[Back in the early days of my Substack (Feb 2023), I wrote a post about worldbuilding, which I described as “an archetypal 21st century rhetorical practice.” The ideas from that post have stayed with me; for instance, I think that part of my interest in Klein’s Doppelganger, and her discussion of “Mirror World,” was that it resonated with some of the things I say there. Today’s episode, as I’m preparing to write it, has the same sort of vibe for me—it feels like I’m onto something that might turn out to be a book chapter. We’ll see. At the very least, I’d describe this as a companion piece to that earlier post.]
The Aviators
“The Aviators” opens with fighter jets performing air maneuvers, then cuts to a child whooshing a toy plane around a room. It cuts back and forth once more before we see a young girl (Sally) asking her grandfather about his flight jacket. The scenes continue to bounce back and forth between brief shots of the planes and the present day, where Grandpa shows Sally a picture of his fellow pilots (“look at us knuckleheads”) and names them all (some of the names are interlaced with shots of similarly old men in other locations). “And they’re all coming?” she asks. “Those who are still with us,” Grandpa intones seriously. He tells Sally about their A-4 Skyhawks1, the planes they flew (“We loved those things.”). As her mother is putting Sally to bed that night, she asks her daughter, somewhat obscurely, “I don’t know, honey. Don’t you think they’re a little too old for that?”
The next day, Grandpa’s fellow pilots arrive. They hug one another, play cards around a table with old pictures of their squad scattered about it, and (presumably) reminisce about old times. At one point, one of them says, “Let’s go,” the music swells and they walk to the beach, where they stand side-by-side, and salute the sunset. We don’t see them turn back, because the video cuts to Sally staring out the window at them, just before she turns back to her parents and excitedly tells them that “They’re coming!”
As the old pilots return to the house, she runs over and gives Grandpa a wrapped box. He opens it, and pulls out a VR headset, asking, “What’s this, Sally?” and Sally replies, “Your wings.” He slides it on, and we’re instantly transported back to a shot of the the Skyhawk buzzing through the clouds. The music shifts, to the opening notes of what we’ll discover is Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” Cut back to the house, and the other pilots are opening their own boxes and visors, and then Mom tells Sally to “light ‘em up.” She presses a single app on a phone helpfully emblazoned with the Xfinity logo, and we return to the flight footage from earlier, only this time interspersed with images of the old pilots in their visors, laughing and whooping, as they enter an impossibly photorealistic, multiplayer simulation of their Skyhawk cockpits. But there’s a visor for Sally, too! And we’re back in the air, with Sally announcing over the comms that she’s “On your wing, Grandpa!” as she waves to him from her own cockpit. The final shot shows the planes all passing the camera in formation and starting to peel off individually, as the commercial’s tagline “WiFi built to wow” is replaced by “Xfinity,” and the image fades. It’s replaced with a full screen acknowledgement of the “men and women who serve or have served in the armed forces.”
The actual television commercial version of “The Aviators” is much shorter than this three and a half minute movie, although to compensate for that, if you watch the full version on YouTube, there’s also a “Making of” featurette (!!). Even before I knew who had directed it2, I would have described “The Aviators” as cinematic and deeply polished. As I hope my description suggests, these three minutes are dense with familiar cultural tropes, up to and including the final title card thanking our veterans for their service—and it presents them economically. This commercial packs a tremendous amount of story into its handful of minutes.
My first reaction to commercials like these is always that they devote (what seems to me to be) an outsized amount of effort and resources to what is, in essence, a fairly banal advertisement. Most commercials are 15 or 30 seconds—while marketers have certainly grown more adept at this sort of narrative density (relying on cultural archetypes or tropes to trigger associative reason in their audience), this sort of longform, cinematic advertisement is still somewhat rare, I’d argue. There’s something of the bait-and-switch in them as well: they are commercials whose initial appeal is an attempt to appear like something other than an advertisement. In this case, the generational nostalgia, the Top Gun vibe, even the science-fictional assumptions about the convenience and capacity of virtual reality, etc., are intended to hook the audience (and to activate positive feelings) before the revelation that this is an ad for home wifi. And this is not an especially novel tactic—it has to do with the emergence of storytelling as a corporate strategy.
Storytelling
I’m writing about things a bit out of order here, as sometimes happens. Before I get to the links that themselves prompted me, I want to mention that I spent a little bit of time down the rabbit hole of storytelling. Several years ago, Jason Miller posted an essay to LinkedIn that looked very specifically at what that site’s data might tell us about the relationship between marketing and storytelling. He reports that, “In early summer 2011, the number of marketers listing storytelling as a skill on their LinkedIn profile was miniscule. It effectively didn’t exist as a marketing discipline.” Over the course of only a year or so, the idea of including it as one of the core competencies of marketing professionals exploded. The graph below only runs to 2017, when the article was published, but it went from virtually zero in 2011 to hundreds of thousands just a few years later.
Miller’s essay is a great mix of data-driven trend identification alongside specific moments during that early stretch that might legitimately be described as catalysts for the steepest part of that curve in 2012. And he references some of the earlier sources for this work, like this piece from Seth Godin3 in 2006, which is strangely (and disastrously?) prescient if you fast-forward to our present-day political discourse.
If you recall my post on metonymy from last summer, you’ll remember that I talked a bit about advertising/marketing, and honestly, I could easily have cited Godin’s work in there. Marketing (as storytelling) is about triggering associations in consumers that precede rational thought—as Godin puts it, “First impressions are far more powerful than we give them credit for,” and marketers are hired/paid to generate those first impressions, even (and especially) if they don’t match up to the reality or the value of the product or service in question.
