How Far Does the Avengers Reflect the 'Pop' Aesthetic of the 1960S

Susan Landon The Avengers and the ‘Pop’ aesthetic of the 1960s The Avengers is iconic in the ‘pop’ aesthetic of the 60s. In this essay I will explore how much the Avengers reflected and contribued to that pop aesthetic. In the first part I will consider what the ‘Pop’ aesthetic of the 1960s actually is, and will move on to look at the influence of ‘The Avengers’ on that ‘Pop’ aesthetic. Since The Avengers spans two decades (from the sixties’ first series to the seventies’ New Avengers – and, technically, also the film made in 1998, which is, frankly, little more than revisionist nostalgia) the stylistic developments that take place over the years mean that not all of what we call The Avengers reflects the pop aesthetics of the 1960s. While this would in itself be an interesting topic for discussion, in this essay I will be focussing on episodes made in the sixties and their specific relationship to ‘Pop’ aesthetics. Finally, beyond simply reflecting pop culture and pop aesthetics, I will look at how far The Avengers of the sixties actually contributed to the creation of this pop aesthetic. If culture is both for and of its time, then programmes like The Avengers should be viewed as active agents and protagonists in creating the culture of their time and, ultimately, become ‘Pop’ in their own right.1 The Avengers was the first TV series to hire an ‘Exploitation Manager’ and have its own fashion line spin-off, creating both a new market (by fetishising the pop aesthetic), and marketing scheme (i.e. the programme itself), in one fell swoop.2 Thus, in discussing The Avengers’ interventions in pop we frequently end up faced with the aesthetics of the postmodern. For Pop Artist Richard Hamilton, pop is: “Popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business”.3 1 Chapman, James “Is There Honey Still for Tea? The Avengers” in Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp.52-99; p.99. 2 Miller, Toby, (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p.47. 3 Richard Hamilton, quoted in James Chapman, “The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the ‘High Sixties’” in Windows on The Sixties, ed. Anthony Aldgate; James Chapman; Arthur Marwick, (I.B. Tauris: London, 2000), pp.37-69; p.59. 1 Susan Landon Pop Art involved the breakdown of the barrier between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, but the way in which this was done, and the reasoning behind it, varies. What we now call ‘Pop Art’ was sparked by the boom in consumerism and advertising in Britain and America during the 1950s, at its peak in the 60s. Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956, produced for the ‘This Is Tomorrow’ exhibition of the Independent Group in London), is held up as one of the first works of Pop Art and points to the emergence of a relationship between advertising and new consumer ‘lifestyle choices’. Here, Hamilton parodies the way advertising manipulates desires: Adverts from magazines fill the living room of a young couple who pose naked among them and the phallic lollipop held by the bodybuilder proclaims ‘pop’, which, juxtaposed with his overbuilt body, heavily hints at the strain which advertising exerts on individuals/consumers.4 According to Arthur Marwick, “there was no sharp, dialectical divide between a commercialised, mainstream culture and a socialistic, non-profit-making alternative culture” during the sixties.5 Although no “sharp, dialectical divide” strictly existed in Britain and America in the 1960s, there were nevertheless clear differences in values, and a need to assert political positions. One of Arthur Marwick’s examples for the blurring of cultural divides between alternative culture and commercial mainstream is Andy Warhol. Although closely linked to alternative culture, Warhol did not advocate it as “socialistic”, or “non-profit-making”. Indeed, Warhol’s “reverence” for the capitalist system is evident in his tributes to Campbell’s soup tins and Brillo boxes, which are themselves consumer objects produced in a similar way to the objects they celebrate. Like Hamilton’s work this breaks the barrier between high and low art – but it does so by exploiting and celebrating the capitalist system rather than offering any critique or parody of it. 4 This could be read as a visual precursor of what Richard Dyer later articulates in his assessment of images of men. According to Dyer the penis can never live up to the phallus, and images of men in advertising and elsewhere perpetuate this straining quest for the phallus. Dyer, Richard, ‘Don’t look now: The Male Pin-Up’, printed in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.265-276. 5 Marwick, Arthur, Windows on the Sixties, ed. Anthony Aldgate; James Chapman; Arthur Marwick, (I.B. Tauris: London, 2000), p.xiii. 2 Susan Landon Mass produced images are physically worthless: their value lies in the ideology they support and propagate, making them agents. As Walter Benjamin points out in his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the original, ‘authentic’ work of art can be reproduced, but there will still be only one ‘authentic’ original.6 A reproduction is only ever a tribute, a reference to the aura of the original. Aside from making money, a function of reproducing works of art is to advertise the uniqueness of the original, which no copy can compensate for. Actual adverts make use of this relationship between the copy and the “authentic” object (i.e. their product) more openly, and it is this that made them appealing to artists. The Avengers had little to do with Pop art to begin with. As I have acknowledged, The Avengers is not a single text, but a “set of texts” which span the entire decade of the 1960s.7 At the outset it was intended as a spin-off of a previous series, Police Surgeon, but after the first series with Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry (the “dirty old men on the run”, in Macnee’s words),8 it began to evolve into an independent programme. As with any long-running series, The Avengers underwent a number of reinventions over the years it was aired. My suggestion is that these reinventions take place around the lead characters; each time a new lead is introduced there is an opportunity for a radical change in style born out of this new character. As Toby Miller notes, “[Steed] provides a top-and-tail presence to mark equilibrium, but his partner is often the agent of change”.9 These leads are therefore crucial in the development of the series, and from Honor Blackman onwards they are all female. Having women at the locus of stylistic change does something very familiar. It codifies and sells pop aesthetics to women, but also sells them as images to men: 6 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; transl. Harry Zorn, (London : Pimlico, 1999), pp.211-244. 7 Chapman, James, “The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the ‘High Sixties’”, p.37. 8 Miller, p.43. 9 Miller, p.71. 3 Susan Landon As in America of the 1950s, British women in the 1960s were central to consumption. Much like television itself, women were at the heart of the home and the consumer economy, but female spies on television mark the disparities between women as consumers and consumable images.10 Rosie White exposes a key problem with the ‘Pop’ aesthetic: its use of, and dialogue with, women. Women’s position in society was beginning to open up to new possibilities, and becoming more ambiguous in the process. One of the once-popular arguments made for The Avengers was to champion it as a feminist text, but most scholars would agree it is not as straightforward as this. In interviews Diana Rigg herself seems unsure of her status as feminist icon (this is not surprising given the number of scenarios in which she is the one trapped, tied up, or used as bait). 11 Even in episodes where she requires little or no help from Steed it seems that Emma Peel is objectified or cut up in some way in order to right the power balance. In ‘The House That Jack Built’ she is trapped in a moving house created in her honour by an obsessed employee effecting posthumous revenge for being fired by her some years before.12 The sequence where Emma Peel is walking around an exhibition of her own life is particularly interesting, especially in that it culminates with her actually cutting through a poster of her own image and discovering the main control room of the house (fig. 1). We see a similar theme in ‘The Joker’, another scenario in which Emma Peel is invited to a large country house in the middle of nowhere and trapped. Again the villain is an old nemesis who we learn she has previously slighted, and who has subsequently developed an unhealthy obsession with her. In this case it is he and not her who cuts up her image (fig. 2). In both episodes, Emma Peel is the character with most of the screen time. Although Steed comes to her aid in ‘The Joker’, in ‘The House that Jack Built’ she manages to defeat the house by herself, quipping at Steed’s belated attempt at being the knight in 10 White, Rosie, Violent Femmes, (London: Routledge, 2007), p.62. 11 Rigg has said, “I never think of myself as sexy.

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