Susan Landon

The Avengers and the Pop aesthetic of the 1960s

The Avengers is iconic in the pop aesthetic of the 60s. In this essay I will explore how much the Avengers reflected and contribued to that pop aesthetic. In the first part I will consider what the Pop aesthetic of the 1960s actually is, and will move on to look at the influence of The Avengers on that Pop aesthetic. Since The Avengers spans two decades (from the sixties first series to the seventies New Avengers and, technically, also the film made in 1998, which is, frankly, little more than revisionist nostalgia) the stylistic developments that take place over the years mean that not all of what we call The Avengers reflects the pop aesthetics of the 1960s. While this would in itself be an interesting topic for discussion, in this essay I will be focussing on episodes made in the sixties and their specific relationship to Pop aesthetics. Finally, beyond simply reflecting pop culture and pop aesthetics, I will look at how far The Avengers of the sixties actually contributed to the creation of this pop aesthetic. If culture is both for and of its time, then programmes like The Avengers should be viewed as active agents and protagonists in creating the culture of their time and, ultimately, become Pop in their own right.1 The Avengers was the first TV series to hire an Exploitation Manager and have its own fashion line spin-off, creating both a new market (by fetishising the pop aesthetic), and marketing scheme (i.e. the programme itself), in one fell swoop. 2 Thus, in discussing The Avengers interventions in pop we frequently end up faced with the aesthetics of the postmodern. For Pop Artist Richard Hamilton, pop is:
Popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business.3

Chapman, James Is There Honey Still for Tea? The Avengers in Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp.52-99; p.99. 2 Miller, Toby, (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p.47. 3 Richard Hamilton, quoted in James Chapman, The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the High Sixties in Windows on The Sixties, ed. Anthony Aldgate; James Chapman; Arthur Marwick, (I.B. Tauris: London, 2000), pp.37-69; p.59.

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Pop Art involved the breakdown of the barrier between high and low art, but the way in which this was done, and the reasoning behind it, varies. What we now call Pop Art was sparked by the boom in consumerism and advertising in Britain and America during the 1950s, at its peak in the 60s. Richard Hamiltons collage Just What Is It that Makes Todays Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London), is held up as one of the first works of Pop Art and points to the emergence of a relationship between advertising and new consumer lifestyle choices. Here, Hamilton parodies the way advertising manipulates desires: Adverts from magazines fill the living room of a young couple who pose naked among them and the phallic lollipop held by the bodybuilder proclaims pop, which, juxtaposed with his overbuilt body, heavily hints at the strain which advertising exerts on individuals/consumers.4 According to Arthur Marwick, there was no sharp, dialectical divide between a commercialised, mainstream culture and a socialistic, non-profit-making alternative culture during the sixties. 5 Although no sharp, dialectical divide strictly existed in Britain and America in the 1960s, there were nevertheless clear differences in values, and a need to assert political positions. One of Arthur Marwicks examples for the blurring of cultural divides between alternative culture and commercial mainstream is Andy Warhol. Although closely linked to alternative culture, Warhol did not advocate it as socialistic, or non-profit-making. Indeed, Warhols reverence for the capitalist system is evident in his tributes to Campbells soup tins and Brillo boxes, which are themselves consumer objects produced in a similar way to the objects they celebrate. Like Hamiltons work this breaks the barrier between high and low art but it does so by exploiting and celebrating the capitalist system rather than offering any critique or parody of it.
4

This could be read as a visual precursor of what Richard Dyer later articulates in his assessment of images of men. According to Dyer the penis can never live up to the phallus, and images of men in advertising and elsewhere perpetuate this straining quest for the phallus. Dyer, Richard, Dont look now: The Male Pin-Up, printed in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.265-276. 5 Marwick, Arthur, Windows on the Sixties, ed. Anthony Aldgate; James Chapman; Arthur Marwick, (I.B. Tauris: London, 2000), p.xiii.

