Dennis Hopper had an unfortunate gift for self-marginalization. He played the buffoon, the drunk, the druggie, the sex addict whose foolish behavior obscured a serious sensibility. When he died on May 29 at the age of 74 from prostate cancer, his life was once again in chaos. On his deathbed, he was divorcing his wife of 18 years, getting a restraining order to keep from seeing her. The mainstream writers, with their unfailing instinct for the superficial, remembered him as a “Hollywood bad boy,” a “rebel,” a “hellraiser.” The New York Times memorialized him for portraying “drug-addled, often deranged misfits.”

But this official record distorts, suppresses and marginalizes what the mainstream doesn’t want to see in Hopper’s work. It confuses his social and political critique, most notably in “Easy Rider,” with intentionally bizarre roles such as the psychopath Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet.”

More importantly, the mainstream writers entirely omitted some of Hopper’s most interesting and sustained efforts. In the late 1990s, he narrated and acted in three separate films stretching over nine hours of viewing time made by a German director who you’ve probably never heard of. Not only are Hermann Vaske and his films unknown in the U.S. but you can only get one of these films here – and then only on VHS and only from specialty video stores. (In Berkeley, CA, Reel Video; in San Francisco, Le Video.) It’s the first of the Hopper and Vaske trilogy called “The Fine Art of Separating People from their Money.”

(For the record, the two other films are “The A-Z of Separating People from their Money” (1998) and “The Ten Commandments of Separating People from Their Money” (2000). Vaske also issued an abridged version of these three, called “The Golden Years of Advertising – The Roaring 90′s of Separating People from Their Money” that is available from Germany.)

When Hopper died, I gave him a kind of memorial service of my own. I dusted off the VCR and rented the tape of “The Fine Art” again, wondering if it would have as big an impact on me as it had had a decade ago when I first saw it. I expected to write a short tribute to him and his work based on an evening’s viewing. But I was hooked once more at the beginning when Hopper leaned forward and with his customary intensity, asked the central question: “When is advertising art – and when is art advertising?”

I’ve heard advertising called “art” when people only mean it is a skillful job of salesmanship, but what does it mean to say that art might be a form of advertising? If a film isn’t blatantly selling a product, what is it selling? Can the effort to sell something coexist with telling the truth? Or are they mutually exclusive? In other words, if a film is trying to sell us something, then has it necessarily stopped telling the truth? If it is substituting a sales pitch for the truth, can we see the difference? And if we’ve stopped recognizing the difference, does it mean we have learned to accept the meretricious for the real? In some way, does it mean we are losing touch with human reality, or just need to avoid the wave of bad movies more carefully? Does any of this matter to social and political progressives, and if so, how?

These questions unfolded before me over the past several days as I found myself on a journey into a part of American culture that I have tried to ignore. Commerciality is so ever-present that it has receded from my normal consciousness into a kind of irritating invisibility, like the drone of machines around me, or the trace of smog in the air that I breathe. But when my attention wakes up, the obvious emerges for a moment and I’m surprised to see with a new clarity something I have half-known all along.

For me, this is what Hopper and Vaske have done in “The Fine Art.” They explore Hopper’s question through a series of interviews with film directors and commercial photographers in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of these are British film directors who “crossed over” from advertising into film-making, like Tony Scott (“Top Gun,” “Crimson Tide”), his brother Ridley Scott, (“Alien,” “Blade Runner,” Gladiator,” “America”, “Angela’s Ashes”). They show clips from 60 different commercials, such as Apple Computer’s 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh computer, a zany Benson & Hedges commercial, the early 1980s “Joe” Isuzu ads, the suggestive Calvin Klein underwear ads and many that I’d never seen from other countries. I might ignore commercials in daily life, but when they are laid alongside familiar movies, they reveal a common sensibility that says much more than I care to admit about what’s going on in this country.

A man in a yellow plaid shirt is standing on an empty stage, describing a new women’s fashion magazine.

“It’s for both men and women,” he says.

While he is speaking, a woman is striding across the stage. She’s dressed all in black and carrying a black handbag. Red lipstick. High heels.

“It’s engaging,” he says.

“Provocative.”

Her skirt is so short that the camera gives you glimpses of her bottom as she walks.

