The odious implications of modern advertising were explored in Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self (‘02), a landmark doc with laser-like insights into a few bizarre corners of the human psyche.
This reminds me of a certain legendary ad copy line for Clairol hair coloring…a line that came from the contours and tendencies of the culture of the mid to late ‘50s but finally broke through in the first year of the Kennedy administration.
Tom Wolfe nailed it in his legendary 1976 essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”
In 1961 a copywriter in the employ of Foote, Cone & Belding named Shirley Polykoff came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”
The basic attitude of having “only one life,” said Wolfe, contradicted a general belief among families and nations that had existed for centuries, which you could sum up as a belief in “serial immortality.”
Boiled down, serial immortality means that we’re all part of a familial stream — our lives being a completion or fulfillment of our parents’ lives and our children’s lives completing and fulflling our own, and everyone understanding that we’re part of the same genetic river of existence and spirit.
Polykoff’s copy line basically said “the hell with that — it’s just me, it’s just my life and my goals, and I’m going to satisfy myself!”
By the time the early ’70s rolled around the culture had begun to believe in the “me first” philosophy en masse.
And then, exactly ten years after Polykoff’s brainwave, came Erhard Seminars Training (EST).
And then, in ‘77, along came Michael Ritchie‘s Semi Tough, a satire of the human potential movement and, really, the whole damn ‘70s decade.
That completely aside, the 1970s were arguably the greatest nookie decade in the history of Western civilization, and they’ll never, ever return. That was then, this is now.
