Toward a Theory of the American TV Commercial of, Oh, Say, About 1990

This is the first entry in a new recurring feature in which Believer Commercials Correspondent Ian Dreiblatt travels back in time via YouTube.com to review and examine the cultural phenomenon that was Television Commercials. Commercials featured here will mostly be old, and have, in many cases, already left an indelible mark on America and its culture. Watch this space for a new installment every month. 

Today, I put on a block of TV commercials that aired exactly twenty-five years ago. One of the first things I saw was a short movie singing the existential praises of cheese. The concept of cheese. America was being urged, presumably by an undescribed Cheese Cabal headquartered somewhere off-set, to take up the noble mantle of cheese-eating:

Give it the kick of a bluegrass fest,
Give it a chance to taste its best!
[Pandemonic over-enthusiasm ratchets cheesefully skyward]
Cheese adds life to the old recipes!
Give American food
A new attitude
With Cheese!

This commercial expresses the human desire to be made new in a banal way. But its underlying cheesognomy is wild. For thirty seconds here, America sounds itself out through the resonant medium of Cheese, and, with a certain spooky pep, declares the stuff—and, implicitly, American life—both new and exciting. The fact that there was little new about cheese in 1993 notwithstanding, a number of questions arise: Who are we to understand is speaking in this paean to curds? Is there any rational way of responding to an affect of anthemic Cheese exhilaration? And who constitutes the imagined audience of TV watchers still on the fence about eating Cheese?

(Sidenote: is “bluegrass,” as a genre, indeed cheeselike? “Fest” provides cover for all kinds of cheesetivities. Why a “bluegrass” fest rather than, say, a “city” fest? A “chili” fest? For that matter, “fondue plate” b/w “to taste real great”? The mind reels that bluegrass should receive this honor. But I digress.)

Cheesemania ’93, as I’ve decided to call it, is a classic TV commercial. In a civilization organized primarily around the funneling of capital to corporations, commercials offer a space of transcendent communion with the objects of our dependence and desire. They take place in a realm understood to be ideational without quite being imaginary—existing not in any one person’s mind, but ambiently, on a level of reality we rarely think to question, encoded in the daily order of things as neatly as the peanut butter aisle of a suburban grocery store. (This bare proximity to capitalism’s exposed nerves, combined with a habitual callousness to human dignity, is I believe why, in the recent words of A.S. Hamrah, “TV commercials are the worst thing to see on hallucinogenic drugs.”) These commercials embody and transmit all kinds...