The final scene shows Andrea hugging an unnamed girlfriend. Commercial advertising is arguably today's most influential cultural grammar. It makes sense to tease out what these dense and expensively constructed pieces of communication tell us about ourselves. In this case, the message to young magazine readers could not be clearer. Love doesn't last.
Relationships come and go.
Marriages don't last either, not even your parents' marriage. The only thing that lasts in life is the brand name that you can purchase from our company. Much to our benefit, the recent history of advertising has attracted the attention of Thomas Frank, a leftist intellectual who writes for publications such as The Nation and In These Times and edits a Chicago-based journal called The Baffler. He is the author of The Conquest of Cool, a fascinating study of the U.S. advertising and menswear industries in the 1960s. In advertising, especially, he rules supreme.