Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(11)

To sell a thing—goods, services, property—one tells a story. So we, the copywriters of my generation, were told, and it was true. Now, though, it seems the language of commerce has little use for stories. Stories take too much time. The span of attention—I see it like a bridge, a span of that sort—is shortening, shortening. Or being shortened.

In my career I always assumed that advertising communicates with people in order to persuade them. But these ads don’t persuade; they barely bother to communicate. Why be clever? Why be novel? Why not simply find an asinine catchphrase and repeat it endlessly?

No longer is there a bridge to span, a walking across from either side, seller to purchaser, a meeting in the middle. There’s just a stabbing at the base of the brain—so much the better if its targets aren’t even aware that it’s working. This seems to me like a great cheapening of all of us. Instead of appealing to my reason, my thrift, or my taste, those Oreos insinuated themselves into my unspoken desires and anxieties. My missing Gian back when he was young, still more my son.

I have a great many unspoken desires and anxieties.

Another commercial comes on, this one for Twix, clearly meant to be taken as happening in New York City. These ads are revolting and inaccurate, objectionable not just for being false but for being so much less interesting and vibrant than the city itself. The commercial shows an ersatz Jerome Robbins dance-routine vision of the city that is even less edgy than West Side Story. I do not see my city in it all.

I want to tell Sam, who is down at the end of the bar, chatting with the couple, that his new TV and his Negroni have helped me to see what is so repulsive to me in these ads: the way they depict, and thereby encourage, this infantilization of the country. Through most of this century most of us Americans were treated as—or were encouraged to behave like—grownups, proper adults. But now we have turned, or are being turned, into a tribe of incorrigible brats.

Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one. But I can’t say that to Sam. Gauche to bring up politics.

Onscreen, a batch of housewives orgiastically fondle rolls of toilet tissue, then are instructed by a shopkeeper to “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.”

Sam comes back to check on me.

“Sam,” I say. “I would like you to answer for me just one small question.”

“Sure thing, Lily,” he says. “Fire away.”

“Why has this establishment installed a television set?”

“Not a fan of it?” Sam says.

“Honestly not, no.”

“Me neither,” he says. “But I guess the owner just thought it was due. Almost 1985 and time to get with the trend. People come into a bar, they expect to be able to watch the game, see the news.”

“But the Yankees are terrible, and the news is appalling,” I say, and Sam laughs. “I don’t hate TV, just so you know. For example, Columbo is an excellent program. That Peter Falk.”

“I love that guy,” says Sam, chomping an imaginary cigar and raising a hand to his forehead. “One more thing!”

“I also enjoyed him in that Cassavetes movie, that Husbands.”

“Really?” says Sam. “You don’t say. I heard it was depressing.”

“Well, I think that was the intent,” I say. “But, Sam, to return to Columbo and my point, what I mean is that I watch Peter Falk in the privacy of my own living room. I do not go out into public gathering places to ignore other people while I watch him solve mysteries.”

“I hear you,” says Sam. He nods toward the flashing box. “Seems like it’s already making people less likely to talk to each other. Or to me.”

“It hurts your tips,” I say.

“It hurts my feelings,” Sam says.

“I suppose there’s no going back, Sam.”

“Nope,” he says. “Time only goes in that one direction. Or at least that’s how we go in time. You heading to Times Square later to watch the ball drop?”

I decide not to tell Sam that I dislike Times Square. Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.

Rather, I say, still telling the truth, “I have dinner reservations at five, so I ought to be going. May I settle up with you?”

“Of course. Pleasure meeting you.”

I doubt I’ll ever come back here, so I leave a tip that’s thrice the cost of the drink. Gian’s kids will inherit most of my money when I die, but I might as well spread it around as long as I’m still here.

A Negroni is meant to be an apéritif, a little predinner something to whet the palate. This one was delicious but seems only to have filled me up more. It’s a quarter to five, and I have to start walking.

I have enjoyed watching Sam for the same reason I think people enjoy watching sports: seeing someone in full command of what he is expected to do, doing it better than most would, and doing so with joy.