Experiments are now in progress to "syncroscent" films. As the film unreels an operator presses the right buttons, spraying the audience with smells of sea-spray, new-mown hay, petrol fumes, and so on. More exotic scents will be cheaply synthesized, and Hollywood will try to associate various perfumes with its film stars. Thus the grim predictions of Huxley's Brave New World take shape as Monroe undulates into focus through a cloud of Chanel No. 5. We have the movies and the smellies. Aldous Huxley's feelies must be just around the corner, and if Hollywood is going to be really up-to-date and logical it will start installing its electromechanical equipment any time now.

Freud and you

Meanwhile the psychiatrist has entered the advertising field and up and down Madison Avenue the hucksters are earnestly consulting resident sages of the unconscious. These highly paid hacks of the conference room are working (quite correctly) on the theory that a consumer's brain is a hindrance to effective advertising. In return for their salaries they perfect schemes to by-pass rational processes and assist their sponsors' sales by manipulating the public's unconscious wish-fulfillment drives and other hidden mental quirks. For example, in one campaign a brassiere firm instructed its artists along lines suggested by the psychiatrists. They prepared media which played on the submerged exhibitionistic tendencies present in most young Women. "I Dreamed I Stopped Traffic in my Maidenform Bra" ran the ads with illustrations of slim maidens sleepwalking in the firm's product before a multitude of admiring men in Times Square. This advertisement paid off in millions of brassiere sales.

For the greeting card industry the analysts turned up the fact that the fastest selling cards were those that had designs incorporating the classic Freudian symbols. A lot more candles have been put on the Christmas cards since then. Freudian theory is no novelty to the hucksters but the attempt to condition consumers by playing on sexual energies has got beyond the beach-girl-selling-tractor stage. More and more sexual stimuli of a kind varying from the commonplace to the pathological is being employed.

Sublime or . . .

A new enterprise called the Subliminal Projection Company has patented a technique for exposing T.V. audiences to invisible commercials. The advertising matter is flashed on the screen for a fraction of a second at an intensity of light lower than the propaganda being shown, with the result that the additional propaganda is absorbed without the conscious knowledge of the viewer. Vance Packard, author of "The Hidden Persuaders", suggests the method of flashing "sexual" or "emotional" symbols, in the middle of regular T.V. commercials. "You might flash a picture of a couple making love, or a mother breast-feeding her baby right in the middle of an automobile or cigarette commercial," he explained. "It wouldn't be 'visible' and the emotional impact would be unconsciously very powerful." The sexual symbolism of the automobile is almost unconsciously established in American life. The association of cigarette smoking with breastfeeding may or may not be tenuous. But to judge from what we already know, breast-feeding images should help the sales of anything in the U.S.A.

It seems a good case could be made out for saying that American males exhibit strong tendencies to infantile regression. Freudians make much of their milk drinking, cigar munching, gum chewing, etc., and European anthropologists are always commenting on their apparent confusion between sex and food. ("Cookie", "Honey", "Sugar", "Sweetie - Pie", "Sugar - Candy") Hollywood and the balloon-bust, the obsession with breasts, the whole massive Colossus of Momism—these things have gradually convinced the world that American women wean their infants too early or too late.

The Ridiculous

Advertisers knowingly exploit these trends. On the semi-pathological level there is the case of the nauseating Liberace. His T.V. sponsors utilise all the trappings of Oedipus symbolism in selling to women past the child-bearing age (where most of his following is concentrated).

The "psychiatrists" who trollop their clinical knowledge to the hucksters are not alone in this whole disgraceful trend; a great body of other professional men is equally guilty. More and more social scientists are doing the same, and there is nothing seedy about these men's qualifications. Included among them are men best in their fields. Some of Harvard's and Chicago's leading social anthropologists, sociologists, and research psychologists are listed in "A Directory of Social Scientists Interested in Motivational Research". It contains names and facts about 150 available "social scientists" mainly on college campuses. Price 25 dollars. As this trend gains momentum, pure research will disappear and in America these faculties will become mere appendages of Madison Avenue.

Society a Bas

At one time the psychiatrist and the social scientist studied irrational elements in human behaviour with a view to learning more about the condition of man. They hoped to increase the scope and texture of knowledge, and perhaps they hoped to find ways to cause irrationality to be less prevalent, or less dangerous. Now these scientists will hire themselves to men who manipulate irrationality for profit, who wish to increase the extent of it as it is useful to commerce. This is no passing craze. Since 1950 "the depth boys" have been building Motivational Research into a nationwide concern—an integral part of the huge advertising industry.

How will New Zealand be affected by these new currents of American social dynamics?

Will New Zealanders lovingly accept the smellies?

Five years from now will the National Film Unit and the Dominion Laboratory combine to spray cinemas with appropriate smells of sheep-dip, ensilage and superphosphate?

When T.V. comes will the "hidden flash" technique be used to indoctrinate New Zealanders?

Images

Technically at any rate, what could be done for cigarettes and automobiles could also be done for politicians. In America the subliminal technicians will be cunningly identifying Dulles with Abe Lincoln, Eisenhower with Jefferson, and Faubus with Franklin Roosevelt. How rapidly will our own politicians respond to this new weapon? Speaking as a New Zealander who has devoted some thought to our national character I recommend the following images for New Zealand politicians. When television comes, no election candidate could fail if he subliminally projected these images immediately following a close-up of his face looking sincerely at the electorate. They would be useful both "asso-ciationally" and "subliminally."

We Recommend

A sun-tanned shearer, knee-deep in sheep, abusing the foreman or punching the boss's nose . . .

A cheerful, hirsute, grinning New Zealander, prancing on the duckboards, and flicking his mates with a wet towel as they queue for the shower after the football match . . .

A tall, open-shirted Kiwi, sharing a bawdy joke with the boys around the keg at the R.S.A. Hall.

A laconic lantern-jawed Hillary grinning, democratically behind the dog team . . .

A pipe-smoking boxing parson piggy-backing the children on the lawn of a State House . . .