The Saudade of Hal Riney

The Voices Writers Hear In Their Heads

I write phonetically. That means I write for the ears, not the English teacher. I care about the flow, how the words sound together, and irregular syncopated rhythms that don’t obey meter.  I write how street talks and how the bar tells stories and jokes. When done well, this style of writing turns your ears into a second set of eyes.

Writing this way means I subvocalize. That’s a careful, non-psychotic way of saying I hear narrative voices in my head when I write.  If you are a slow reader like me, it’s probably” the way you read as well. Which is funny, given how much crap slow readers get for subvocalizing, when you never find a great writer who didn’t subvocalize or vocalize out loud what they wrote. End of protest. 

Sometimes when I’m in an editorial blogging mode, I hear Dick Cavitt’s smooth, conversational voice. I’m too young to have watched his talk shows, but if you read a couple of his old Opinionator posts in The New York Times, that voice sticks with you. When I’m being sardonic and irrelevant, a bit of Anthony Bourdain slips in. Watch two or three episodes of his show, and that voice sticks with you in the same way. And as much as I would like to have the talent of George Lois, I have instead inherited his unfiltered Bronx Irish neighborhood street mouth. 

But the voice that I can’t get out of my head is Hal Riney. There is a poetic touch to his voice that always ache’s in. A big part of that is he did the voice-over narration for his own advertisements. When you watch a Hal Riney commercial, you get the writing and the voice together. It doesn’t get any more direct injection than that. And it's rare, rare for his era, our era, or anybody’s era.  

Truth to Soul

I never understood why Hal Riney got stuck in my head. If you’re reading this far, you’re probably wondering the same thing. That changed when I watched an excellent documentary called “Art & Copy” from 2009. It’s worth hunting down online.

Hal Riney is the man who wrote Reagan’s iconic “Morning in America” campaign commercials. He did it after work, in the bar below his ad agency, drinking a bottle of bourbon and inhaling a pack of cigarettes. Full campaign, knocked out in two or three hours, by himself at a pub table. Had it been me, it would’ve been a Costco-size bottle of Jameson, the kind that looks normal in the hands of Andre the Giant or a Greek god, while inhaling a bottomless order of taquitos.

Then again, the resulting campaign would not have been, “It’s morning in America and more Americans are going to work.” it would have been, “It’s 3am in the Brockton projects and the Snap benefits just ran out.” Tapping into the same vein of ache with a needle filled with Methamphetamine panicked realism in the place of Riney’s cherry cloud opioid of “looking up” optimism.  In short, gritty as fu*k in truth, not making people feel happy. Those ads would never see the light of day. It’s truth to soul, not soul to wishes.

Soul to Wishes

Watching the documentary, Riney depicts San Francisco of his time (not ours) as the back water of the NYC centered ad world. San Francisco was where agencies sent their rejects who had talent, but didn’t fit with the “New York Groove”. A little later, he reveals with an unusual casual vulnerability the soul of his ads:

“Because of my childhood, emotion was a part that was always left out. I suspect I let advertising be a sort or avenue to express some of the things I might not experienced in my life. I missed a lot of things, and I certainly missed the kind of wonderful families we all still admire. And I think there is a lot of that in my work.” 

That is Saudade. 

It’s different than nostalgia. It’s not only the idealistic, life-weary aching for things that once were, but also the idealistic, life-weary aching for things we wish could be but never were. It can even extend to things that actually exist, but carry the imagined possibility of never happening. If that doesn’t break your mind, then this last part will: it’s not temporally locked or dependent on the past. It expands into the future, a nostalgia for things that will never be or will ever be experienced.

Conditions That Create Saudade

As you can see, Saudade is a complicated, multilayered emotion. If it weren’t embedded in my upbringing, I might not grasp it at all. I’m half Portuguese, and as determined as my Vavó was to Americanize me, Saudade was inescapable, woven into the marginalized, outlier psychology that’s always part of it.

Riney would never used the word Saudade. But he describes San Francisco’s position in the ad world of his day similar to Lisbon’s historic position in Europe: a forgotten western outpost excluded from the center where all the actual opportunities happen and all the real decisions are made. Coincidently, Lisbon is San Fransisco’s weather-wise twin. They even have similar bridges. 

Take that outlier setting and then add in his upbringing. This is a man idealistically longing for things that never were. It resonates with the quiet reflectiveness of a minor 9th jazz chord. Take in what he wrote for this Pierre ad:

That is poetry. It’s lyrically rhythmic. Perrier is a place that exists, but in this ad it carries the possibility of never happening. That possibility highlights how rare Perrier is, triggering the scarcity instinct that tells us rare equals valuable. He took a complicated element of Saudade and sold it as an emotion, connecting it to the afterglow hue of being rare and special.

The Hal Riney Experience

Welcome to the Hal Riney Experience or to paraphrase Jeff Goodby, who said in “Art & Copy”: 

“When Americans buy a Hal Riney experience, when they buy into one of his campaigns, many times what they are buying is what they wish their lives could be. A feeling for something that happed in their childhood or something that could have been better if you had that kind of dad or that kind of mom or lived in that kind of house or that little town. A time in America wished had happened that probably never did.”

That is Saudade. 

Hard to Communicate, But Universally Understood

Every so often, I’ll come across an ad with a fragment of Saudade. But most of the time, it’s just a slightly nuanced version of nostalgia. Saudade is hard to sell. Even in an ever-increasingly segmented world of audience targeting, it’s an emotion too complicated to communicate, too layered to connect to selling the way Riney could. It’s hard to communicate for me, and I’ve felt Saudade in every direction my whole life.

So it’s on us, the marketers, not the audience. Riney proved the audience gets it instantly when it’s communicated well. More than that, it resonates in a way few other emotions do. It has staying power, a long tail. And as hard as it is to believe, we still share variations of the same self-myths.

At the very least, we should appreciate how masterful Hal Riney was at communicating a rare, melancholic idealism that transmuted absence into tenderness while selling emotions he wished existed. Emotions we all wish existed. 

Hal Riney is Saudade.

💡 OffLabel-013 | Saudade

Diagnosis: Modern marketing confuses sincerity with sentimentality. It sells emotion as stimulus instead of using it as meaning.

Prescription: The Hal Riney Experience. Feelings that resonate feeling the most are ones that communicate depth. Riney showed that truth and tenderness can coexist.

Strategic Medication: Truth to Soul, Soul to Truth, Saudade [Provisional]