Andrew Dominik (born 7 October 1967) is a New Zealand-born Australian film director and screenwriter. He has directed the crime film Chopper, the Western drama film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the neo-noir crime film Killing Them Softly.
Jean Kilbourne, creator of Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women, discusses ‘The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women’ at TEDxLafayetteCollege conference. Below is the full transcript of the TEDx Talk.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: The dangerous ways ads see women by Jean Kilbourne at TEDxLafayetteCollege
TRANSCRIPT:
Killing Them Softly is a 2012 American neo-noir crime film written and directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Brad Pitt, based on George V. Higgins' novel Cogan's Trade (1974). The film is about three small-time crooks who rob a Mob-protected illegal gambling operation, which prompts the Mob to send in two hitmen, Jackie (Pitt) and Mickey (James Gandolfini), to deal with the perpetrators. Haven't gone through all of them yet, but the ones I checked are real scripts. Many are shooting scripts with the usual indicators. Lots of common ones, so if you already collect, then you probably have a lot of them. Screenplay Request: Killing Them Softly. Posted by 5 years ago. Screenplay Request: Killing Them Softly. We still had a few weeks on our contract with the network and spent them working on the pilot script and outlines to see if we could get them to a point the execs liked and approved. After a lot of work we were able. Screenplay Request: Killing Them Softly. Posted by 5 years ago. Screenplay Request: Killing Them Softly. Been looking everywhere for this script.
I started collecting ads and talking about the image of women in advertising in the late 1960s. As far as I know, I was the first person to do this. I tore ads out of magazines, put them on my refrigerator, and gradually, I began to see a pattern in the ads, a kind of statement about what it meant to be a woman in the culture. I put together a slide presentation and began traveling around the country.
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In 1979, I made my first film “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women”, which I have remade three times since then.
These were some of the ads in my original collection long time ago. “Feminine odor is everyone’s problem.”
“If your hair isn’t beautiful, the rest hardly matters.”
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“Honey, your anti-antiperspirant spray just doesn’t do it.”
“I’d probably never be married now, if I hadn’t lost 49 pounds.” Which, one woman told me, was the best advertisement for fat she had ever seen.
I am going to do a very abbreviated version of this talk, of course, today, but I want to begin with a question that I most often get asked, which is: “How did you get into this? What got you started?” Many factors in my life led to this interest. I became active in the second wave of the women’s movement right away in the late 1960s. I’d worked in media. I spent a year in London working for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and a year in Paris working for a French film company. This sounds much more glamorous than it was — I was a secretary. In those days, options for women were very limited. I was a secretary, I was a waitress, but I did have one other option that I rarely talk about. I was encouraged to enter beauty pageants and to model. This is artfully cropped to make it look as if I won. I was, in fact, the runner up. This was my first ad, and I think the car tells you something about how long ago this was, and this ran in a London newspaper.
So modeling was one of the very few ways that a woman could make money in those days. It was very seductive, but for me it was also alienating, it was soul-destroying. There was a whole lot of sexual harassment that came with the territory, so I didn’t follow that path. But it left me with a lifelong interest in the whole idea of beauty and the power of the image.
Since that time, advertising has become much more widespread, powerful, and sophisticated than ever before. Babies at the age of 6 months can recognize corporate logos, and that’s the age at which marketers are now starting to target our children. At the same time, just about everyone feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising. So wherever I go, what I hear more than anything else is: “I don’t pay attention to ads, I just tune them out. They have no effect on me.” I hear this most often from people wearing Abercrombie T-shirts, but that is another story. The influence of advertising is quick, cumulative, and for the most part, subconscious. Ads sell more than products.
Now, in many ways, we have obviously come a long way. But from my perspective of over 40 years, the image of women in advertising is worse than ever. The pressure on women to be young, thin, beautiful is more intense than ever before. It’s always been impossible. Years ago, the supermodel Cindy Crawford said: “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.” She couldn’t of course, no one can look like this. But it’s really impossible today because of the magic of Photoshop, which can turn this woman into this woman and then try to make us believe that an anti-aging cream can do this.