“Totally modern,” he says.

Her shirt is open to the navel so it shows her black bra and cleavage.

“And so much va-voom!” the man says enthusiastically.

She pulls out a pistol and shoots him half a dozen times.

The bullets erupt through his chest, blood spurting from the holes in his plaid shirt.

He falls to his knees.

She shoots him four more times.

His body is lying inert on the stage.

She smiles – and fires two more shots.

His lifeless body jumps with each bullet.

Above, the words:

“Don’t Tell It.”

“Don’t Tell it” was a “cutting-edge” British fashion magazine that used this 1995 ad designed by Saatchi & Saatchi, an international advertising company that prides itself on replacing brands with “lovemarks.” Its website explains: “A lovemark is a product service or entity that inspires loyalty beyond reason.” And: “Lovemarks are where love and business work together.” According to the only news article that I could find on the Internet, the “Don’t Tell It’ ad was inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs.

It’s an example of “shock advertising” from the 1990s, often associated with photographer Oliviero Toscani and the “United Colors of Benetton” ad campaign that he developed for the Italian clothing designer Benetton. Along with the company’s logo, these ads showed a series of news photos, entirely unrelated to clothing, of the world’s horrors and catastrophes: The blood-spattered clothes of someone killed in Kosovo, a man dying in his hospital bed of AIDS, surrounded by family members, the faces of inmates on Death Row in Missouri..

Hopper asks: What, exactly, is shock? How does it work? In his narration, he defines it precisely: Shock is “the prostration of our voluntary and involuntary functions caused by trauma.” If you look up trauma in the dictionary, you find that it is comes from the Greek word meaning “wound.” We experience trauma when an external physical force violates our boundaries, physical or psychic, that protect our well-being; it prostrates, or exhausts, the functions of our normal system and we are left both hurt and numbed.

Shock depends on these pre-existing boundaries for comparison. If we have nothing to compare it with, no pre-existing boundaries or assumptions of what is appropriate, then we don’t experience shock. “Where there is nothing to measure appropriateness, it can’t be shocking,” Hopper says. “As soon as the shocking becomes familiar, it is no longer shocking.”

This means that shock is both parasitic and progressive. Once shock has violated a boundary of what’s appropriate and has become familiar, it must violate an even more basic boundary to produce a shock again. It’s a bit like trying to get someone’s attention by making a deafening noise. The louder the noise grows, the faster the person becomes deaf. In the end, the person ends up stone-deaf in the midst of the most awful sounds.

But what’s the point of shock? Why would a company think that shock might get you to buy a product rather than just leave you repulsed?

A handsome young surfer is swimming on his board through a lagoon, perhaps somewhere tropical, to dreamy flute music.

Seen on the board from underneath, he’s wearing dark swim trunks, trusting, vulnerable and at peace.

Then from underwater, there’s a sudden thrashing of violence, gushers of blood, the young man drowning.

The sea is calm again.

“Burp.”

Next image:

A photo of a dead shark lying on a pier on its back, its stomach sliced open and the contents of its last meal exposed. A fish, a human skeleton — and the dark swim trunks.

Then four black frames blast single words in white;

Tough

Clothes

By

KADU.

Vaske turns to Dr. Ruth Westheimer to voice the natural human reaction:

“Disgusting! Awful!” she exclaims when ad executive Ben Nott shows her the photo of the shark. It’s from an ad campaign for Kadu, an Australian clothing company.

“You’re quite correct that it is effective,” Dr. Ruth tells Nott. “I’m not going to forget it so fast.”

“Exactly,” says Nott. “It’s has been effective. Sales are WAY UP.”

That’s exactly the point: sales are way up. The ad got people’s attention, and it’s true: trauma is hard to forget. This ad is a perfect example of how an ad works. Our imagination is drawn into a world where our natural response to human sufferingis suppressedand our attention is diverted to the real “hero” of the story, the swim trunks. We’re invited to admire the object that proved more durable than the young man. As our imagination absorbs this, we live, even if briefly, in a world where humans are only props for the real actors, the objects. The objects are imbued with human characteristics: they struggle against the odds and triumph in the end. In other ads, objects might seem to give us feelings of love and loyalty, excitement, attraction or repulsion. The commercial message is: You may only be an object in this world, but you can acquire the qualities you desire, normally associated with human relationships — if you buy the product and pay the price.

