PICTURES, MUSIC, SPEECH AND WRITING 39 copy’ are godsends to advertisers, as teetotallers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protestors are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of| the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the meaning of a poem is to a poem, of the words of a song, (a song, Highly literate people cannot cope with the nonverbal art ofthe pictorial, so they dance impatiently up and down to express a pointless disapproval that renders them futile and gives new power and authority to the ads. The unconscious depth messages of ads are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to notice or discuss nonverbal forms of arrangement and meaning ‘They have not the art to argue with pictures (McLuhan 1964:246) ‘The foresight of these remarks, published ata time when both ads and analyses of them tended to be quite entary, is striking, Advertisers rely more and more upon pictures, while their critics still harp upon the “titeral” meaning of copy. (Even a quick glance through the British Code of Advertising Practice, or the case reports of successful complaints against ads, reveals that a great deal of official criticism in the UK centres ‘upon wording, despite its demonstrably subsidiary role in many cases; the same is true of Federal Trade Commission Reports in the USA.) MeLuhan, publishing at a time when ty advertising was still in its infancy, and ads were far more reliant ‘upon words and literal meanings than now, might have been excused for misjudging the relative power of different modes. Thirty years later, not only have pictures gained ground, but also language, where itis used, Jeans further and further towards the meanings it derives from interaction with pictures. In addition, many ads create powerful and complex messages entirely—or almost entiely— through pictures and music, and, are virtually language-free, In illustration of this, I hall examine one such ad in detail ‘This is “Last stick”, a ty and cinema ad from 1990-1 for the intemationally best-selling chewing gum s thirty-six frames in sixty seconds, but itis not for its skill in compressed story-telling that I wish to analyse ithere. The tale unfolds to the music of ‘All Right Now” by Free, a pounding pop song of 1970 (successfully re-released at the same time as the ad). ‘Though the words of this song also concern a meeting between two strangers, I shall treat this ad, its ‘message and its methods as fundamentally non-verbal, as I believe they are, though I also briefly refer to the ‘mood of the song in the analysis, In order to discuss the significance of the different images used, I shall first need to give an outline ofthe story ‘The ad begins with a broad panoramic shot of a bus—The Westerner — making its way in bright sunlight past high mountains through prairies full of ripe wheat (Figure 16a). The camera shifts to the interior of the bus where a young man and a young woman sit across the aisle from each other, on the inner seats (see Figure 16b). Both ate blond, white, conventionally good-looking, They are clearly attracted to each other, but shy. She elances at him, but ashe looks back she looks aveay. Behind the couple, we glimpse the other passengers: a Hispanic couple (the woman holding a bunch of flowers), another white couple, an older ‘countrycouple’(theman wearing cowboy hat). There are alternating close-upshotsofthe young man, and young woman (Figure 16c). She is reading. a magazine. She looks at the young. man again, He looks, away, out of the window, but seems pleased, The scene shifts hack to the prairie outside: telegraph wire along the road, distant mountains, a heat haze, The next shots are extreme close-ups—just the eyes and nos ofeach main character in tur (see Figures 16d and 162). He glances sideways; she looks back. The scene changes back fo the exterior again: a combine harvester, a man on a horse riding past in the other direction, Back inside, the young woman is fanning herself with her magazine, ‘The young man reaches into the pocket of his shirt, We see a close-up of his hand faking out a packet of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. He takes out a stick of gum and then looks back into the packet, It was the last stick. He hesitates—then offers it to40. THE DISCOURSE OF ADVERTISING q i Figure 16Wrigley’s ebewing gum ad: “Last stick’ thor and she accepts. From the seat infront, a small boy looks round curiously, until the hand of the invisible adult beside him descends firmly on to his head and twists him back towards the front, We retum to the ‘young woman who is reading the Wrigley's wrapping paper. The camera shows her hand in close-up as she ‘breaks the stick in half, and offers one half back to the young man, ‘There are alternating shots—avain very close—of the two main characters looking affectionately towards each other. Ina longer shot ofthe interior of the bus, she shifts her body closer towards him. He does the same. ‘The bus stops outside a building called “The Rosebud’. Outside, there is a van parked and a horse tethered, a cartwheel leaning against the wall, An ‘old—timer’ with a large white beard is sitting on the porch whitting a piece of wood. ‘The young man is leaving the bus. He tums and raises his hands in a gesture of resignation, We see the young woman’s face close up. She looks down sadly. Inside, the youngPICTURES, MUSIC, SPEECH AND WRITING 41 ‘man sits down, while outside the bus pulls away. As the young man sits dejected, the young woman enters behind him. She has got off the bus to be with hi ‘The final shots show his hand with half a stick of Wrigley’s gum, and her hand with the other half, The two halves join and fit perfectly; they merge into one, then transform into a whole, full packet, Words appear om the screen GREAT TO CHEW.’ BETTER TO SHARE, A male voice says: ‘Cool, refteshing Wrigley’ Spearmint Gum, Great to chew. Even better to share.” The hands disappear, and we see the packet on its ow, In thisad, there are four distinct pictorial perspectives. There is the broad sweep of the outside world of nature—sunlight, com, mountains—a benign, fertile, agricultural world at harvest time, in which the traditional (horses) and the new (combine harvesters) are in harmony. Moving in more closely, there is the social worldofthe busand thebusstation, This tooisharmonious, with across—sectionof American society the old man and the little boy, the rural couple, different races, Moving in even more closely, there are shots in which we see the young man and woman, within this social context, forming a relationship, Lastly, closest in ofall, we see their faces from so short a distance that the image is one of complete intimacy. Only {in an embrace would one see someone so close. The most dominant image is the middle perspective: the young man and young woman forming thet relationship in a social context ‘The overriding impression, then, is of a young man and woman meeting in a beautiful landscape, as part of a harmonious and approving society. Itisalso a very American world: the prairie, the old-timer, “The Rosebud! (the same tame as the sled which symbolizes lost childhood in Citizen Kane). It centres upon the ‘monogamous heterosexual relationship of a man and a woman, which in turn centres upon the product— chewing gum, The bus, the social world, moves through the world of nature, A further harmony between the ‘human and natural world is effected by the echo of the colour of the com in the colour of the young ‘woman's hair. Inthe shots of the interior of the bus, the couple are at the middle, moving, but apparently slill, with the agricultural world visible outside the window. Like any couple, they have both a social identity (as they appear to, and with, the other passengers) and a private identity, as they appear to each other (the close-ups), At the very heart of this image is the stick of gum, passed from hand to hand, which, brings them together and forms the bond between them. ‘These concentric levels of detail are best rept 2 lly (Figure 17) Thaye been using the word ‘aisle’ deliberately. The view of the bus is reminiscent of a wedding viewed from the altar: a young man and woman coyly sitting on either side of the aisle, the guests in the pews behind them, (Only the little boy—tike a choirboy—is in front of them.) The woman immediately behind the young woman is holding a bunch of flowers like a bridesmaid, There are other parallels too. The young ‘man reaches in his pocket for the gum as a groom reaches forthe ring. He gives it to her, and i is a symbol of their union, In the final shots, we see an image of joined hands (another symbol of marriage) and also i the only merged shot of the whole sequence—a transformation in which two become one, (The slow and significant placing of the gum in the mouth suggests both oral sex and the communion service.) There is a tension between this image of holy matrimony and the story of a casual pick-up, between a sexual union sanctified by society and one quite outside its institutionalized constraints. The casual nature of the encounter is emphasized by both the words and the period of the song, This clash of the matrimonial and the cextra-marital is an image of fascination to the 1980s and 1990s; i is frequently used, for example, in the stage and video performan