FREE ESSAY ON SOUTHERN COMFORT

SOUTHERN COMFORT

The old ball-and-chain is a phrase that many Americans are familiar with. Oftentimes we
imagine it spilling forth from the lips of some distressed, fatigued, overworked man who
is with his nagging wife. It is this image that the advertisers for Southern Comfort are
trying to reproduce. They want the person looking at the ad to sympathize with the man in
the image, the man dragging his imaginary ball-and-chain. We associate the ball and chain
with oppression, hard labor, and unfairness. These connotations are probably derived from
the images that we have seen in old prison movies where the convicts are forced to work
the fields, shackled by a ball and chain. Let us back up for a moment though and look at
just how this Southern Comfort ad takes us from the image of a man to the labor intensive
fields of old prison movies.
There are many denotations in this ad. There is a man, three women, bags, sides of
buildings, a chair, writing on a window, a sidewalk-like walkway, a bottle of Southern
Comfort, some white lines, and two lines of copy. The first line of copy reads, Your free
time may have changed. Your drink doesn't have to. The second line reads, Hang on to your
spirit. There is also a division in the ad, the top two-thirds of the ad being the photo
image and the bottom one third being a black background.
How is it that the advertisers take our mind from the image on the page to the thoughts
that progress in our head? To figure this out let us more closely examine the images, or
signs, that have been presented to us. Let us first examine the image of the man in the
ad. He is dressed casually preppie, wearing khakis and a blue, collared shirt. Tucked
under his left arm is a box and his hands are full of shopping bags. On his right foot is
the image of a ball-and-chain created from dashed white lines. On the man's right (the
direction in which he is looking) is a woman wearing a short black dress with black
heeled-shoes. The woman is holding onto the right arm of the man, clutching a purse with
her right hand. Her head is turned toward him and she appears to be smiling. Much of our
reaction to this ad comes solely from looking at these two individuals. More
specifically, from the image of the man.
The brightness of the man's shirt and the bags he is carrying stands in contrast to the
black of the woman's dress and thus attracts our eye toward him. The fact that he is
carrying so many bags, whereas the other individuals in the ad have at most one bag, also
makes him the center of our attention. By using metonymy, we substitute the bags that the
man is carrying to mean that there has been a day of shopping, a shopping spree perhaps.
The paradigmatic relation between the man and woman, aided by our own codes of what the
duties of both the male and female are in a relationship, leads us to assume that the
bags do not belong to the man but rather, he is carrying them for the woman next to him.
It would be one thing if the man were walking along carrying the bags by himself but once
we see the woman next to him, holding onto his arm, our mind begins to draw its own
conclusions. Another paradigmatic relation begins to form after we have made the
assumption that the man is carrying the bags for the woman. The image of the ball
and-chain along with the woman's grasp of the man's arm, leads us to believe that the
man's presence here may not be a completely voluntary action. Rather, one may begin to
associate this with the myth of commitment, of a man becoming whipped. That is to say,
the man is suckered in or captured by the woman and is then forced to do things that he
otherwise would not do (in this case, spend the day shopping).
The copy of the article supports the myth of commitment, or the lifestyle change that a
man is forced to undergo once he enters into a relationship with a woman. It blatantly
reads, Your free time may have changed, referring back to the paradigm of masculinity,
that a man would not, under normal circumstances, choose to be shopping (this paradigm
that shopping is a female hobby is also reinforced in the ad by the fact that there is
only one male figure in the ad as opposed to the three women, and the only man is there
because he is fulfilling some unstated requirement of a male in a relationship). In the
next line, Your drink doesn't have to, the syntagmatic relation of the words in relation
to the previous phrase, leads one to assume that the Southern Comfort being advertised is
the drink that the man used to use before his life was interrupted by the woman, or is at
least a common drink of choice for bachelors. Making this connection is important because
it links the drink to the freedom that the man presumably had before he became whipped,
the freedom that men like to hold on to. The next line of copy, Hang on to your spirit,
stands out from the rest of the copy because it looks like individually cut-out words
which stand out on the contrasting black background. Our mind associates these cut-outs
as looking like the print found in newspapers or magazines. By using the cut-and-pasted
words the advertisers invoke the ransom myth. This myth is something that we have seen in
numerous movies, the villain/kidnapper of the film using cut-out letters and words so as
to prevent being traced. In this sense, one can see this line of copy as a warning. The
advertiser is warning the consumer not to let what happened to the man in the ad happen
to them, not to let the man's bachelor spirit be overtaken by a demanding woman. They are
imploring the consumer to hold on to their freedom found in their old way of life, which
has been linked to the Southern Comfort.