18
Popular Culture Review
In the three Camel advertisements, the cigarette promotion is integrated into
the sexualised depiction of the trapeze act. Smoking is personified with the
performance persona of the female performer in a narrative which depicts time
passing in the act. The cigarette becomes the reward for undertaking these
exceptional physical acts. But aerial feats look risky and so the cigarette is
positioned in a continuum of risky activity that constitutes enjoyable
entertainment. In an advertisement that highlights spectator responses, the
pleasure of a cigarette is collapsed into the pleasure of viewing trapeze acts. The
full sensory engagement of live circus is aligned with the smell, taste, and sight
of cigarettes in what Dennis calls the “multisensual and intercorporeal smoking
practice” (2006: 48). Perceptual sensory engagement with the trapeze
performance unfolds in similar ways. Flying and smoking are depicted as
embodied activities to evoke and engage with the sensory body responses of the
reader/spectator.
Trapeze performance suggests a sublime experience arising out of evocative
sensory encounters that also arouse anxiety about a sudden fall. What Richard
Klein writes about cigarettes could equally apply to flying trapeze action. He
says, “That beauty has never been understood or represented as unequivocally
positive; the smoking of cigarettes has always been understood [...] has always
been associated with distaste transgression, and death. Kant calls ‘sublime’ that
aesthetic satisfaction which includes as one of its moments a negative
experience, a shock, a blockage” (Klein 1993: xi).
A spectator’s breath-holding in response to the risk of a trapeze flyer falling
may be akin to the physical shock of inhaling smoke. Such physical reactions
can arise concurrently with the sensory awareness of the beauty of a body in
flying action or seeing beauty in cigarette smoke rising in the air. Additionally
there is relief and/or satisfaction with completion of an act of smoking or flying.
Although the action comes from a socially defined, material body, the aesthetics
of flying or smoking evoke phenomenological extremes through the senses so
that the beauty of rising, floating, lightness, also prefigure a notion of death
through transcendence.
La Trobe University
Peta Tait
Notes
1 For a discussion o f advertising as popular culture and linked to entertainment, see
Fowles (1996: 11, 43 -8 ). For an example o f cigarette advertising as an entertaining social
history, see Webb Smith (1990).
2 The author viewed 20th century RBBBC Programs and Bertram Mills Circus programs
most recently at the Joe E. Ward Circus Collection, Boxes 31-7, Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, University o f Texas at Austin, 30 July to 5 August 2007.
3 Author’s interview with Norma Fox, 23 July 2007, Sarasota Florida, and subsequent
biographical information comes from this interview.
4 The Old Gold cigarette brand is advertised with one image o f the wire-artist Herbert
Castle in the RBBBC program 1951: 57.
5 Solo trapeze performer Luisita Leers, who was noticeably muscular, was promoted