the fish please, plain-broiled, with the sauce on the side.

A Short Lesson on Truth

Last week, Susan and I celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of our first in-person meeting. That day a quarter of a century ago was blustery and freezing. We went to the movies — to what is now called The Paley Center — so that we could watch episode 144 of I Love Lucy, in which Lucy goes to Scotland to learn about her McGillicuddy ancestors and instead discovers she’s been brought there as a sacrifice to appease the appetite of a two-headed dragon who shows up every thirty years, played by Fred and Ethel Mertz. It’s a dream, of course — a nightmare — the meaning of which is: if you find whatever it is you’ve been searching for, at best it ultimately may not be what you bargained for. At worst, it may kill you.

(Why this episode? When we met, Susan had a Curly Coated Retriever named MacGillicuddy, and I thought that it would be a fun and thoughtful thing to do to take her to see it on our first date because when it originally aired in 1956, Susan was three years old and her parents wouldn’t let her watch it.)

We didn't see it after all because The Paley Center didn’t have it in its library. Instead, we watched a few of the earliest 1951 episodes of I Love Lucy, which was sponsored by Philip Morris Cigarettes. Every few minutes, one or both lead actors would light up and extol the healthful virtues of a good smoke. Desi Arnaz went on to die of lung cancer in 1986, at the age of 69.

Why am I telling you this story of our first date and episode 144 of I Love Lucy and the death of one of its stars whose salary was likely, in part, paid by a company responsible for killing him? Because it is about the power of suggestion, style, trend, fear, and sentimentality to convince you to live a certain kind of life, and then to believe particular things about yourself and the world around you, even if they are completely illogical. The advertising world is built upon this foundation (and I say this as the daughter of a man who was a vice president and creative director at a very big Manhattan ad agency for twenty-one years). When Don Draper pitches the Kodak people his creative plans for their account — specifically their new slide projector, which Kodak is calling “The Wheel” — he does so by telling them a story of nostalgia, of family and children, of creating an inviolable and emotional bond with the product. Nostalgia, Draper says, means in Greek the pain from an old wound. He goes on:

It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel; it’s called The Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

This is what advertising and media are all about: capturing the hearts and minds of the public and making us believe with every fiber of our being that this thing — this perfume, this cigarette, these sneakers, this gin, this recipe, this car, this slide projector, this politician — will bring us to a place where we think we are loved and accepted by a family, a community, a boss, a culture, a norm, a team. The thing that they neglect to mention is the two-headed dragon who, every thirty, or fifty, or eighty years, needs to be fed a meal of the guileless, lonely, rootless, fearful, or disenfranchised for it to work, and who have been bent like Gumby into believing that which simply isn’t true, just so that the gears can still turn. Because everything needs fuel, doesn’t it?

So: why the fish, plain-broiled, with the sauce on the side?