Benetton's
Evil Ads I: Righteous Consumerism
Theodore
Dalrymple
A new ad campaign celebrating convicted murderers is the ultimate
in radical chic . . .
About 50 yards from the
entrance to the prison in which I work is a large billboard, displaying
the picture of a black man, his head inclined gently, almost romantically,
against a wall. In large letters, the advertisement proclaims: SENTENCED
TO DEATH. It is an advertisement for Benetton knitwear.
The man is Jerome Mallet, sentenced for killing a Missouri highway
patrolman 15 years ago. According to the ad, Mallet "was looking for a
perfect world back then": in a perfect world, of course, there would be no
Missouri State Highway Patrol or police of any description.
What are the murderers released from my prison—Britain having abolished
the death penalty—to make of this advertisement? That they are heroes,
worthy of commemoration on billboards?
The mastermind of Benetton's advertising campaigns, Oliviero Toscani,
says that "today's culture is images, and I don't draw any distinction
between them." The first half of his statement approximates to a
lamentable truth; the second half is a barefaced lie. Of course Toscani
draws distinctions between images: he could hardly do his job if he did
not.
In choosing pictures of murderers rather than of their victims, he
appeals to the tender conscience of the liberal, whose ethical code
consists simply of the categorical imperative to sympathize with those
whom others abominate. The murderer-as-victim—more sinned against (by a
heartless society) than sinner—is the liberal's last word in ethical chic.
It was a masterstroke of Toscani's to choose cases in which the verdict
was not in the least doubtful. "We are all equal," said Toscani, declaring
Benetton's independence from moral convention—the mugged and the mugger,
the raped and the rapist, the murdered and the murderer. "We can wear
whatever we want, whatever colors we want."
Toscani added that advertising "is a far better medium for discussing
[the death penalty] than journalism," as if his radical-chic
sentimentality were a discussion, courageously making a profound moral
point. That's the point of his ads, of course: to convince the susceptible
that wearing one brand of knitwear instead of another is part of a moral
crusade—an expression of compassion rather than of a personal whim that
contributes to the profits of a large corporation. Henceforth goodness is
to be the easy purchase of the right brands rather than the strenuous
cultivation of virtue.
In Benetton, Jacques Derrida meets Citizen Kane: a mixture
of pretension, nihilism, and utter unscrupulousness.
Benetton's
Evil Ads II: Sears Strikes Back
Joe Diamond
and Dennis Saffran
. . . but one company has had enough.
Give Sears credit for
bucking the PC orthodoxy prevalent in corporate America these days. It
terminated an exclusive contract to sell a special line of Benetton
clothes after the uproar over the Italian company's repulsive "We, On
Death Row" ads that romanticize convicted killers.
The ads began running in January with a huge supplement to Tina
Brown's Talk magazine, featuring fan-magazine-style profiles of 26
murderers awaiting execution across the U.S. Jesse Compton's profile is
typical. A full-page headshot accompanies an interview. "What did you want
to be when you grew up?" he is asked. "A lumberjack," he replies. The
questioner follows up: "What does it feel like when you're cutting through
a tree?" Left unasked, however, is what it feels like to burn a
three-year-old girl with a propane torch or puncture her stomach with a
fork—subjects that Compton became an authority on when he and his
girlfriend tortured her daughter to death.
Benetton claimed that its ads were intended to "stimulate a
conversation about" (i.e., erode support for) capital punishment by
"bringing a human face to the individuals on death row." None of the ads,
though, mentioned the victims or the details of their slayings, suggesting
that the lives the murderers took were less important than their own.
Benetton expressly forbade its "subjects" from discussing their crimes or
victims—even when some tried to show remorse—because it did not want to
"distract readers."
Benetton has a long history of shock ads that push its left-wing
politics. An earlier effort featured a priest and nun locked in a
passionate kiss. Another showed a retouched photo of President Reagan
disfigured with AIDS lesions—Benetton's way of criticizing his
administration's AIDS record.
At least in the U.S., though, Benetton's politicized publicity has
coincided with the company's precipitous decline: all but 200 of the 800
stores it operated here in the 1980s have closed. The steady erosion of
its U.S. market share led the company to enter into its arrangement with
old-fashioned Sears—the kind of place where the fashion firm's chic
executives and upscale customers normally wouldn't be caught dead.
Benetton executives doubtless anticipated that the latest
ads would spark a publicity-generating backlash, especially in a country
where 70 percent of the adult population supports the death penalty. But
Sears's decision is something that Benetton probably didn't foresee, and
it may wind up reverberating in the marketplace, scaring off potential
Benetton partners, franchisees, and consumers, at least on these
shores.
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