killed.”
Gallaher s media services manager, Colin Stockall, says of the alleged Psycho overtones, Well I know some people interpret it that way but I can t say that s our view of it. He added (pers. com. 16-8-96) that Silk Cut constitutes, The most successful advertising of its age. Still don t think it compares with the B & H ads of the 70s. I think they were in a class of their own. As for psychological interpretations, You re reading more into this than me, quite honestly. I just regard them as images, and the fine images that they are.
But what sort of mind sees them as such? Martin Casson of M & C Saatchi created Silk Cut s bagpipe ad. I phoned him and asked what he made of the shower curtain one. He contradicted Stockall, saying: People recognise the connection between the advertisement and Psycho, the thriller, so people think they re quite clever. It s smart arse. It affirms their intelligence and their wittiness. It strikes a chord with them.
Silk Cut and Thrust
It is my view that what we see here is actually violated sexuality. The silk is not merely cut; it is knife-slashed. The erotic purple shower curtain triggers thoughts of rape and murder. The purple hand over the phone suggests cutting off communication in a vulnerable situation and the white version suggests the draining of life (I am told that a Hitchcock movie featured a man who you do not see cutting off the phone and attempting to strangle Grace Kelly, who stabs him with scissors). The mosquito sucks blood and gives cerebral malaria. The magician s legs are wide apart, the condom-like phallic shape of the cut suggesting perhaps the male member. Or perhaps, since the cut has up until this point in time been a feminine image, the male s thrust into the feminine not by invitation, but by force of will.
The nightmarish teeth come alive at night and bite. The pawns outside the toilet are dying for a slash, or is it a fag – but either way it is administered with a kitchen knife. The can-can scissors cut at the sexual apex. Others stand arrayed like the surgical instruments might in a cancer operating theatre, but the prison-like context brings to mind torture more than healing.
And the Venus Fly Trap has ripped out the crotch with its toothed vagina. Male or female crotch or genitalia? It matters not at this level of psychological depth; of obscenity when commercially used in these ways. Norman O. Brown would have found the image perfectly to illustrate his hyper-Freudianism (1966, pp. 62 – 63):
The woman is a penis. …Aphrodite, the personification of femininity, is just a penis, a penis cut off and tossed into the sea; the penis which Father Sky lost in intercourse with Mother Earth. …The vagina as a devouring mouth, or vagina dentata; the jaws of the giant cannibalistic mother, a menstruating woman with the penis bitten off, a bleeding trophy.
Why should such images attract smokers to Silk Cut? Why the high recall amongst young women in particular? Why spend some 50,000 in concept development and artwork alone for each ad? What deep chord is being struck?
I propose that two elements are at work here. The first is rape fantasy. As Freud repeatedly emphasised, one of the costs of “civilisation” is repression of the erotic instinct. Anthologies of women s’ sexual fantasies suggest that rape is often a theme. Nancy Friday explains (1975, p. 108):
Rape does for a woman’s sexual fantasy what the first Martini does for her in reality: both relieve her of responsibility and guilt.
The repressed woman is able to let go. She has no option but to accept enjoying what, in the fantasy, has been thrust upon her. It is crucial to stress that this is a psychological device used in fantasy only; it does not imply actual rape wish.
In the psychology of advertising the identity of the product and the consumer are often merged. The consumer s self becomes identified with the product, or more technically speaking, with its brand image. Brands are given anthropomorphic characters. Market researchers ask, If this brand was a person, what would he/she be like. Brands are refined to persuade the consumer into a relationship with them. Attachment develops consistent with psychological attachment theory.
Silk Cut may suggest at an unconscious level that the consumer has no real choice in the question of addiction to its brand. Like rape fantasy, she might as well just lie back and accept it. Might as well enjoy the quasi-orgiastic rush of nicotine to the body. What is being sold is not tobacco. The real product is sexual release. And this is not the normal sexual arousing of, say, a suntan lotion ad. This is about very deep psychophysical penetration in a way that just can t be said no to. It cuts to the very soul.
To a woman, rape is theft of the soul. And this leads in to the second sinister element in Silk Cut. Death imagery.
