beauty is distorted
I’ve seen a few blogs link to this formally interesting Dove soap video which uses rapid jump cuts to depict the transformation of a fairly ordinary-looking woman into a hottie billboard model. The video shows the woman sitting down at a makeup chair, then quickly-edited shots show artists doing her hair and makeup. The video then shifts to a photo-editing application where her image is further touched up, finally transitioning to the woman’s image on a billboard. The meaning of the video seems to be intentionally ambiguous. On one hand it suggests that beauty is quite literally constructed: it takes a team of hairdressers, make-up artists, and designers to make a woman into a beauty ideal. On the other hand, it suggests that all women have the potential to conform to beauty norms, if they use the right products and techniques. Like much of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” it does a dance with feminist critiques of beauty ideals and promoting a consumer product.
Writing about the Dove campaign last year, Stay Free’s Carrie McLaren said, “he only reason Dove’s campaigns have caused such fervor is because advertisers have ignored feminist critics for decades and continued to parade the same bony skeletons with such uniformity that simply using non-anorexic models is enough to cut through the clutter.” I tend to agree with Carrie; it’s difficult to see how the campaign is motivated by an interest in changing general cultural attitudes when the benefit for Dove to differentiate its brand is much more immediate. (I think also of the use of breast cancer charities in earlier “pinkwashing” marketing campaigns.) Despite the appropriation of feminist thought for advertising purposes, perhaps these ads are still useful to feminists. For example, Jill/txt says she is showing the video to her daughter. Although some people may complain about the co-optation, it’s nice to have someone shell out the budget for a nicely designed media product that reflects your politics.
…or maybe not. The video is clearly an effort at viral marketing, harnessing feminists to email the video to their friends or post it to their blogs. To the right of the video, is a link that enables viewers to “tell a friend about this film.” (The film student in me cringes at the thought of calling the grainy, compressed video a “film.”) And while there’s no buttons to bookmark the site on del.icio.us or code to cut-and-paste on MySpace, the video engages the viewer in a different way. The call-to-action is not to buy the Dove beauty bar, but to get involved in the Campaign for Real Beauty. I’m unsure if any viewers would regard the campaign as a genuine grassroots effort, but passing off branding as political action seems to only reinforce the power of advertising in our culture. Rather than engage in true community organizing, this astroturf effort takes away time to promote a product and its attending discourses.
