COMMERCIALS are infuriating. They are also irresistible. Commercials are an outrageous nuisance. They are also apt to be better than the programs they interrupt. Commercials are the heavy tribute that the viewer must pay to the sponsor in exchange for often dubious pleasure. They are also an American art form. A minor art form, but the ultimate in mixed media: sight, sound and sell.
Commercials or a great many of them are better than ever. How and why this came about is one of the more fascinating phenomena in television. They are part of the background music, as it were, of the American scene. Hardly anybody pays total attention to them; hardly anybody totally ignores them. Many, the very good and the very bad, force or insinuate themselves into the imagination. Even a reluctant viewer cannot quite resist the euphoria induced by airline ads that waft him up up and away, or travel spots, island-hopping in a wink of quick cuts, that drop him on a sun-splashed beach. Even while grumbling, he marvels at the dexterity, not to say ludicrous imagery, of a white tornado suddenly swirling through an untidy kitchen. He wakes up singing "You can take Salem out of the country, BUT . . ." His kids, riding shotgun on the shopping cart, may not know a stanza of The Star-Spangled Banner, but they can rap out several verses of "To a Smoker, It's a Kent."
With their vast and relentless power of amplification, the writers of commercials sprinkle more tag lines and catch phrases into the conversation than the poets, fettered to their paper and print, can ever hope to put into the American idiom. "A little dab'll do ya," "Fly the friendly skies" and "Leave the driving to us" are in fact a kind of pop poetry.
Commercials also have deeper, more serious impact. In a discussion of the causes of last year's ghetto riots, the Kerner Report suggested that the enticements of TV commercials, "endlessly flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth," were an important inducement to the state of unrest. Opinion Researcher Mervin Field goes so far as to suggest that commercials constitute "a looter's shopping list."
Whether or not that analysis is correct or fair, commercials obviously represent the American materialist vision of the good life all the shiny possessions and luxuries that people want, or are supposed to want.