Since 1994 death imagery, and not just sexuality, has been increasingly prominent in Silk Cut s work – the mosquito, the silk hand, the lampshade, the scissors and dying for a slash.
The most recent example is the bagpipes ad. This was designed by Martin Casson of M & C Saatchi to link in with Silk Cut s sponsorship of events in the 1996 Edinburgh Festival. I spoke to Casson about this (16-6-96). I congratulated him on the brilliance of the concept and its execution, and outlined my own research theories. He refuted the notion that there was any deep psychological undertone to the work.
When I suggested that the silk-cut theme was basically about violation he replied, I think that s over-analysing it. The primary motivating factor in my culture, in my advertising culture, is an attempt to get humour into the advertisement rather than hark back to death or entrapment…. (They) work if it s funny, if people find it engaging.
He said that for the Festival ad they had considered a piece of silk with 2 diagonal cuts to make a St Andrews flag. But that would have been too boring. Thus, the idea was to imply cuts, rather than to show a piece of silk that has been cut.
I suggested that the gin traps insinuated entrapment/addiction and even death. And imagine the noise if one of those creatures got trapped and deflated through the chanter! He said:
I think people would have to be either very negative in their view of life or overanalying it to create a sub-plot that doesn t really exist. I mean, the idea really is that these are not people, these are not living breathing animals. They re just objects that look funny. That look although they almost want to get trapped because that s what man traps do. They trap things. And that s what animals do. They step in things. You know, especially like dumb sheep-type animals. But these are more than that. They re just odd looking, bagpipes, which have been made to look like haggises. It s a fantasy. It s just an odd image, and because it s odd it looks interesting. It captures people s attention.
But what kind of humour is it that my culture … advertising culture reinforces in us. If death is implicated, why do such necrophilic images capture people s attention and result in tangible sales?
“Then there is Death”
Packard (1960) devotes a whole chapter to the exploits of the “depth boys” of the 1950’s with sex and its relevance to cigarette advertising is well recognised (Pollay c.1994). But death imagery of the past two decades suggests that maybe the boys had not fathomed the deepest trench.
Freud became unfashionable in the sixties and seventies to the extent that there is hardly a British university psychology department left that teaches him. But were one or two of the smartest minds in advertising looking for material that went counter to the pendulum swing? Looking to Freud and Jung because what they have to say is in some ways more pertinent than ever.
Maybe, as advertising agencies wrestled with the requirement to have government health warnings, somebody speculated that death itself is the best caption you could have. Or maybe there was no such realisation. It is not necessary to prove that Charles Saatchi or whoever hit on a vein of psychological gold in the dusty texts of an older generation that nobody else in advertising had previously mined. But to understand why violation in ads might appeal, the dusty texts need dusted off.
In this paper I propose that violative imagery is effective because it taps into what was the third and final stage of Freud s thought: what he called the “death instinct.” P. Federn later dubbed this “Thanatos,” after the Greek god of death. In discussing the imagery of it here, I shall use the adjective thanatonic – a kind of inverse of bionic. Brown (1961, p. 28) points out that Thanatos was one of the least popular of Freud s theories: Almost alone amongst his pronouncements this conception raised a storm of protest amongst Freud’s orthodox supporters, much of it couched in the language of moral disapproval.
Not many people in the ad agency would need to know what was going on because Gallaher s surrealism conceals what I argue is the real message from consciousness. But it entices it into the unconscious. The creative people would probably work more freely if thanatonic themes were not articulated and thereby risk articulation of self-censoring moral norms. Maybe nobody in the agencies is conscious of the consistency with which violative images are being used, but if so it renders all the more remarkable that very consistency.
One B & H ad is not overtly objectionable. I would not have featured it here but that I was able to procure considerable insight from the person who made it. The story is that in early 1994 B & H featured a tuna fish on a piano. Cross-word style, it punned: “Balancer of Scales? (5,5),” To this the smart Alex response was meant to be, “piano tuner.”