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Mass produced images are physically worthless: their value lies in the ideology they support and propagate, making them agents. As Walter Benjamin points out in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the original, authentic work of art can be reproduced, but there will still be only one authentic original. 6 A reproduction is only ever a tribute, a reference to the aura of the original. Aside from making money, a function of reproducing works of art is to advertise the uniqueness of the original, which no copy can compensate for. Actual adverts make use of this relationship between the copy and the authentic object (i.e. their product) more openly, and it is this that made them appealing to artists. The Avengers had little to do with Pop art to begin with. As I have acknowledged, The Avengers is not a single text, but a set of texts which span the entire decade of the 1960s.7 At the outset it was intended as a spin-off of a previous series, Police Surgeon, but after the first series with Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry (the dirty old men on the run, in Macnees words), 8 it began to evolve into an independent programme. As with any long-running series, The Avengers underwent a number of reinventions over the years it was aired. My suggestion is that these reinventions take place around the lead characters; each time a new lead is introduced there is an opportunity for a radical change in style born out of this new character. As Toby Miller notes, [Steed] provides a top-and-tail presence to mark equilibrium, but his partner is often the agent of change. 9 These leads are therefore crucial in the development of the series, and from Honor Blackman onwards they are all female. Having women at the locus of stylistic change does something very familiar. It codifies and sells pop aesthetics to women, but also sells them as images to men:

Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; transl. Harry Zorn, (London : Pimlico, 1999), pp.211-244. 7 Chapman, James, The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the High Sixties, p.37. 8 Miller, p.43. 9 Miller, p.71.

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As in America of the 1950s, British women in the 1960s were central to consumption. Much like television itself, women were at the heart of the home and the consumer economy, but female spies on television mark the disparities between women as consumers and consumable images. 10

Rosie White exposes a key problem with the Pop aesthetic: its use of, and dialogue with, women. Womens position in society was beginning to open up to new possibilities, and becoming more ambiguous in the process. One of the once-popular arguments made for The Avengers was to champion it as a feminist text, but most scholars would agree it is not as straightforward as this. In interviews Diana Rigg herself seems unsure of her status as feminist icon (this is not surprising given the number of scenarios in which she is the one trapped, tied up, or used as bait). 11 Even in episodes where she requires little or no help from Steed it seems that Emma Peel is objectified or cut up in some way in order to right the power balance. In The House That Jack Built she is trapped in a moving house created in her honour by an obsessed employee effecting posthumous revenge for being fired by her some years before.12 The sequence where Emma Peel is walking around an exhibition of her own life is particularly interesting, especially in that it culminates with her actually cutting through a poster of her own image and discovering the main control room of the house (fig. 1). We see a similar theme in The Joker, another scenario in which Emma Peel is invited to a large country house in the middle of nowhere and trapped. Again the villain is an old nemesis who we learn she has previously slighted, and who has subsequently developed an unhealthy obsession with her. In this case it is he and not her who cuts up her image (fig. 2). In both episodes, Emma Peel is the character with most of the screen time. Although Steed comes to her aid in The Joker, in The House that Jack Built she manages to defeat the house by herself, quipping at Steeds belated attempt at being the knight in
10

White, Rosie, Violent Femmes, (London: Routledge, 2007), p.62. Rigg has said, I never think of myself as sexy. I identify with the new woman in our society who is evolving. Emma is totally equal to steed. On the other hand she has claimed that Emma Peel isnt fully emancipated. Quoted in Miller, p.73. 12 James Chapman incorrectly states that it is Emma Peels father who fires professor Keller. Upon inheriting the business from her father, however, it is Emma Peel who fires Keller because she does not believe in his ambition to replace man with machine. Kellers revenge is thus deeply personal, a result of his obsession with her and the power she has held over him both mentally and economically. Chapman, The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the High Sixties, p.53.
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shining armour. The subtext of these episodes seems to deal with womens struggle to escape from the illusions and confines of the domestic sphere. A similar theme occurs in the episode Epic in which yet again Emma Peel is the subject of the villains scopophilia, trapped in a metanarrative (The Destruction of Mrs Emma Peel) taking place within a movie studio within which she is also trapped. This time, Steed rescues her, however. In posing Emma Peel as the subject of the film, and again harking back to Hollywood B-movie production and German expressionist cinema, Epic proliferates numerous references to and pastiches on the production of moving images (fig. 3).

