When Professor Lipton mentioned that the advertisement we analyzed did not necessarily have to be from a magazine, I jumped at the chance to look deeper into the image above.
The image is from the front cover of the season one DVD set of my favourite television series Six Feet Under. While this image is not from a magazine, I do believe it is a very valid advertisement; it is meant to pull the audience, or in this case the consumer, in and entice them to buy the product.
In this image we see the nose and mouth of a person who is lying down, The white of the person's skin immediately signifies death, as do the words "Six Feet Under". But then, how is death appealing? Death is appealing because it is unknown; after all, only the dead know what it's like to die.
Cleverly though, the makers of the image have rid it of fear in order to make it more appealing. The use of a bright lipstick, which has been partially applied to the mouth of the dead person suggests a certain liveliness, especially when juxtaposed against the person's pale white skin. In a sense, the lipstick is covering up anything fearful about death buy presenting the consumer with something familiar: lipstick. In addition, the person applying the lipstick is wearing cloves, which signifies a certain safety, as if to say "Yes, this person is dead, but it's okay because I'm wearing gloves.
The image is an effective one because it advertises what Six Feet Under is all about (in addition to being quite eye-catching). I believe Six Feet Under's main goal was to normalize death, remove the fear from and, and sometimes even make fun of it. As one of the show's main characters once stated "...if you rearrange the letters in 'funeral', you get real fun" (Six Feet Under, 2001).
>Six Feet Under. Dir. Alan Ball. Perf. Francis Conroy, Peter Krouse, Lauren Ambrose Michael C. Hall. HBO 2001
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