Worthy Of Their Hire

[thedarkages]

Today, the LA Times had an editorial on product placement in novels -- novelists placing specific companies' products in their work in exchange for medium-sized sums of money. The idea gives me pause. On the one hand, novelists need money, and if they can induce companies to give it to them without undue effort on their part, so much the better. Moreover, according to some of my writing teachers, detail is where it is at. The more realistic details you can give, showing that you've gotten into the interior of things, the better. What could be more real than the specific instantiation of a specific product? In one of my essays, a piece of engineered lumber played a crucial part, and the more details I was able to get about that lumber -- its weight, its loading capacity, its brand name and product designation -- the better the essay became. It wouldn't have worked without the brand name. On the other hand, products, and the ad campaigns which sell them, are by their nature ephemeral. The iPod begat the iPod mini which begat the iPod nano, and, although only a true geek could tell you which generation of what product came out in what year, the specification of the product ties the novel into a specific time. For certain novels, which are meant to sell and be read at a specific time, this works out well. For example, Jackie-Collins-style beach novels are festooned with brand names of the moment, and if you don't know that the AMG S55 (for the non SoCal car-culture-clued-in, a $115,000 highly-modified Mercedes) is the car in which the buff corporate executive should be squiring around his rock-and-roll girlfriend, don't worry, it will change in the next summer's product. If you're trying to illustrate universal truths about the human condition, brand-name specificity is not necessarily your friend. You may not want to recreate a specific year, and have your novel deemed of archaeological significance some years hence. Some of the best novels -- I am thinking here of Iris Murdoch's -- operate in a middle ground, where it could be today or 1981, but the human dynamics remain the same.

The other question is whether placements detract from the integrity of the novel. I think it depends on how aggressive advertisers want to be with their placements (and how willing authors are to go along with them.) If I were given an assignment to write a novel mentioning Diet Coke five times, the writing of the novel would be a much more serious task than inserting the plugs. One could, however, foresee a situation in which the heroine is the one who must do the drinking of the Diet Coke; perhaps she may have to express her satisfaction and refreshment, vocally, at least twice. Going further, one could make the villain drink Pepsi, tossing his unrecycled cans over his shoulder. Going still further, one could make the characters express their class differences by means of their product choices -- perhaps "placing" the product, whose valence has yet to be secured by a campaign, among other products already determined by research to be well-regarded. And, why not go whole hog, by basing one's character development on Yankelovich groups? Just as reality shows fabricated by marketers have become common currency, why not novels? I think of all the working writers-for-hire I've known over the years, who have been given a 30-page "treatment" and a 225-page limit, and then turned loose with six weeks to write the next paperback-only SEAL Team Seven. (An aside: how is the young Kaavya Viswanathan, pressed by her packagers, any different from these pros, besides being inexperienced and unschooled?) They would jump at the chance to write this stuff. I suppose that filtering it out will be the work of critics. Then again, these days, who listens to critics?

P.S. - On the implications of pervasive advertising, see Alex Shakar's underappreciated novel, The Savage Girl.

Comments

[willendorf5761.livejournal.com]

The early Stephen King novels contained a lot of references to specific products (I don't know about his more recent works). I found it annoying even as a teenager.

The image of a villain tossing his soda can over his shoulder sounds like something straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel. In fact, in his novel _Sick Puppy_ the whole plot is set in motion by a villain tossing a piece of litter out the window of his car.