By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Subliminal Man’ is a 1963 short story by J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), whose work has variously been categorised as ‘science fiction’, ‘dystopian’, ‘slipstream’, ‘alternative’, and a number of other labels. The story is set in a near-future world in which the population’s consumer habits are controlled by subliminal advertising, delivered via a series of signs that litter the urban landscape.
‘The Subliminal Man’: plot summary
Dr Robert Franklin, the story’s protagonist, is leaving the hospital where he works when he is accosted by Hathaway, a young down-and-out who is convinced that there is a conspiracy afoot to manipulate the population via giant road signs which are being erected around the town.
Franklin has little patience for Hathaway’s conspiracy theories, and reminds his unwanted visitor that subliminal advertising is both illegal and ineffective, but as he drives around the town and witnesses the signs everywhere – including a contradictory pair of signs which command him simultaneously to ‘Keep Away’ and ‘Buy Cigarettes’ – he starts to pay more heed to Hathaway’s worries.
The story is set in some near-future time when consumerism has become almost a religious compulsion: built-in obsolescence affects all household goods, cars, and other amenities, meaning they are ditched as little as a few months after their purchase in favour of the newer, improved model.
Uniformity is also the order of the day: where once there was buyer’s choice, now all cars are pretty much the same (Ballard was especially prophetic here), and we appear to have gone full-circle back to Henry Ford’s apocryphal ‘any colour as long as it’s black’ model of mass consumerism. There are four television channels, but they all show the same programme: only the adverts differ from one channel to the next. Choice is an illusion.
And cars, and the roads that they travel on, are central to Ballard’s future vision of consumerist dystopia: road tax accounts for thirty per cent of the country’s gross national product, we are told, while income tax provides just two per cent.
Hathaway predicts a grim future in which people are working seven days a week, and when they’re not working, they’re spending the money they’ve earned, in some cases working two jobs just to keep up with all the new appliances and gadgets they are being subliminally conditioned to want. Mrs Franklin herself insists on buying a fourth TV set – for the guest room – because ‘all the magazines’ tell her it’s what every household needs.
Although Franklin starts to become convinced Hathaway has a point, when he goes home he dismisses the idea of a conspiracy as preposterous. However, all of his reasons for rejecting the conspiracy theory as outlandish only go to prove Hathaway’s point.
Hathaway tells the doctor he is going to try to bring down the signs, and sure enough, a little time after this, there are reports of attacks on the giant signs around town; however, the television news states that these are the result of construction work rather than sabotage.
Franklin sits down and writes a list of all of the household appliances he has traded in recently, and he concludes that he has never consciously decided to buy anything; instead, each purchase has occurred almost beyond his own control.
Two months later, Franklin stumbles upon a commotion on a traffic island and finds police with shotguns apprehending Hathaway, who is standing atop one of the signs. The police suppress the crowd of onlookers, smashing windscreens and forcing Franklin back, and Hathaway jumps from the top of the sign, dying from the fall.
The story ends with Mrs Franklin trying to reassure her husband that Hathaway was in the grip of an ‘obsession’, and that he was deluded. Franklin remains unconvinced, but nevertheless, as a new sign goes up on the Franklins’ affluent estate, he tells his wife he will accompany her to the shops so he can order a new car, since the new models are coming out.
‘The Subliminal Man’: analysis
Ballard’s early short stories show far greater range and richness of subject-matter than his later work, which tended to show him recycling and reworking the same narrow selection of interests and obsessions (air flight, and the death of space travel, above all others; these themes came to dominate his fiction from 1974 onwards).
But ‘The Subliminal Man’ belongs to his early period, and might be productively paired with ‘The Watch-Towers’, a story from a year earlier (1962; ‘The Subliminal Man’ belongs to 1963). In both stories, some nebulous authority controls the populace via a series of structures, although in ‘The Watch-Towers’ the function of the titular towers is surveillance rather than influence.
The theme of ‘The Subliminal Man’, of course, is consumerism, and the way that people can be conditioned to want items which they have no real need for. Partly, a need is created via the manufacturers and the phenomenon of ‘built-in obsolescence’, so that, for example, a recently purchased television set starts to display interference, meaning that a new one is needed just a few months later.
But Ballard is also interested in the way that advertising functions to convince us we need things that we really don’t, and once we have been conditioned in that way, we can be made to want just about anything. Smoking is a good example: get a person to take it up and their bodies will do the rest, making them addicted.
Indeed, as he is driving home, Franklin sees the auto-mart at the side of the road and ‘abruptly remembered that he needed some cigarettes’: a prompt to himself, or a wish that has been subliminally suggested by something he has seen? Is this his lifelong addiction doing the work, or is this the malign influence of advertising, telling him he needs the cigarettes?
The early examples of such ‘needs’ in ‘The Subliminal Man’ – cigarettes, but also the whisky which Franklin, in an act of quiet protest, pours down the sink rather than drinking – are closely bound up with the psychology of addiction, but Ballard begins to pan out from these to more nonsensical ‘addictions’: a new car every few months, more television sets for every room in the house, and the rest of it.
And the television sets are themselves a kind of Trojan horse, existing in the world of ‘The Subliminal Man’ merely as an additional way for advertising to infiltrate the popular consciousness. There are four channels but only one programme, as in a totalitarian state, because the real purpose of those TV sets is to convince the ‘consumers’ who watch them that they need to buy more TV sets, in an endless cycle of wanting, buying, and needing more.