The Double-Breasted Suit
In 1956 psychiatrist James Brussel was visited by NYPD officers desperate for help in uncovering the identity of a bomber terrorizing Consolidated Edison. After looking over the evidence, Brussel famously told the officers:
“When you catch him — and I have no doubt you will — he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.”
And, sure enough, he was. It was the beginning of the path to the criminal profiling which has since then been, alas, far less accurate more often than not.
The Blinking 12:00
The continually blinking illuminated 12:00 on a VCR which has never had its clock set becomes the symbol for a consumer product which is not marketed in the traditional method of informing buyers how to use it. When the VCR explosion occurred, it was without the tradition of demonstrative advertising. Instead, buyers were expected to figure things out from the included instruction manual. The VCR effectively marked the end of the tradition of demonstrative advertising and created the expectation that anyone buying new technology would be smart enough to figure out how to operate it using just the instruction manual.
Paul Cezanne
Noted French Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne becomes the central symbolic figure of being a “Late Bloomer” in the essay of that title. Cezanne is juxtaposed with Pablo Picasso to reveal the difference: Picasso’s early paintings auction for a greater value than those he painted later in life while the exactly opposite is true of Cezanne. Of course, this does create an equivalence between commercial success and quality that may not exist, but is only perceptually true.
Jana Novotna
The collapse of Jana Novotna in the 1993 ladies’ final at Wimbledon against Steffi Graff opens the essay titled “Why Some People Choke and Others Panic.” Novotna was just five points away from winning the championship when the level of her play just seemed to drop precipitously at once. She becomes therefore the essay’s definitive symbol of “choking” under pressure.
Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell himself becomes a symbol in an essay that looks at the mechanics, complications and consequence of plagiarism from the perspective that it is sometimes difficult to determine the fine line between stealing and borrowing, homage and theft, and unconscious inspiration and conscious lack of attribution. His article “Damages” published in the New Yorker issue of February 24, 1997 becomes the locus of his transformation into symbol as a result of its seemingly irrefutable case of being plagiarized by a successful Broadway playwright.