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Now, she is a beautiful woman, but older women are considered attractive in our culture only insofar as we stay looking impossibly young. We learn to read men’s and women’s faces very differently. Here we have Brad Pitt and former supermodel Linda Evangelista, about the same age, each one of them in an ad for Chanel, but he gets to look like a human being, and she is transformed into a cartoon.
Now sometimes, every now and then, a celebrity resists. As you may know, just this week Lorde sent out a tweet with an unretouched photograph below the photoshopped version, and she tweeted: “Remember, flaws are OK.” Good for her, but this doesn’t happen very often.
Men are photoshopped too, but when men are photoshopped, they are made bigger. Andy Roddick laughed when he saw the bulked-up arms on this cover photo, and suggested they should be returned to the man they belong to.
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Sometimes people say to me, “You’ve been talking about this for 40 years, have things gotten any better?” And actually I have to say really they’ve gotten worse. Ads sell more than products. They sell values, they sell images, they sell concepts of love and sexuality, of success and perhaps most important – normalcy. To a great extent they tell us who we are and who we should be.
Well what does advertising tell us about women? It tells us, as it always has, that’s what’s most important is how we look. So the first thing the advertisers do is surround us with images of ideal female beauty. Women learn from a very early age that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy and above all money, striving to achieve this look and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail. And failure is inevitable because the ideal is based on absolute flawlessness. She never has any lines or wrinkles, she certainly has no scars or blemishes, indeed she has no pores. And the most important aspect of this flawlessness is that it can not be achieved, no one looks like this including her; and this is the truth, no one looks like this. The supermodel Cindy Crawford once said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.” She doesn’t, she couldn’t, because this is a look that’s been created for years through airbrushing and cosmetics but these days it’s done through the magic of computer retouching. Keira Knightley is given a bigger bust; Jessica Alba is made smaller; Kelly Clarkson… well isn’t this interesting it says, “Slim down your way” but she in fact slimmed down the Photoshop way. You almost never see a photograph of a woman considered beautiful that hasn’t been Photoshopped.
We all grow up in a culture in which women’s bodies are constantly turned into things and objects, here’s she’s become the bottle of Michelob. In this ad she becomes part of a video game. And this is everywhere, in all kinds of advertising. Women’s bodies are turned into things and objects. Now of course this affects female self esteem. It also does something even more insidious – it creates a climate of widespread violence against women. I’m not at all saying that an ad like this directly causes violence, it’s not that simple but turning a human being in to a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. We see this with racism, we see it with homophobia, we see it with terrorism. It’s always the same process. The person is dehumanised and violence becomes inevitable. And that step is already and constantly taken against women.
Women’s bodies are dismembered in ads, hacked apart – just one part of the body is focused upon, which of course is the most dehumanising thing you could do to someone. Everywhere we look, women’s bodies have been turned into things and often just parts of things. And girls are getting the message these days just so young, that they need to be impossibly beautiful. Hot, sexy, extremely thin – they also get the message that they’re going to fail, there’s no way they’re going to really achieve it. Girls tend to feel fine about themselves when they’re 8, 9, 10 years old but they hit adolescence and they hit the wall and certainly a part of this wall is this terrible emphasis on physical perfection. So no wonder we have an epidemic of eating disorders in our country and increasingly throughout the world.
I’ve been talking about this for a very long time and I keep thinking that the models can’t get any thinner but they do. They get thinner and thinner and thinner. This is Ana Carolina Reston who died a year ago of anorexia weighing 88 pounds and at the time she was still modelling. So the models literally can not get any thinner so Photoshop is brought to the rescue. There are exceptions however – Kate Winslet has been outspoken about her refusal to allow Hollywood to dictate her weight. When British GQ magazine this photograph of Winslet which was digitally enhanced to make her look dramatically thinner, she issued a statement that the alterations were made without her consent and she said, “I don’t look like that and more importantly I don’t desire to look like that. I can tell you that they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third.” Bless her heart.
So, what can we do about all of this? Well the first step is to become aware, to pay attention, and to recognise that this affects all of us. These are public health problems that I’m talking about. The obsession with thinness is a public health problem, the tyranny of the ideal image of beauty, violence against women. These are all public health problems that affect us all and public health problems can only be solved by changing the environment.
By Jean Kilbourne
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