Sherrie Ann Innes notes the importance of television in the progression of women in visual culture, particularly the serial, since producers are willing to take more risks with female gender roles than [they are with] mainstream films due to the reduced costs of TV serials. 13 The concept of the action heroine as a kind of dominatrix is an aspect that crops up in pop culture more than anywhere else, and is suggested frequently in many of the Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) episodes, and heavily hinted at in A Touch of Brimstone with Diana Rigg. However, in this particular case the concept emerges somewhat confused, undercut as it is with objectification and victimization: It is Peter Wyngarde, not Diana Rigg, who holds the whip (fig. 4). As Frederick Jameson notes:
S&M thus becomes the latest and last in a long line of those taboo forms of content which, beginning with Nabokovs nymphets in the 1950s, rise one after the other to the surface of public art in that successive and even progressive widening of transgressions which we once called the counterculture, or the sixties. 14

Subcultures are thus manipulated: what was once counterculture is claimed, assimilated, by the mainstream. Questions as to why powerful women do not occur in mainstream culture and how empowering they really are for women still need more answers. 15 Griselda Pollock makes an interesting point regarding the use of women in mainstream culture:

13

Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie Ann Innes, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p10. 14 Jameson, Frederick, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1991), pp.295-6. 15 This is discussed in Action Chicks, edited by Sherrie Ann Innes.

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I would contend that what recuperates a bottle of sherry or a car in advertisements from being read as still life, with its traditional associations, and indicates their status as purchasable commodities, is the presence of woman by virtue of what the woman introduces into an image.16

It is fair to say that in The Avengers, Emma Peel is the one perpetuating the pop aesthetic. However, what does she introduce to the images we see in The Avengers? Griselda Pollock is referring to static adverts, yet what we are presented with in The Avengers are characters with whom we connect, every episode; active participants in the narrative. While in some respects Emma Peel is a walking pin-up and advert for a young lifestyle of champagne-sipping and fashion addictions, she is not your average poster girl: she has the cutting voice and dry wit of a sceptic with varied intellectual interests. Emma Peel is well spoken and well educated, but to what extent is she thoroughly emancipated, as she refers to herself in the episode Escape in Time? If she is thoroughly emancipated it is a privilege of her class, indicated by the car she drives, the apartment she lives in, the books she owns, the clothes she wears, and so on. This is neither pop nor emancipation. As I have suggested, pop is not something available only for a minority who have the taste to appreciate it: nor is emancipation. To quote Pollock again:
It is a common misconception to see images merely as a reflection, good or bad, and compare bad images of women (glossy magazine photographs, fashion advertisements etc.) with good images of women (realist photographs, of women working, housewives, older women, etc.).17

Pollock argues that instead of this we need to acknowledge woman as a signifier in an ideological discourse, which means that in order to discuss meaning we must first explore how meaning is attached to different images.18 If, then (instead of considering how the series reflects pop), we view it as a signifier in an ideological discourse, we might arrive at something closer to the truth.

16

Pollock, Griselda, Whats Wrong With Images of Women? in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Routedge, 1992), pp.135-145; p.139. 17 Ibid, p.136. Pollock extends this argument with Rosziker Parker in their collaborative book Old Mistresses, ed. Griselda Pollock; Roszika Parker, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). 18 Pollock, p.136.

