Bless the Commercials

"A man's mind, stretched by a new idea; can never go back to its original dimension."

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in the luncheon program of the American TV Commercials Festival.

At first thought, and at second thought too, a festival of TV commercials is as appealing as a festival of anthrax germs. Yet last week a ballroom full of people gathered for such a rite at Manhattan's Hotel Roosevelt and sat voluntarily through 100 commercials in a row. They shouted "great" and "terrific" because a pitch for Ban deodorant used a documentary technique and private-eye oboes to amplify uneasiness about "being close." They rhapsodized in terms that John Ruskin might have used to describe Venice at the sight of margarine oozing down a stack of pancakes in a Blue Bonnet ad. And when Mike Nichols and Elaine May did their spiel for a Jax beer cartoon, involving a surrealistic flirtation between a female waitress and a male kangaroo ("How do I know you're not a kangaroo dressed up in a girl suit?"), voices in the audience had a cathedral hush: "This is real entertainment."

Nearly everyone present was in the ad business, but the enthusiasm was not entirely faked. What was remarkable about the parade of commercials was that they had been made with so much more imagination, humor, photographic skill and musical talent than the programs they were designed to interrupt. The cinematography in a Prell shampoo blurb was visual poetry as it showed, with crystalline acuity, each gob of goo sinking into each coil of hair. There was the pathos of Willy Loman in a Metrecal pitch called the Lonely Man (commercials have titles these days), which showed a forlorn, overweight figure trudging through Central Park on a cheerless winter day while a narrator spoke of blubber in tones of quiet reasonableness.

Perhaps surprisingly, a number of commercials did not prejudice the viewer irrevocably against their product. Martini & Rossi's ad was clever: a vermouth crate is shown aboard a heavily rolling ship. An arm comes out of the crate (one speculates vainly on why its owner is inside) and grabs for an M & R bottle that is sliding toward an open porthole. The viewer thinks the bottle will fall over board. It does, in some commercials; but sometimes the ad is shown with a happy ending. A cartoon for Puss 'n Boots cat food shows a little man eating a can of Puss 'n Boots. A voice asks why he, a man, is doing this. Instead of replying that the cat food is so good that he prefers it to filet mignon, or something equally trite, the little man peels off his face. "I'm not a man," he says. "I'm a cat dressed up for a masquerade ball." The viewer is left to brood that although this tiny bit of cartooned lonesco may not be the funniest thing ever written, it is, pound for pound, a great deal better than Gunsmoke.

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