Is the ad shocking? Yes. Forgettable? No. And people seem to buy what they don’t forget, even if they are left with a subtle wound to their consciousness.

This objectification and de-humanization of reality is even clearer in the sex ads.Since its 1980s ad of the 15-year-old Brooke Shields putting on her jeans, Calvin Klein has deliberately pierced moral boundaries to sell its products. It may have drawn controversy and opposition, but in the end, Calvin Klein has tapped into the sensibility shared by both commercials and movies. As Vaske shows, its ads boosted former “Marky Mark” Mark Wahlberg to such popularity that he starred in “Boogie Nights,” reprising the same kind of role he played in his underwear ads.

In the 1990s, Calvin Klein also created an uproar when it used teenagers in various quasi-pornographic poses. “The Fine Art” reminds us of this familiar image (which I couldn’t find on the Internet):

A very young woman is lying on her back.

She wears white knit top and a short jeans skirt

Her legs are spread enough

so you can see the white underpants

between her thighs.

Provocative?

If you think so, you’re the one to blame, not the ad, says the ad industry.

“It was more in the minds of those who were saying, ‘That’s provocative,’ and perhaps it was their worst nightmare,” says Jerry Della Femina, a New York ad man, during his interview with Vaske. “I would question the people who are questioning the advertising and wonder what they are thinking.”

What’s interesting about Della Femina’s response is that he is putting into words exactly what shock must do. It must violate our human sensibility — otherwise, it would not be “provocative” — and then camouflage the violation by blaming us for having the sensibility. Ironically, as Hopper has pointed out, the entire effect of the ad depends on what Della Femina denies, the comparison with our interior sense of what is healthy. Della Femina and the ad industry need to pretend this larger moral reality doesn’t exist because they need to separate us from our natural, human reactions so we will have the reactions they need to sell their products. They need us to stop seeing the young woman as a human, perhaps a friend or a daughter, and see her as an anonymous sexual object in order to stir a sexual sensation that we are not permitted in reality but can have by buying these jeans — at twice the price of ordinary jeans.

The existence of the unacknowledged but clear moral boundaries is what Vaske is referring to when he asks: Do the Calvin Klein underwear ads go “too far?”

No, says art critic Edward Lucie Smith.

“Those Calvin Klein ads go no farther than Lolita,” he tells Vaske.

Which leaves us in one heck of a quandary. If we object to the commercial exploitation of young people, then do we implicitly favor censoring Lolita? If we don’t believe in censorship, then on what basis can we reject the Calvin Klein ads?

This quandary is entirely false. Smith fails to recognize the fundamental difference between art, the effort to tell human truth, and commerce, the effort to “separate you from your money” by deliberately separating us from our human responses. In this way, commercialism is the “art” of retreating from the reality of our humanity into a more restricted world of objectifications. And yet, amazingly enough, this commercialization of art has become so successful that even a professional art critic no longer sees it.

That this commercialism has shaped the consciousness of a new generation, we see in a clip of a familiar movie:

In a car, Jules and Vince are chatting good-naturedly about the McDonald’s hamburgers in Paris. The quarter-pounder with cheese is called the “Royale with cheese.” And the Big Mac is “Le Big Mac.”

They pause outside the car, look into the trunk and muse: “We shoulda brought shotguns.”

They’ll have to make do. They saunter up stairs toward an apartment, bantering about whether foot massage is seductive or sexual. Chit-chat. No rush. Like hourly workers postponing the moment when they have to punch the time clock.

Then, it’s time to get to work. “Let’s get back in character,” says Jules.

A few moments later, he is towering over a scared young guy who was eating his breakfast in his apartment. Jules, in his black undertaker’s suit, is glaring and aiming his revolver at him.

It isn’t clear what he has done.

But Jules is screaming the verses from Ezekiel 25:17 that end with a cry for “great vengeance and furious anger.”

“Then they will know that I am the LORD!” Jules shouts in a rage.

He fires several times into the young man in the chair.

