Hunger for and ignorance of emotional nuance; lessons from modern advertising and Barbie

Sky Sports recently put out a very colourful, visually metaphorical advert, portraying sports stars as fairground entertainers. I tend to find sports boring, but I appreciate spectable and I like seeing my friends and my partner get excited about them; Sky's advert captured that sense of accessible fun. Despite this, the ad was awarded Campaign magazine's 'Turkey of the week'.

This is not an anomaly. According to System1, a research agency that tests emotional responses to advertising, critics and the public have a very different idea of what makes a good advert. The industry's most critically reverred, Cannes Lions-winning adverts tend to test below the industry average for System1's metrics; they reportedly induce weaker or less positive emotions. Campaign magazine's 'Turkey of the week' ads tend to test above the industry average.

You can see a similar dynamic between Barbie (average score of 80/100 on Metacritic) and Oppenheimer (88/100). I enjoyed both films, but I much preferred Barbie, it's one of my favourite films of all time, I've had so much fun talking with my friends about it and discussing our favourite moments. My favourite was Barbie's description of crying as "achey but good."

I was not surprised that rightwing commentators hated the film or considered it to be man-hating. What really surprised me was the amount of intelligent friends who have told me that they felt like Barbie was "just not that good" or that "it could have done more." I nodded my head, whilst my brain span out, and afterwards I would find myself thinking MORE? MORE??????? GRETA GERWIG INVENTED THE GENRE OF THE 'FEMME BLOCKBUSTER' AND IMMEDIATELY USED IT TO DELIVER FEMINISM, EXISTENTIALISM, COMEDY AND POP MUSIC VIA A FULLY DEVELOPPED FANTASY DREAMWORLD WITH ZERO CGI, WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT? I knew that art is subjective, but it felt strange to me that these friends could appreciate the the genius of Oppenheimer and not Barbie.

My answer came in a copy of the 2021 book Look Out by Orlando Wood (who works at System1), an analysis of modern advertising and wider society in the 21st century. It describes our recent inclination towards left-brain literalism and logical analysis, and away from right-brain artistry and emotional nuance. I tend to think of this stuff as a kind of fight-or-flight response to Trump/Covid/etc, but he demonstrates that these trends have gradually increased alongside the usage of smartphones and social media.

My favourite part of Look Out has to be its back cover, which bears a truly brilliant metaphor for the effects of smart-phone/social media. Underneath a picture of a dog wearing a cone, it says;

One morning, when writing this book, I felt the need to go for a stroll. A woman walked past me in the street with her dog. Suddenly, the dog jumped up at me and started to bark, straining at its leash; its owner pulled it away. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, ‘he’s normally fine – it’s the cone.’

It’s the cone,’ I reflected. The dog was wearing a veterinary cone. When a dog wears a cone, it can become fearful and aggressive, in large part, because it is denied its peripheral, broad beam attention. And it struck me, isn't that exactly what's happened to our world - and perhaps even to our industry?

This metaphor works so well that, on reflection, one wonders if it is even a metaphor at all, it starts feels like a very practical description of human life in 2023. Our gaze narrows, we focus in on the words on our screens, the facts and the data, and we lose our appetite for art and emotional nuance.

Across Look Out and its predecessor Lemon, Wood analyses trends in tv and film across the 21st century; the decrease of comedy/sitcoms/romance and the increase of live sports, competitions, talent shows and horror movies;

Popular culture is more repetitive, analytical, factual, competitive than it was a generation ago, and there is a new focus on how things are made.

This helped me understand why the BBC’s The Traitors has been so succsesful. The meat of this show consists of contestants analysing eachother and discussing how they are approaching the game. Everything else is pretty thin; my partner adores the show, but she tends to skip its bland game segments (contestants gathering gold coins around a lake etc). The actual, long-term game of the show is all about deceipt; pulling it off and detecting it. As such, The Traitors an ingeniously meta show that cuts to the performative heart of reality tv, it makes the subtext of reality tv explicit; who is lying? How are they getting away with it? Who is likely to win? It is also profoundly lacking in aesthetic or nuance, even for by the standards of reality tv (at least Made In Chelsea used to have an good soundtrack…)

Look Out also helped me understand why Barbie is simultaneously adored and abhorred, why some people just didn't get how intelligent it is. One of my favourite journalists described Barbie as a 10/10 in terms of visuals, but criticised the film for spelling out its message with exposition, telling the audience its lesson rather than letting them come to their own conclusions (a classic mark of bad storytelling).

Whilst I agree that Barbie uses a lot of exposition, I totally disagree with the idea that the film has one lesson (ie: "the patriarchy needs to be dismantled"). It contains so many messages. Barbie doesn't just discover the existence of the patriarchy, she discovers death and sadness, and then she learns about the importance of nuanced emotions; how powerful it can be embrace difficult emotions, emotions that are both painful and vital. (and emotions that are processed by the right side of the brain)

The way we consume culture in 2023 encourages us to evaluate media in a direct, literal way; what is this? What is this trying to achieve? How is it doing this? Barbie does not set out to achieve one goal in a practical, logical manner, it creatively juggles a variety of messages and themes, whilst fulfilling its obligation to focus on the toy named Barbie.

What does this mean for creators who want to make emotionally nuanced stuff? It's not going to be easy, a lot of people will not get it, particularly the people with money to comission your work (Greta Gerwig went through a long process of resisting edits to Barbie). Stick with it and dedicate yourself to your vision, because once your work it out there, it will stick out like a glorious sore thumb in technicolour pink.