Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 20

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