Pulp Fiction is not shocking, only “different,” says Samuel L. Jackson, the film’s “Jules.” “Different is sometimes shocking and change is hard for a lot of people to accept,” he tells Vaske. And actor Harvey Keitel, who plays “Mr. White” in Reservoir Dogs and “Mr. Wolf” in Pulp Fiction, also defends the movie. Pulp Fiction is an “extraordinary piece of directing and writing,” that does what a good film should do. It produces a “healthy stirring of the imagination and the emotions so we can evolve to some place,” Keitel says.

Some reviewers were also enthusiastic. Desson Howe at The Washington Post called it “brilliant and brutal, funny and exhilarating, jaw-droppingly cruel and disarmingly sweet.” The film’s “most exhilarating showpiece,” he said, was “an extended, hair-raising suspense ride that includes sword violence, rape, gunfire and torture.”

Janet Maslin at the New York Times wrote:

Surprisingly tender about characters who commit cold-blooded murder, Pulp Fiction uses the shock value of such contrasts to keep its audience constantly off-balance. Suspending his viewers’ moral judgments makes it that much easier for Mr. Tarantino to sustain his film’s startling tone. When he offsets violent events with unexpected laughter, the contrast of moods becomes liberating, calling attention to the real choices the characters make. Far from amoral or cavalier, these tactics force the viewer to abandon all preconceptions while under the film’s spell.

It seems to me that what Maslin is really describing — this “shock value” that keeps us “off-balance” and forces us to “suspend” moral judgments and “abandon all preconceptions” — is what Hopper has described as trauma. The images of rape, gunfire, and torture wound our natural human responses, exhaust our normal functions designed to protect us, and leave us de-centered and de-selfed, “off-balance.”

Just as in those ads for the swim trunks or “Don’t Tell It,” we enter an imagined world where humans do not react as humans but as objects, as if the blood, the screaming, the rape and torture was not happening to real human beings. In a strange way, Pulp Fiction reverses the way traditional fiction operates; fiction generally asks us to suspend our disbelief in an imaginary world and accept what we are seeing as real. Pulp “Fiction” asks us to suspend our disbelief and accept that what we are seeing is not real.

And the reviewers do exactly that. In her review of Pulp Fiction, Maslin also refers to the “playful torture” of a policeman in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs –a scene in which Michael Madsen’s “Mr. Blonde” slices the ear off the policeman, screaming in pain, covered in blood, and tied to a chair. That “showpiece” in Pulp Fictionthat Howe called so “exhilarating” is when the drug kingpin Ving Rhames’ “Marsellus Wallace” is tortured and sodomized by an off-duty policeman. To get his revenge, the drug boss promises to return with “a blowtorch and pliers” to finish off his tormentor whom he has shot in the groin.

This is not the writing of someone who has followed the usual advice to writers, to “write about what you know.” Quite the opposite. Tarantino is writing about things he knows nothing about. If he had had any experience of such horrific violence, he never could have made such a movie. And I doubt his admirers would be so enthusiastic if they had the slightest familiarity with the reality of violence. One can only shudder to think what family members who lost a loved one to drug addiction or gang warfare must feel when they see these scenes. What might the Iraqis who suffered in Abu Ghraib think when they learn that mainstream American newspaper writers find depictions of rape and gunfire to be “exhilarating” or torture with a razor to be “playful?” Isn’t it possible they might see the film’s mixing of “violent events with unexpected laughter” as similar to those photos of smiling GIs heaping up the Iraqi prisoners into human piles like so many playthings?

I think Susan Sontag is exactly right when she says that photography of war can only provide us with what she calls a “camera-mediated knowledge of war.”Directors like Tarantino aren’t making movies about what they’ve actually experienced, only what they’ve seen movies about. He is the “vid kid” who lives in what Sontag might call a “video-mediated” world. This secondhand type of vicarious living is what gives these movies a strange disembodied quality, where death doesn’t look like real death, or love doesn’t look like real love. Pulp Fiction may be an “extraordinary piece of directing and writing,” but it is only a clever fake. It’s not reality, not truth and not art.

