"In America, seduction is dishonest"

Marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille explains why Americans invented fast food and fast sex -- while the French, despite their cultural "senility," know how to savor their adulterous liaisons.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Obesity, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

Illustration by Mignon Khargie / Salon.com

May 20, 2006 | Clotaire Rapaille is a controversial, often outrageous figure, an anthropologist turned marketing guru and Frenchman turned American. From his flamboyant appearance (he swans around in a cravat and black velvet frock coat, drives a Rolls-Royce, plays polo and lives in a restored industrialist's mansion in Tuxedo Park, N.Y.) to his sweeping pronouncements on the "archetypes" underlying various national cultures, he tends to elicit either rapt attention or dismissive scorn. Academics write him off as both irrational and behind the times, rival market researchers accuse him of being simplistic and a shameless self-promoter -- but an impressive roster of Fortune 100 companies have engaged his services and come back for more again and again.

Rapaille's method involves a three-stage focus group process, one that starts with the rational aspect of the participant's experience -- the "cortex" as Rapaille calls it -- then moves on to a more creative, storytelling portion targeted at the "limbic brain." The final stage, during which the participants are encouraged to lie on comfy cushions and dig down to their earliest memories of "cars" or "coffee" or even "seduction," is the only one that really counts for Rapaille. These sessions allow him to tap into what he calls the "lizard brain," a center of primal impulses, needs and memories that he calls "imprints." When it comes to decision-making, we may offer excuses from the cortex ("I want a car with great safety features"), but what really motivates us are the primitive emotions of the lizard brain ("I want a car that makes me feel free and strong").

Rapaille's latest book, "The Culture Code," offers a few fairly predictable (if not necessarily inaccurate) conclusions, such as the fact that Americans view money as a badge of personal worth and one's work as "who you are." But some of the code pairings have a startling, metaphorical potency that feels genuinely insightful. "The American Cultural Code for alcohol is GUN," he writes, explaining that the American association of alcohol with danger and transgression, and of alcoholic drinks as primarily a path to intoxication, baffles the people of his native France, who see wine as an art form to be savored. Rapaille grew up in France during World War II, and moved to America as an adult, but he considers himself to be American at heart and his upbringing has given him a valuable perspective on his new home. "You can't really understand one culture unless you understand other cultures and compare," he states. Salon called up the richly accented Rapaille at home, and then later on his BlackBerry as he sped down Route 4, to hear his thoughts on love American-style, what a politician needs to do to win the White House and why religion in the U.S. is just like Disney World.

One of your theories is that the most powerful emotional "imprints" people received occur in their childhood. You spent your childhood in France, presumably receiving a lot of French cultural imprints, yet you consider yourself an American.

If I go back to my first experience during the war in France, the Germans were running the show and the French were trying to escape or survive. Then one day, I saw the Germans throwing off their helmets and running away. An American tank came out of the forest, with a white star. I remember the colors, the smells, everything. Then a big guy came out of the turret, and gave me chocolate and chewing gum and took me for a ride! How can you beat that? My imprint was that I wanted to be in that tank, to be those guys. I didn't want to be with the French, these losers. At school they tried to imprint me the French way, saying General de Gaulle liberated France. I said: I'm sorry, he wasn't on the tank.

These imprints are so strong that they dominate the others. Now I still have some French imprints. My relationship with cheese, food, love and women is very French. But there are some elements of me that make me more American than many Americans. An issue that is very unique to America is that you can choose to be American, but you cannot choose to be German or French, which is why they have so much trouble with immigrants over there.

So you believe that through an affinity with a culture, and an early positive imprint of it, and then immersing yourself in it as an adult, you can absorb some of those imprints even though you're not a child?

Exactly.

I went back and forth reading this book between scoffing at some of your statements as simply cultural stereotypes and finding them illuminating. A lot of your critics have accused you of trafficking in stereotypes. Do you make a distinction? How do you answer those criticisms?

This is a usual criticism I have. People say it's simplistic, cliché and stereotype. I make it clear in the book that I'm not telling you everybody is like that. There are people in France who are not arrogant. Not many, but some. You can find Americans who are not interested in money. I'm not telling you everybody is the same. We have what I call a reference system that's available to everybody in a given culture. So when we speak about killing yourself, for example, you never find an American man going to the kitchen, taking a kitchen knife and intentionally opening his stomach. That reference system is not available in American culture. In Japan a few months ago, three bankers who were bankrupt went to a hotel and opened their stomachs with swords. I'm not telling you that every Japanese is going to kill himself this way, but this is available.

Stereotypes never exist randomly or by accident. There's a reason why they are there. The first reaction is to say that the Italian is a good lover, the French is an arrogant guy, the American is materialistic. These are the clichés. The reality is that behind that you have some tensions. The American might be very materialistic, but the other side is that we are very idealistic. We give so much to charity and are so concerned with religion. We are concerned about the spiritual dimension all the time.

You say that these things change very slowly.

Yes, very slowly.

Next page: "I choose to be American because I'd rather be part of an adolescent culture than a senile culture"