Selling Spontaneity

Pastoral Dreamer, David Phelps

Improvisers use the gesture of careless, rough-hewn spontaneity to persuade us to loosen up and embrace more of life. They invite us to trust what comes. Relax, they say, if I can do this without thinking and have all this fun, why constrict your life with all that rule-bound rationality and judgment? Life is a cornucopia ever replenishing itself. There are no wrong moves except the decision not to act on impulse. There are no wrong notes except the ones you don’t play. For Miles Davis, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” Using the rule of agreement — Yes, and …, call and response — improvisers always find a way forward.

Advertising Wars

Trickster Hermes, the disruptive voice of improv, is Lord of the Marketplace, patron of both merchants and thieves. Little surprise then that Madison Avenue executives in their Armani suits are masters of selling product by means of apparent spontaneity. The agent of the consumer society, Madison Avenue is in the business of making us believe that, indeed, life is an ever-filling cornucopia.

You may associate spontaneity with jazz or comic improv. But the direct, all-embracing experience that spontaneity promises has been deployed to sell blue jeans, one of America’s gifts to popular culture.

Jeans were born as long-wearing workpants. J. W. Davis, inventor of the five-pocket, riveted blue jeans, sold them at his dry goods store in Reno, Nevada. They were meant for the mining community (note the pickax in the patent application). Unable to afford the patent office fee, Davis approached Levi Strauss, his denim cloth wholesaler in San Francisco. In return for half interest, Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant born in Bavaria, funded the patent. Improved by human artifice — rivets — the original jeans were anything but natural.

Hollywood’s James Dean and Marlon Brando, and eventually the ’60s countercultural movement, turned Levi’s workpants into a fashion statement that accented its unstuffy naturalness, a far cry from the businessman’s worsted wool. Blue jeans were the perfect expression of America’s openness to the frontier experience.

Then along came designer jeans. European designers saw they could emphasize not durability but high design, disruptively turning the jeans world on its head, dragging it from the frontier to the metropole.

In 1980, America responded to Girbaud’s call to take back the marketing mantle. A 15-year-old Brooke Shields, shot by high-fashion photographer Richard Avedon to promote Calvin Klein’s new line of super-tight jeans, was meant to make a stir, or to stir the blood. The tag line? “What comes between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.” The scandal chased the ad off ABC and CBS. Klein did not back down. “Jeans are sex,” he remarked. “The tighter they are, the better they sell.” Naked beneath her jeans, Brooke Shields is as au naturelle as we dare imagine. What Calvin Klein was selling was direct, unmediated — raw — experience.

Calvin Klein’s sales boomed sevenfold in one year. Rather than hurt the company, Calvin Klein himself told Shields in an interview that her ad put the company on the map (Today, October 29, 2021).

Levi’s yes, and … came in 1984 with the launch of their 501 Jeans. One direct, raw experience leapfrogged another. Levi’s new marketing emphasized their retro button fly, and, where designer jeans emphasized tight fit, 501s promised “shrink-to-fit”—meant to appeal to American individualism. But the main theme of the ad campaigns was carefreeness. Levi’s countered Avedon’s studio slickness with washed out, underexposed, now-familiar shaky-camera shots pairing blues and roots music with scenes of young people enjoying life. The award-winning ads — saturated in naturalness — helped launch the careers of several actors, including Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, and Jason Alexander.

The Levi Strauss site recalls how the TV spots were recorded. Shooting in New York’s Meatpacking District, hardly the glam spot it is today, director Leslie Dektor told the actors to take a break while they reloaded the camera. Meanwhile a long lens from across the street caught the young actors just hanging out and having fun. If Keats “hate[d] poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket,” these regular guys literally don’t have their hands in their pockets. They weren’t trying to sell you something. That was Madison Avenue’s job.

Free and Easy Huck Finn

Improvisation’s playful spontaneity trope seems just to be selling fun and games. But in advertising it is a sales tool.

Spontaneity has also been used to powerful, humane effect — in novels, for example. The great improvisers, like Mark Twain, deploy the rhetoric of spontaneity to explore the tensions and contradictions in our longing for “the natural” and the authentic.

The famous notice to his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn jokes tongue-in-cheek that “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot will be shot.” The joke nostalgically invokes the pastoral world of Huck’s journey where like Arcadian shepherds, Huck and his sidekick Jim loll about without purpose because none is needed. The river and the great American continent it drains will provide.

Such rhetoric initiates us into Huck’s world where he and Jim drift “free and easy” down the Mississippi. Huck’s ready improvisations along the way get him out of trouble again and again. Like Trump, Huck boasts he goes “a good deal on instinct.”