I contacted the agency CDP and spoke with the creative executive who had come up with the image. I had to stretch my case more than would have been necessary with some of the other ads, but put it to him that here was an image of a dead fish: its snout rested on a B & H packet which depressed three adjacent keys on the piano – a discordant chord. The piano was curved, black, coffin-like. An arc of gold swept the picture from the cigarette pack, to the gold ring in the fish’s eye, to the fish’s fin, to a gold keyhole in the piano. Rings often symbolise coitus. A keyhole in a coffin invites unlocking. And underneath the caption simply reads, “Smoking Kills.”
The executive was intrigued but understandably taken aback. He felt uneasy talking about a client issue, but also wanted to hear what I had to say. The idea that the ad mixed symbolism pertaining to Eros and Thanatos had never entered his mind. He said that he had been leaving the house one morning just as the piano tuner arrived. Piano tuner; piano tuna! Nice pun. A tuna was ordered up from Billingsgate fish market. A model was made. They played around with it on a white piano, but black gave better contrast. The piano happened to have a gold keyhole. The artist “made it all look nice.” No thought of sex or death ever entered their minds.
“And yet, now you say it,” he said frankly, “I can’t deny that that might be there as well. Is it possible, heaven forbid, that I’m good at my job because these things come up in my creative work without being conscious of such interpretations? Come to think of it, one of the client executives did say of this series that they were ‘very Jungian’.”
A few weeks later the same creative executive unexpectedly phoned up. Had I seen Campaign magazine of 15 April 1994? Look at pp. 2, 34 and 35. It made him feel that I might be onto something. And the thought of it was somewhat affecting his creative motivation in his work.
I bought Campaign. It contained an article by Patrick Collister, executive creative director with Ogilvy and Mather. He reviews new ad campaigns. And he wrote:
Finally, there’s Death cigarettes, where all my problems as a reviewer begin. Frankly, it defies the criteria by which ads are usually judged in this column. It is artful only in that it is cunning and clever. Yet, unlike everything else here, it’s of real importance.
In a letter to Campaign, Tony Brignull wrote about the real issues of advertising tobacco. He pointed out that smoking kills people. Not allegedly, or possibly, but actually. The Enlightened Tobacco Company says all this is true but smokers choose to risk their lives. If you’re going to die, they urge, die with us and in return we’ll donate a few bob to cancer research.
My private view is that the Enlightened Tobacco Company has every right to use advertising to sell its wares but I know plenty of you out there will abhor how it’s chosen to do it. Is it cynically exploiting kids too immature to have any real grasp on the concept of death? Or is it simply revealing the hypocrisy that surrounds the issue?
Page 2 of the journal reported that the top five UK poster contractors had refused to carry posters for Death: “Industry sources say that the larger poster players have caved in to pressure from their major tobacco clients who are directly attacked in the Death campaign.”
Freud s Thanatos
To strongly support the hypothesis that advertisers are benefiting from a death instinct, it must be shown that, i) any such instinct exists and, ii) it would be an attraction, albeit perversely so, to potential tobacco consumers. To achieve this with the confidence necessary to head off libel suits from the tobacco companies is beyond the scope of this paper. It would require further research. I must therefore emphasise that what is presented here is tentative, based largely upon Freud’s thought and anecdotal observation. Let me review what Freud said and then suggest its contemporary relevance in politics, in popular culture and in spiritual emergence – the process of self-realisation.
He arrived at his theory of Thanatos after the First World War. He had started off postulating that neurosis is caused by child sexual abuse. He then shifted to his main theory that its origins lie in conflict between the pleasure and reality principles. Civilised living frustrated the expression of Eros. Eros in Freud’s earlier writings was sex drive. Later he broadened it out into something much more like Jung’s concept of libido – a generalised urge to life.
The war presented Freud with cases of neurosis which clearly did not have an erotic aetiology. For reasons about which he is vague, this lead to the third stage of his thought which postulated a death instinct as a counterpoint to Eros. A full discussion of the merits and demerits of Thanatos theory may be found in the appendix to Fromm (1977, pp. 581 – 631): Freud’s Theory of Aggressiveness and Destructiveness. Fromm himself wrote extensively on what he called the necrophilous character. This built on Freud s though (Fromm 1994, p. 47):