Western landscape helps sell products Samsung credit card services films a scene depicting cavemen protecting their nest egg in an Alabama Hills cave. The company was one of about eight to use the local landscape for television commercial shoots in Inyo County during the last month alone. Photo by Chris Langley
Inyo County Film Commissioner6-19-2008
Commercials use various myths, buyer expectations and visual cues to sell their products. Analyzing commercials as artifacts of our time, for indicators of our culture and measures of our expectations and assumptions can tell us about how customers at home and across the world see us as a people, a history and a region. Learning how commercials manipulate us can help us be visually literate viewers, making us less susceptible to their manipulations.
While feature films like “Iron Man” are spectacular and lucrative in benefiting the local economy, commercial projects and production companies are our “bread and butter.” They are better funded. After all, their half-million to million-dollar budgets are basically focused on creating a 30-second image, and producing it in three days of filming.
In the last month, seven or eight commercials filmed in Inyo County. Their product was of diverse content, intent and images. They probably left behind near $1 million in revenues locally. They were unique in that because of the weakened dollar internationally, they were foreign sponsors using American production companies to create commercials for an international audience.
Our analysis of the nature and efficacy of the images the advertising agencies create may be more complex because of the international nature of our filming business and the intended audiences these days.
These companies come because of our intimate and epic landscape, because of their beauty and high production value for less cost, and because the county and its residents are “film friendly.” However, it is not just because of these factors that they come to film. It is because the landscape can be used to create associations with their product that may induce the consumer to purchase the product, as if by doing so they bring home part of the association, the landscape and the myth of the West with it.
Some of the products that were the focus of these commercials were cars: Land Rover, BMW and Lancia and Nissan Xterra. Choice Hotels and Samsung credit card services also filmed commercials locally; Mastercard was denied a permit because they insisted on riding bikes on the boulders of the Alabama Hills and felt they didn’t have to compromise their vision of the “hero” shot at the end. That was even with the dictum we now use for the Alabama Hills: “Don’t show it, if you can’t do it.”
Some of the elements of these commercials we will focus on are buffalo on the road to Death Valley, a giant saguaro cactus in the Alabama Hills, travel to exotic Tibet and cavemen protecting their nest egg in an Alabama Hills cave.
Frequently, new cars must be photographed in our scenic landscape to prove they are up to the challenge and that the driver takes on the cowboy image of man alone in the Western hostile environment. Unfortunately, a corollary of this idea is that the car can “conquer” this environment, which suggests the negative environmental impact of driving these vehicles in the delicate desert landscape. Author Elliott West in his essay, “Selling the Myth: Western Images in Advertising,” states, “Western themes, with allusions to restless power, have been a staple of auto ads for 60 years, but during the last quarter century they have become far more common. This may reflect new engineering and the growing popularity of four-wheel vehicles; the ability to leave the pavement and crash through brush and over small trees may feed fantasies of liberation and mastering the land that are pictured best in a western setting.”
Two iconic symbols of the West turn out to be buffalo and saguaro cactus. Easy to identify, unique to the American West and apparently well known internationally, artificial buffalo and cactus were placed for vehicles to drive by. To a certain extent, they have been threatened, abused and are easy to attack in our landscape, no matter how out of place they are in an Inyo environment.
English Professor Michael L. Johnson in his new book, “Hunger For the Wild: America’s Obsession with the Untamed West,” analyzes America’s ambiguous attitudes about the tame and the Wild West in great detail. He begins by quoting scholar Richard W. Etulain who says, “The hunger for a Wild West … arose well before 1900 and … continues to the present.”
Locally and across the West this yearning can be seen in the desire to protect the “wildness” of the land but be able to visit the land in a very tame setting of RVs, air conditioning and the all the comforts modern technology provides us.
These car commercials associate the somewhat wild West with the definitely tame comforts of the SUV and their associated power over the land. Of course, they are very comfortable and safe at the same time.
Johnson has created a term for how the West has been treated in the last 25 years. He calls it the “Ralphlaurenization” of the West. Author Ray Allen Billington has written, “The enthusiasm for the American West – real or legendary – generated by a century of image-making found its most revealing expression in the frontier-worshipers who appeared in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s.”
Next time we continue by looking at commercials made here in the last five years that used the West to sell a product. We will also see how cavemen, exotic locations and a global outlook began to create the image of a “post-regional West,” a kind of new West that makes our debate about wilderness and a tamed West even more complex.
Langley can be reached by phone at (760) 937-1189 or by e-mail at
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