16
Popular Culture Review
strategy have a somewhat less proficient drawing style and framing narration.
The three RBBBC Camel advertisements unfold as narratives of physical and
social action and female prowess that are reminiscent of an action-based comic
book. The display of circus action mimics animated cartoons, which Norman
Klein finds “are a record of consumer rituals” over decades in North American
society (1993: 3). Comic books became a medium of heroic action and
superheroes in popular culture and capture a sense of movement as well as
narrative development. Of comic book precedents, Joseph Witek explains that
there are powerful social “fantasies embodied in Superman and Batman” (1989:
7). Aerialists can appear like superheroes in their upper body muscular
development and seem superhuman in their flying action.
In these advertisements, cigarette smoking is also linked to a combination
of social risk-taking in defiance of gender identity difference, and the physical
risk-taking exemplified by circus. Perhaps these associations were inadvertent
and not intended by the advertisers. Nonetheless circus performance, if not
circus life, conveyed adventurous physical behaviour and taking risks with
social identity as women excelled at feats requiring courage and muscular
strength commonly associated with masculinity.
The reputations of female circus stars such as Gould, Fox, and especially
Concello, with her execution of the exceptional triple somersault, had been
made prior to the post-war 1950s society that encouraged women’s withdrawal
from the work force. If female aerialists were the embodiment of daring by the
turn of the twentieth century, the post-World War II decades of trapeze
performance displayed a gendered pattern of activity with female performers as
decorative additions in choruses or in supporting roles in flying trapeze troupes
(Tait 2005: 90-1). For three decades (from the 1950s) female aerialists were no
longer expected to train for the very difficult tricks expected of predecessors like
Gould, Fox, and Concello.
Sensory Body Phenomenology
As indicated, the Camel advertisements were intended to be read in
conjunction with attendance at the circus, so that the brand became associated
with the excitement of viewing the circus. The sights, sounds and smells of the
circus, the sensory responses, are distinctive and through branding aerial action
with the nomenclature of Camel, the cigarettes co-opted the sensations of circus
viewing, its viscerality. After the event, the brand potentially evoked memories
of the circus, and thus rekindled felt bodily experience of this thrilling
engagement. The habit of smoking is also a response to the arousal of felt bodily
responses.
Dennis explains that smoking can be considered to extend the
phenomenological body in the world, and that this understanding might also
include literal ideas of escape (2006: 41 [Katz]). She outlines how cigarette
advertising intertwines the body and the world, and while the body is grounded,
the exhaled smoke can “offer an avenue of escape to sites located beyond the
bounds of the sited body” (ibid: 42). At the beginning of the 21st century, Dennis