Lock Away Your Returning Dead

Although on a conscious level this ad deals with our concern for protecting the deceased from the elements by being firmly sealed in a protective container, we could also read it on the level of latent, unconscious content and say that the ad is telling the living that it is being protected from the return of the dead; in other words it is really advertising to our irrational, unconscious fear of being haunted by the dead.  It is the logic of the dream; if nothing can get in the casket, then the dead cannot get out.  We are safe from our irrational fear that they will somehow escape the grave to confront us and our unconscious desire for them to die.  Our guilt or shame over the passing of a loved one intermixes with our mourning and sense of loss.  Death stirs unconscious memories and desires.    We sense that they have some kind of supernatural access to our unconscious that they did not posses while living.

This type of advertising – back then and now – is based not on demographics but psychographics;  information that goes beyond facts such as age, gender and income and attempts to portray the psychology, lifestyle and values of the consumer.  This ad dated around 1950s could have been based on the work of Ernest Dichter.  Dichter trained as a psychoanalyst before fleeing Vienna and the Nazis.  He landed in the U.S. and quickly determined that his psychoanalytic concepts and practices could help Big Business explore the psyches of consumers all the better to manipulate their unconscious motivations.  Dichter viewed his work as a kind of therapeutic democracy where institutions (government, corporations, non-profits) used “motivation research” to discover the neurosis, anxieties and inhibitions of the public psyche and benevolent technocrats would create advertisements or propaganda campaigns that would cure the public mental disorders and make a more smoothly operating society.  Dichter radically altered market research by experimenting with the open-ended interview of psychoanalysis and anthropology.  Rather than asking consumers direct questions such as why they liked or disliked a product, Dichter would allow the consumer to freely associate about any given topic.  Rather than asking “Why do like/use Dove Soap?” Dichter would ask “Describe the process of bathing?”  Dichter would give his interviewees ample time to free associate about the process – or as Dichter discovered – ritual of bathing.  As deep meanings and practices emerged from these interviews, Dichter would sell these findings to his clients to use in their ad campaigns.  So with the Dove Soap project Dichter found that bathing is a deeply felt cleansing ritual were consumers felt not only physically clean but spiritually purified and reborn.

If we interpret some of the signifiers in this ad we can see, on a manifest level, the advertisement comforting the bereaved by assuaging their fears that the “dear one” will stay dry through rain.  If we look at a latent level (which works with the manifest content) the ad is more about locking away the “dear one” thus connoting their inability to escape.  There is “deep” (as in buried deep in the ground) consolation provided by the “metal vault”.  Although vault is a common word in this area, here it seems to resonate with meanings such as bank vault or security vault; places were things are locked away and can only be retrieved with our consent.

This ad connects to our current fascination with zombies.  Where the above ad depicts a familial drama, zombies represent a social phenomena.  But is there a connection between the two scenarios?  The fear and guilt over our personal returning dead echoes  our fear regarding the dead returning en masse; we anxiously fear these faceless numbers will confront us for our unconscious desire that we wished them dead all along.  The socially neglected, marginalized and forgotten come back as zombies for revenge because death gives them the power to destroy a social order that excluded them all along and was based on a social violence that wanted to destroy them.  The survivors of the zombie apocalypse are reduced to the brutal life of mere survival; the state of social being the multitudes endured when things were “normal.”

This fantasy of pure survival is nothing but a purified, un-repressed  narrative of current social reality; an elite group of survivors possess the means of violence to liquidate and ultimately control the multitude of people/zombies.  Just as the ad above caters to our fear of and desire for the death of our “dear” ones, the zombie apocalypse fantasy plays to our fear of and desire for social destruction.  Furthermore it says that we are willing to submit to our own extinction in exchange for the experience of pure social violence; to experience for a short time without guilt our desire to destroy the social order by acting on our aggressive impulses towards other people i.e. zombies.