PROJECT: Creative Content on vittromero.com

There are Dreams Bigger Than Our Minds

You’re fired, you’re the survivor, you won the amazing race, fear is not a factor with you! Suddenly the television is talking to us directly. With the creation of all these reality TV shows and the redefinition of what it means to be a celebrity, it seems that the world has its eye on the most everyday things. Having been failed by many institutions full of lofty ideals and noble precepts, we have began to piece together what it means to be human by piecing together fragments, litter from everyday. An archive of commercials, a collection of used wrappers or tetra-paks would not be considered fare for a museum, but it is immense fodder for the new student of culture.

Sometimes history talks in a more universal language when it talks about what detergent was used, or what shampoo was hot off the shelves for there are no true casualties, merely the circulation of money in a world. What used to be considered mundane has been noted to contain what just may be the secrets to the universe, or at the very least a comprehensive record of how we do and shall continue to conduct our daily lives, from the time we wake up to the time that we doze off under the covers.

Reality has become the new fantasy, since we’ve realized that sometimes truth is more bizarre than fiction. Yet it is not excitement we seek, but the cloying reassurance that we have something to hold. And strangely enough, it is through the choices made everyday that some semblance of structure can be found. The supermarket has become a new church in this world of consumerism, and we are all paying our respects.

The preceding statements present an insidious side to this preoccupation of what is not canon, or noble or worthy of careful study. What we buy may give us a definition of who we are, but it is merely a description of a shell. Yet let us scratch the surface as we surf the internet to find a multitude of ways of looking at the world. What is now considered traditional dress, food, work used to be everyday, maybe in a few hundred years, the television will be a bastion of nostalgia.

The manner with which we see ourselves is reflected on the television screen, like the movies we have in our sleep. Sometimes we do not remember what they are, yet they are in our waking lives, giving us a sense that the bar of soap we grab off the self is the right one. These advertisements give us standards with which we measure ourselves and all that we require to exist.

Thus, the advertiser is a powerful man. He is that influential best friend who whispers in your ear when you are faced with the myriad of faces and images on the supermarket shelf. He is the scary man on the street bearing various wares in his worn trench coat, the Vanna White who flourishes her white and lithe limbs to direct our eyes and the starched curator in a tasteful Savile Row suit employing his knowledge to help us create our sense of what is beautiful, useful and of any value. His is the power to direct choice.

This fact levels the playing field when it comes to creating vehicles of influence. An everyday object must be given an identity, a subtext, a story of its own thus opening a whole world of possibility. The myriad of variations one can take with a family soap or a two-in-one shampoo are endless like the bubbles and suds one creates when using them. Each bubble, once light hits it reflects the whole rainbow, but in each commercial, the camera creates a whole rainbow of experience. What is everyday and mundane becomes a cinematic masterpiece; a routine becomes a breathtaking choreography of events. And you end up wishing that your life was that dramatic and colorful.

Interestingly enough, the advertiser is not really selling products, commodities, or items. He is actually selling lives, personalities, dreams. That is why he is most powerful when he uses the world of the visual for he is speaking directly to the unconscious, the seat of identity resides in this amorphous realm. The people behind the commercial, behind the print ad, behind the billboard have found a door into our minds and have left it ajar. The temptation to follow and discover who we are is exactly why people love commercials.

It may feel invasive, but in truth, they are in no way different from the artist whose works make you respond physically with a tear, a sigh or the desire to watch and look and therefore must be treated with a critical eye. We don’t let just anyone into the homes we make for ourselves in our mind. The commercial must speak to us in the dialect that we learned even before we could read, the story is the first way the world is explained to us and there is nothing like the depths of what a narrative may reach. Commercials, these films distilled into thirty seconds of real time are veritable epics that discuss, in endless years of fantastic time, instincts — hunger, vanity, the need for security.