They Believe; Can I?

Abstract

There was a certain advertisement on a billboard in my New York City neighborhood that still haunts me. It was an advertisement for the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, but like many ads these days, the product was absent from the scene. Instead, rising above the pavement, was a super-sized portrait of a street protest. It is a particular moment: May 1968 in Paris, when students and workers took to the streets and in a fit of imagination and fury seized the city and brought down the French government, but you don't need to know the particulars to be moved by the image. It is a close shot of a handful of young protesters standing in the middle of the street. To the left is a row of attractive women in their early twenties, dressed with that careless elegance for which Parisian women are justly famous and holding red flags. Some of the flagpoles are pointed forward and some back. The flags fill and billow out beautifully, as they seem to do only in socialist-realist paintings. With their backs to the women stand two young men. They, too, are stylish, wearing black leather jackets as they raise megaphones to their lips, speaking not to the group of spectators we see lining the sidewalk, but to a larger, invisible audience down the street and, presumably, around the world. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is a striking image--both aesthetically and historically--which is no doubt why the fashion designer's advertising agency selected it. It bespeaks hip rebellion, which today is the lingua franca of mass consumption. It is the old alchemy of advertising: buy this product and you will magically become someone else: in this case, someone who could care less about something as conformist as mass-produced fashion. McQueen's last design collection and ad campaign drew upon the imagery of Mods and Rockers. To move from images of mid-'60s subcultural rebellion in Britain to late-'60s political rebellion in France is just a few short years and a hop across the Channel. Time, space, and ideology are easily transcended by advertising's appropriation; only the image of rebellion remains constant. This is nothing new. The culture of rebellion has been embraced by the very culture being rebelled against for quite some time. Arguably the first cultural artifact of modern bohemia, Henri Murger's La Vie de Boheme (1849)--along with its operatic reincarnation as Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme (1896)--was, and still is, wildly popular with the very bourgeoisie it criticizes. By 1968 Columbia Records was selling its music with an image of young protesters in a jail cell and the tagline But The Man Can't Bust Our Music, and today the image of Che Guevara sells everything from T-shirts to Swatch watches to Smirnoff vodka. Co-opting rebellion is an old story, but there is something new about the McQueen advertisement. What is being appropriated is not just the external image of rebellion, but the rebel's inner passions. What makes the billboard so alluring is that these young protesters believe in something. I don't know exactly what they believe, they might be chanting Maoist nonsense or mouthing Situationist slogans, but what they are saying or exactly what they are protesting is largely immaterial, because they believe. It is hard to say how I know this. There are signs: the paradisiacal smile that lights up the face of the woman to the far left; or the young woman in the middle, her mouth caught mid-chant, her eyes simultaneously intense and vacant as she looks off to a place that is not there (the Greek for no-place being utopia, after all); or the young man in front holding the megaphone like a jazz soloist with the cool confidence that what he has to say is bigger than he is. It is something more than these visual markers. It is a presence permeating the whole image, that reaches out through history, past its present appropriation, down from this billboard and confronts me where I stand. I can feel that they believe. …