If it’s not real, what is it? Hopper and Vaske have provided all the clues: It’s commerce. Pulp Fiction is pulp commerce. Instead of selling a product, however, it is selling itself. Pulp Fiction is clearly operating from the same sensibility as the commercial ads, with the same objectification, the same violence to our natural inborn human responses and the same re-focusing of our attention toward something non-human, the movie itself. The movie experience has become “reified,” a “thing-in-itself.” Life among human beings is only a prop for what really matters, a life among human objects.

One of the arguments for a movie like Pulp Fiction is that it “shakes us up.” It challenges us “to abandon our pre-conceptions.” Our resistance is only to “change,” as Jackson says, or as Keitel says, to “the healthy stirring” of our imagination that makes us “evolve to some place.” When you look at this claim more deeply, you see that the opposite is true. Again, the key to seeing how commercialism works is by comparing ads with movies. One blatant ad in “The Fine Art” is for the WonderBra:

A young woman is shown from the waist up, her head turned demurely.

She’s wearing only a white bra that pushes up a lot of cleavage.

Below are the words:

“Plan to run into your ex.”

Or:

“Your tax refund should be so big.”

Or:

“34-24-36. (With the 34 crossed out and replaced by a 36.)

Ad exec Bill Tragos defends the WonderBra ad because, after all, they were designed by women. “It has a lot of the sensitivity for what women feel,” Tragos tells Vaske.

Designed by women or not, this ad is embarrassingly obvious in how it has resorted to the tired old trick of treating a woman’s breasts as objects to manipulate a man. These ads might be designed by women, but they operate within the usual commercial clichés. Once again, the bigger, the better. Once again, measurements matter. Far from “challenging our preconceptions,” this ad does the opposite. Commercial “shock” may appear to violate moral boundaries in order make us “abandon all preconceptions” but it actually reinforces our worst cultural preconceptions.

When we switch back to the world of film, where this is less obvious, we see the same phenomenon is true. Pulp Fiction mixes humor with violence in a way that actually reinforces the cultural assumption that rape, gunfire, and violence aren’t real and only happen to “other people.” Horror in real life is tamed to fit within the ordinary emotions of humor and irony when it is “camera-mediated” or “video-mediated,” or “news-mediated.”

In this way, commercialism, with its objectification of life, affirms the status quo, suppresses reality, strengthens ignorance and leaves us comfortable and unconscious. Perhaps that is why “innovative” commercialism is wildly popular. It only appears to challenge preconceptions while it actually comforts them. It leaves us unchallenged by the truth and reassured we don’t need real change. Does this sound oddly familiar in a world of Tea Party politics?

That’s why social progressives should care about commercialism in both ads and film. Commercialism is an aesthetic that destroys the spiritual sensibility of compassion, kindness, generosity — the values that Tikkun has championed for so long — on which progressive programs depend. It is a form of spiritual trauma, a wounding of consciousness on which our consumer economy depends. If torture is “playful” and rape, gunfire and violence “exhilarating,” if human suffering isn’t real, only ironic and humorous, then why spend money on an accessible health care system for the sick, or establishing humane treatment centers for the mentally ill and homeless, or effective assistance to the poor or a real end to U.S. militarism and its slaughter?

The answer certainly isn’t a new form of censorship, which tries to impose moral sensitivity on people from the outside. Instead, the only answer is to heighten our spiritual awareness from the inside. If you’re like me, you probably already half-know — and have found ways to endure — the objectification of commercialism in everyday life. But if you do what I’ve done these past two weeks, and give it close examination, you may find it is much more than just an annoyance or harmless “entertainment.” It erodes our spiritual well-being and makes progressive ideas seem absurd. It leaves people empty and hungry for the objects that corporations are selling, which strengthens their hold over us. Most important of all, it lies to us about our human reality of connection and relationship. And this may well be the spiritual precondition for illusionary know-nothing politics. I might have suspected some of this before, but it took my exploration of Hopper and Vaske’s “The Fine Art” to show it to me so much more clearly.

It’s too bad that Dennis Hopper played into his persona as the “out-of-control” wild man with roles like Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet.” He allowed himself to be swept up in the same objectification and commercialism that he decried, marginalizing and oppressing his own deeper self. At his death, it was easy for the mainstream writers to remember him as a Hollywood crazy. They didn’t want to listen to the times when he also was trying to tell us about what’s driving us all crazy. Dennis, I already miss you and your voice.