But the great improvisers like Mark Twain know that careless spontaneity is as much problem as solution. Drifting past the Ohio River and freedom for Jim lands Huck and the enslaved father figure deeper and deeper in slave territory.

Tom Sawyer’s reappearance at the end of the novel illuminates the dark side of improvisation. “Free and easy” offers little guidance, little ground upon which to take a reasoned moral stand. Huck goes along with Tom’s romance-driven improvisations and Jim is made to suffer in the name of “Walter Scott with his enchantments” which, Twain writes, sets “the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society” (Life on the Mississippi).

Within the novel we learn from Huck that the steamboat Walter Scott has sunk — Twain’s little act of revenge against the arch-romantic British novelist who did so much, in Twain’s view, to inspire the chivalry-fueled brutality of the Civil War. Things get so dark at the novel’s end that many readers feel Twain lost control of his narrative. But Twain couldn’t have been clearer about his feelings for “jejune romanticism.” Going “a good deal on instinct” is not always a good moral guide. Jim suffers at the direction of Tom Sawyer’s chivalric improvisations while Huck passively looks on.

Now it’s the algorithm that coopts our agency — as Tom’s romantic improvising did Huck — pointing us toward clicking on those blue jeans you really don’t need. Published 1884, Huck Finn looked back on a simpler time, the 1830s or 1840s, before advertising began to give birth to our consumer society . It looked back on a time when a boy could raft down the Mississippi with less danger of being run down by steamboats carrying raw materials from, and dry goods to, the raw frontier.

In 1866 in The New York Times, master huckster and future circus magnate P.T. Barnum advertised Barnum's American Museum. Mass marketed from 1876 on, Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, a remedy for “female complaints,” became one of the best-known patent medicines of the 19th century. Beginning in the 1880s, Levi Strauss began to create advertising designed to make sure consumers remembered that Levi Strauss & Co. created the first, and best, men’s riveted trousers. Beginning in 1876, John Wanamaker used advertising to turn his Philadelphia men's clothing store into the largest department store of its kind. By 1907 Claude Hopkins at the age of 41 was so successful shilling Bissell Carpet Sweepers, Swift & Company meats, and Dr. Shoop's patent medicine, that Lord & Thomas Advertising hired him at a salary of $185,000 a year (equivalent to $6,049,500 in 2023).

The Consumer Age was thriving, only to collapse in 1929.

No Wrong Notes

Depending on the note you play afterwards, improvisations can convey empty romanticism or robust vitalism, can be healthy or pathological, democratic (little D) or demagogic (big R).

They can be right or wrong. Once you’ve opened the doors to the inspiration of external or instinctual forces, dampening reason’s ability to judge, you never know who will take the helm, whether the force steering you will be divine or demonic, an effort to make America great again through white sovereignty’s sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. If the great improvisers in history explore the tensions and contradictions in spontaneity, Trump improvises to manipulate his base.

Fueled by the onerous Treaty of Versailles and the collapse of 1929, Hitler is the most monstrous example of improvisation’s dark side. In analytic psychologist Carl Jung’s eyewitness report, Hitler “listens intently to a stream of suggestions from a whispered source and then acts upon them.” How do you judge once you’ve dismissed judgment?

“Beware, beware,” says Samuel Taylor Coleridge of the bard, shifting gears after celebrating inspiration in his great poem “Kubla Khan: Or, a vision in a dream”:

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Inspiration and the spontaneity it charges are fine things, till you consider its whispered source. Trump doesn’t pause to consider the dangers his improvising inspires. He courts those dangers.

Not all improvisers consider improv’s dark side. Some move ahead full tilt.

Look at Trump’s nominees for leadership positions overseeing our nation’s health, justice, defense, and intelligence. Kennedy, Gaetz — and now January 6 adherent Pam Bondi — Musk, Ramaswamy, Hegseth, and Gabbard not only share Trump’s extreme views but promise, like him, to bring chaos to their respective departments. Loyalists, they will provide no guardrails. They will not weave a circle around him thrice to protect our democracy and the American people.

When they fail — inevitably — Trump will step in afterwards with an autocratic solution, like deploying the military upon American citizens, his notion of the right next note, despite the posse comitatus act which outlaws it. Call it control through chaos.

Trump’s improvising, fueled by fear and anger, is the engine of that chaos. Like improv, chaos disrupts decorous norms. Unlike improv, chaos has no end in sight, no promise of some new order or community other than destruction and the increased chaos that will follow. Ginning up fear and anger is the goal of terrorism. Call Trump’s improvising the agent of home-grown terrorism.

Beware, beware, for he on well-advertised MacDonalds has fed and drunk the diet Coke of Trumpian paradise.