I have to deal with something that I’ve been obsessing about for weeks: my reaction to the D&G advertisement I mentioned in my first post. You may remember that I screamed that these are the kinds of people on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno who can’t find Mexico on a map. The ad produced a feeling of disgust in me so strong that I could barely look at the page, almost as though I’d come across an advertisement with a two-page picture of a bunch of cockroaches. It was a physical reaction. This scene is my version of hell. When I first saw the ad I might have said, “If you want to punish me and you’re trying to come up with something worse than prison, give me a job at a nightclub that looks like this. This is where intellects are beaten to death.”
This very strong emotion wasn’t a flash in the pan; it lasted for months. And closely related to all that emotion were a lot of thoughts about anti-intellectualism and how letting people dress in D&G clothes was probably going to bring about the end of Western civilization. What I have here is a classic example of what Carl Jung called a complex, which is the worst kind of poison to the mind. I’m setting out to understand a new subject, and if I don’t defang whatever monsters get awakened, they will severely damage or even destroy my ability to be rational about fashion. And Lord knows that we don’t need one more irrational fashionista running loose in the world.
Complexes are notoriously difficult to deal with, so I am not under the illusion that I’m going to resolve this in one blog post and move on. Complexes cannot be eradicated. It’s hard enough just making them conscious. And even if I did succeed in making it fully conscious, I sure won’t be spilling it all onto the Web. Even ex-preppies have limits to how much they’ll confess in public. The roots of all complexes form in childhood in those experiences that were so painful that we aren’t able to discuss them except with our most intimate partners in our most vulnerable moments.
I will say that anti-intellectualism in the form of fundamentalist Christianity was the cause of the most painful traumas in my childhood. (Some perspective: if that was the worst trauma, and it was, then I had a pretty good childhood.) I still struggle with hate and fear of anti-intellectuals, often to an irrational degree. I sometimes feel like they want to destroy me, because the most powerful authority figures in my youth all tried to destroy my intellect. But hey, I’m not bitter or nothin’. Christian fundamentalism rests on assumptions so out of touch with reality and contains logical contradictions so profound that even the most casual intellectual analysis exposes it as a bunch of pathetic lies based on hate and fear, so naturally a big focus of fundamentalism is teaching people that they shouldn’t trust their own minds. So 30 years later, just a bunch of harmless young airheads dressed in D&G clothes can make me feel threatened, defensive, and angry. Okay, so maybe I am a little bitter.
For a long time I resisted the whole idea of fashion, and I was content to wear the same ill-fitting, mediocre clothes every day. Other people may have different reasons, but many other people also have complexes that prevent them from dressing more attractively, which is too bad, because I think everybody should dress in ways that provoke the beauty response in themselves and in others. I lost the ability to believe in God (ironically in large part because of fundamentalist Christians — ha, ha, assholes!), and for years I was critical of the idea of belief in anything, but Jungian psychology has helped me realize that human beings have to worship something. We’re just wired that way. Even fanatical atheistic Communists reproduce the whole intellectual structure of Christianity:
- Marx = Jesus
- the Communist Manifesto = the Bible
- the proletariat = the unsaved
- Communists = believers
- the Politburo = the church leadership
- capitalists = those who actively reject the faith
- a communistic society after the disappearance of capitalism that we can never realize in our lifetimes = heaven
- the gulag = hell
Communism wouldn’t have been able to exist before the marriage of Christian theology and Roman religious institutions. The theology was that of a desert, tribal culture, and the institutions were those of a highly centralized and hierarchical culture.
Since I can’t accept evidence for what philosophers call an agent, I have chosen to worship truth, beauty, and love. My interest in fashion is part of my worship.
One evening after my first experience of the D&G advertisement, I came across it again in a state of heightened awareness. I felt the same reaction, but I decided to face it head on and left the magazine open to that spread and forced myself to tolerate my discomfort. After a minute my reaction was very different. I had much less resistance to the scene. I still didn’t like it, but I nevertheless found it very interesting. I was drawn to the young man sitting on the left. His pose is so unnatural, so fake.
I looked around the photo. Almost everybody is posed that way. The ad reminded me of a medieval or Renaissance religious painting. It’s hyper-stylized. Everybody is in a very unnatural pose, as though somebody carefully arranged everyone. Painters used this device as a way of communicating narratives and ideas to a preliterate audience. For the purposes of exploring my complex, it didn’t matter whether someone actually arranged everyone or not. All that was important was that I found some meaning in this ad, even if I was projecting that meaning onto it. I was almost certainly projecting intentions onto the mind of the art director for this ad, but at least it is healthier than projection of hate and fear onto silly young people and acting as though they were destroying civilization.
So here’s what I decided: the young man sitting on the left is holding his hands up to shield himself from something, as though out of fear. But he’s also drawn toward it, so he’s also attracted. He feels ambivalent. Toward what?
He’s looking at the man at the bottom of the scene. The lowest position in the scene is used for what the painter’s audience hates, the way hell is always below us and heaven is always above us. It’s a simple status equation.
The man on the bottom is on drugs. He’s got his shirt off, is lying on the ground, and is making strange hand gestures. He has his eyes closed, further indicating that he is paying no attention to society and is inner-directed. All this signifies that he has transgressed the normal boundaries of society. That could be bad as in the case of a lunatic or criminal, or good as in the case of a shaman or artist. I decided that he’s a benign figure.
So the upper half of the scene is about society, a vivacious party scene, and the lower half is about the inner life, opening one’s psyche up to the unconscious. And the man sitting now becomes very important and interesting, because he forms a link between the upper and lower halves of the painting. He is the only person sitting, neither standing nor lying down. He straddles both worlds. He is between the ego and the unconscious, and he is simultaneously attracted toward and repulsed by the unconscious.
The man on the far left is the only person pointing outside the scene, indicating that he’s rejecting its values and is on his way out. He’s on the left side, the sinister side, which is further reinforced by his looking over his left shoulder. He feels like some kind of Judas figure. I think he’s going to betray everyone by going to Brooks Brothers. It’s interesting that he’s the most conventionally dressed person. However, in order to call him a Judas figure, we need a Christ figure. This scene doesn’t really have that, so we could just call him a scapegoat or martyr, a powerful archetype that has reappeared throughout history in myth, art, and politics. By going to Brooks Brothers, this man is dying to fashion (at least from the airheads’ point of view), expiating their sins of not studying enough geography in high school.
Anyway, my Jungian fashion analysis went on like this for a while, but you get the idea. I’ll probably make more posts containing extremely strange interpretations of fashion advertisements, and Lord knows what dark things I’ll be revealing in my psyche, but I’ll try to make it fun.
In the meantime, I’ll try to not be so judgmental about how airheads dress. Oh, there I go again. Seriously, one thing this whole exercise left me with was much less emotion towards this ad and toward this approach to fashion, and that was the whole point. I know I’ll never dress like this, and I will always think this scene depicts a bunch of airheads who should spend more time reading, but I no longer feel nearly as much emotion about it.
Because I deprived my complex of a little energy, I was able to realize something more rational: that clothing as art, for example, the existence of clothing designed specifically to be worn for a party in southern California in the summer, is okay. Some people like to do that, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