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Several changes take place with the introduction of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. The series begins to be recorded on colour film for export to the USA. This creates two major factors in the development of the aesthetic style of The Avengers: the introduction of colour, and a new target audience. Chapman argues that Diana Riggs look changed from the black leather championed by Honor Blackman in the earlier series because it did not photograph in colour as well as the brightly coloured cat-suits and mini-skirts.19 Toby Miller, on the other hand, suggests that rather than being prompted by a technical issue this decision was made from the outset, intended to woo American audiences:
From the moment The Avengers was scheduled in the USA, fashion was paramount. The British producers wanted to maintain a contrast with Steed, but move away from leather in order to soften the image. 20

There are some problems with Millers suggestion, however. If, as Miller suggests, the producers were trying to soften the image, why was the infamous episode A Touch of Brimstone (which was banned in the USA) filmed at all? I find it more likely that a combination of trial and error mixed with audience awareness was at work here. Rather than softening its image, I would argue that Brian Clemens and the production team of The Avengers were engaging the series with the cultural trends (and audience) of the time. The introduction of colour was a particularly opportune moment to experiment with the aesthetics and visual style of the programme. A large part of this was centred in the clothing.

As Miller notes, upon its export to the USA The Avengers began to court the fashion industry: three months before miniskirts hit the boutiques of Britain one was purchased from Courrges for Mrs Peel, and when this was protested against by American networks the Emmapeeler was born. Miller notes that: The Peel outfit is said to have been the first publicly available clothing collection designed for TV,21 making The Avengers at the forefront of British TV fashion in the 1960s. The
19 20

Chapman, The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the High Sixties, p.54. Miller, p.47. 21 Miller, p.47.

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most important thing to note about this is that advertising is not just achieved by the presence of woman; it is actually mapped onto the female body.

The episode Twos Company, explores this relationship with fashion directly, casting Patrick Macnee as Steeds doppelganger in the form of a male model. The scene in which a fashion show is staged parodies the role that Steed himself plays in the shows relationship with fashion, but it also demonstrates the relstionship of women in this arrangement and provides a useful case study of what women introduce into the image (fig. 5).

Macnee and Blackmans Kinky Boots song is another example of The Avengers inter-textual interventions in pop and a commentary on advertising (fashion magazines say wear em/ And you rush to obey like the women in the harem). For miller this is clearly a call to arms against the commodity fetish. However, being a commodity fetish in itself, the song actually functions as an ironic celebration of this.22

Lets return again to our working definition of Pop according to Richard Hamilton. Words such as transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, and gimmicky can be applied to most serialised ephemera preceding The Avengers (for example, Louis Feiullades Fantomas novels, lowbudget B-movies, comic books, and magazines). The Avengers mines the history of British and American pop culture, resulting in parodies of Pop tropes or references, which usually prize pastiche and parody over narratives that make any sense.

The Winged Avenger is a case in point, creating a metanarrative from a fictional comic book character. Steed discovers a body with a torn storyboard panel resting over it and begins to read the storyboard, at which point the actions occur on the same time scale. The villain and author of the
22

Miller, p.61.

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fictional Winged Avenger, Julian Packer, hijacks the narrative of The Avengers. At one point this is overtly hinted at, with the villain describing himself as omnipotent, suggesting that he has slipped out of the basic rules of narrative that do generally govern The Avengers. Steed and Stanton, looking at the storyboard on the way to rescue Emma Peel, appear to accept this as plausible, with little discussion:
Steed: Howre we doing? Stanton: Not too good. [He holds up fig. 6.]

The way the sequence of shots is linked directly relates to this content. Fading from the illustrations viewed by Steed and Stanton into the real sequences with Diana Rigg, and vice versa, does several things. It once again presents Emma Peel as a character trapped within a narrative, and it links the time frame of the narrative and the time frame of the show, blurring the lines of reality within the show. Another interesting point is how yet again a subculture is used to make a point. In this case, we have an example of one superheros battle against capitalism and consumerism. This superhero is presented to us in a ridiculous form, which is further enhanced when his crazed creator brings him to life, and as such it undermines and assimilates the message of the existing cultural artefact which it is referencing (i.e. Fantomas).