There were a couple of newsletters last week that overlapped enough to get me thinking about storytelling. Tara McMullin devoted an issue of What Works to “Unpacking the Attention Fetish,” where she notes, among other things, that “The currents of neoliberalism gradually instrumentalized storytelling over the 1980s and 1990s,” which for me, suggests that pieces like Godin’s are more a matter of saying the quiet part out loud4. McMullin arrives at this point by starting with The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, and thinking through the way that documentaries have proliferated recently, especially on streaming platforms, in a way that blurs the same ethical lines that marketers are paid to ignore: “It gives you the impression that some bad things were happening with this family, but you never really get a sense of what's true and what's a good story.” I’ll sometimes turn to series like these (or to crime/scam podcasts), so I share McMullin’s belief that there’s a great deal of what we might euphemistically describe as creative editing going on. These stories are framed in such a way that they are more concerned with capturing (and retaining) attention than they are with any sort of documentary fidelity. (McMullin’s discussion of Jess Shane’s work on this point is worth reading.)
McMullin turns after that to thinking about attention itself and how certain things are lost, when attention becomes the metric5:
Stories do have incredible value. But when a story is shaped and molded in such a way as to maximize attention, it tends to erase the people and personal, social, and political stakes at its center. We see the person on screen or in our feed, but what we're really focused on is the shock, the heartbreak, the transformation.
And she references Byung-Chul Han, who describes this form of storytelling as storyselling. I’ll return to Han, because this sent me to his book Psychopolitics, but first I want to mention the other newsletter that sent me down this track, Blackbird Spyplane.
“You are not a commercial for yourself” starts with a discussion of Yasujirō Ozu’s Munekata Sisters, one of his “films [that] explore tensions between tradition and modernity in a Westernizing Japan.” Spyplane is one of the most entertaining reads out there, and there are plenty of high profile outlets (NYT, Guardian, Vanity Fair, et al.) that would agree, so I recommend giving it a read. But the passage that caught my eye was a discussion of shifts in consumer culture:
Discussing the 19th century “advent of mass manufacture,” Rothfeld writes that, “as factories churned out identical wares with unprecedented efficiency, limitations on production began to vanish. The final barrier to soaring profits was the stingy consumer, who could not be coaxed to continue wanting what she already owned. The ideal product was therefore something that a person would go on wanting even when she had it — something that would induce desire so pronounced that even possession could do nothing to dispel it.”
This connects to what Adam Curtis describes as the invention of “lifestyle” marketing in the early 20th century, where “The goal was to infuse goods with a perceived symbolic value, separate from literal use value, so that companies could make us desire goods we didn’t actually need.”
This idea resonates for me with McMullin’s distinction between the value of storytelling itself and the ways that we’ve instrumentalized it (in marketing, on social media) in order to attract attention. This might also sound familiar as the fundamental issue with clickbait content, where the point of the framing (“one weird trick”) isn’t to deliver on the promised insight (that “You won’t believe!”) but to sell the click-throughs that these language hacks induce. Or the ways that Facebook (and sites like it) black-box customer service because even negative engagement is still engagement.
The Spyplane piece takes issue with the way that “community” has been eroded recently in ways that “storytelling” already has—it describes both in terms of “the torched rhetorical territory of people who live to “move product” above all else,” the cynical churn of capitalism.
in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson, seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things, whether it’s literal drop-shipped products someone peddles through a TikTok storefront or more-abstract products, e.g., the sense of envy we hope others feel when we post from a balling Tuscan vacation …
The obvious problem with this is that, after a while, feeling like every public utterance / outfit / joke / photo you share has to be a little commercial for yourself… sucks!
Honestly, though, I think that it’s even worse than this lets on. When we understand storytelling primarily through its instrumentalization, when we reduce it to its ability to generate attention metrics, then we sacrifice all of its (many) other qualities on that particular altar. This post has gotten pretty long, so I think I’m going to do a second post on this topic. But consider what McMullin says about the way that the attention fetish begins to erase the reality at the heart of our stories, and then compare that with this story about the fatigue surrounding the “Instagram boyfriend” phenomenon, Freya India’s piece for After Babel called “Your Boyfriend Isn’t Your Cameraman.” I’m going to dig into that piece, and talk a bit about Han’s Psychopolitics in Part 2 of this post. Stay tuned. [Part 2 is now available -cgb]
I had to look this up, but this suggests that Grandpa flew during the Vietnam war, although the aerial maneuvering implies something more like the Blue Angels, who flew them from the late 70s to the mid 80s.
If you visit the YT version, you’ll learn that it was directed for Xfinity by Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, et al.).
Miller writes, “Seth Godin was one of the first thinkers to argue that the art of storytelling was fundamental to marketing as a whole. He’d written about it as early as 2005, in his book All Marketers are Liars, an underground hit. In April 2012 it was re-issued, with a cheeky new cover. The original title was scrawled out and rephrased as ‘All Marketers tell Stories’.” This shift, from thinking of marketing as “telling stories” instead of “lying,” is part of what I’m interested in.
McMullin also spends some time with Sujatha Fernandes’ Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling, which I probably need to add to my list.
This strikes me as yet another excellent example of Goodhart’s Law, which I wrote about last winter.