James Chapman argues in his essay The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the High Sixties, that The Avengers is the first postmodern television series, and draws on postmodernism as an aesthetic style.23 The way in which pop aesthetics are treated could be said to be postmodern, if we take Lyotards definition of postmodernism as the obsolesence of the metanarrative of legitimation.24 But in mining historical and contemporary pop references, episodes of The Avengers achieve results similar to the nostalgia films discussed by Jameson, which:

23 24

Chapman, The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the High Sixties, p.58. Lyotard, Jean-Franois, The Postmodern Condition exerpt in Literary Theory:An Anthology, ed. julie rivkin; Michael ryan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), pp. 509-513; p.509.

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Show a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past.25

What Jameson suggests is that:

The general combinatoire thus seems to have broken down at the moment it confronted serious historicity, and the rather different self-concept of postmodernism has taken its place. 26

To conclude, then, this postmodernism in The Avengers can be seen in everything from the attention to fashion and trend-setting (as exemplified in items of clothing such as the Emmapeeler and the miniskirt), to its mining of pop history. While The Avengers does undoubtedly create its own Pop aesthetic, it does so by co-opting and assimilating already existing bits of popular culture and/or subculture into a consumerist ideology. The series evokes a sense of nostalgia; be that nostalgia for a time gone by, or nostalgia for a time which looked like it might happen, but never did. In detatching itself from references through parody and/or fetishisation, The Avengers only poses itself in relation to other times, as a negation. Yet there is also a very real and immediate present which manifests itself in the form of technology and aesthetics. The development of new materials (e.g. plastics and new synthetic fibres), and technological advances all feature as an important part of The Avengers. In celebrating contemporary technological advances while parodying nostalgic references, The Avengers situates itself very explicitly as of and for its own time, and makes a postmodern Pop icon of itself.

So, what kind of postmodern Pop icon does the avengers become? It is apparent that this is not the counter-culture Pop of Richard Hamilton, but the commercial free market Pop of Andy Warhol. For all its so-called feminist messages, emancipation is directly linked with consumerism, and the two lead characters always belong to the establishment, underpinning conservative values and commercial interests. In the episodes I have discussed and a majority of others also, Mrs Peel and Steed are almost always seeking to protect businessmen and the upper classes, either from
25 26

Jameson, p.296. Ibid.

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destruction or infiltration. Given these aspects, The Avengers exmplifies some of the values that series such as The Prisoner go some way in subverting. The ideology is aligned with commercialism, and the aesthetics are part of this commercial drive. While The Avengers presents an image of pop aesthetics, the only way this was available to the masses was via a TV screen, which for many people meant it was not available at all. And even with access to TV, the pop aesthetics, the fashion, the brand names, suggestions of British ingenuity, are all tied to consumerism and necessitate disposable incomes substantial enough to support it. As Richard Hamilton suggests, there is the opportunity to critique this consumerism not in judging or ridiculing the reactions of individuals (as is suggested in the Kinky Boots song), but in the way that we construct culture itself, in the power culture has over people, and in the power we have to change or create culture. To this end, while The Avengers champions Pop aesthetics, it fails popular culture.

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Bibliography
Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie Ann Innes, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p10. Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; transl. Harry Zorn, (London : Pimlico, 1999), pp.211-244. Chapman, James Is There Honey Still for Tea? The Avengers in Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp.52-99. Dyer, Richard, Dont look now: The Male Pin-Up, printed in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 265-276. Jameson, Frederick, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1991), pp.295-6. Lyotard, Jean-Franois, The Postmodern Condition exerpt in Literary Theory:An Anthology, ed. julie rivkin; Michael ryan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), pp. 509-513 Miller, Toby, The Avengers, (London: British Film Institute, 1997). Old Mistresses, ed. Griselda Pollock; Roszika Parker, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Pollock, Griselda, Whats Wrong With Images of Women? in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Routedge, 1992), pp.135-145. White, Rosie, Violent Femmes, (London: Routledge, 2007). Windows on The Sixties, ed. Anthony Aldgate; James Chapman; Arthur Marwick, (I.B. Tauris: London, 2000).

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