Lemmings (1985)

Apple's notorious "Lemmings" commercial from 1985 is one of those special pieces of media that's so phenomenally horrible that it's difficult to know where to begin with it, so let's take it straight from the top.  On 22nd January 1984, during the Superbowl XVIII, an ad was aired which generated so much excitement it was quickly cemented as the gold standard of Superbowl advertising.  The ad in question was for the Apple Macintosh personal computer and featured a plucky young heroine in a Macintosh tank top (Anya Major) sprinting through an Orwellian dystopia and taking on the oppression of an all-seeing dictator (David Graham), armed with only a sledgehammer and her own steely determination.  Developed by advertising agency Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott of Alien and Blade Runner fame, the ad was notable for combining stark and gloomy visuals with a pulse-racing sense of rebellion.  The intended message was that 1984 would not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four, because the underdogs at Apple were not going to let the oppressive regime of IBM go unopposed.  Strike one for the little guys.  Buy a Mac.

The response was wildly enthusiastic, yet ironically the ad had been poorly received by Apple's Board of Directors, who were extremely nervous about showing it.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had pushed to have the ad shown during the Superbowl, and in the end they came out looking like the smart ones.  With Apple having been crowned the kings of that year's crop of Superbowl advertising, thoughts swiftly turned to a sequel.  Obviously, it would have to match the epic proportions of "1984", so that the launch of a new Apple ad would always thereafter be seen as an event.  Chiat/Day were once again brought on, only Ridley Scott was unavailable.  In his place, directing duties were assigned to his brother, Tony Scott, who had recently directed his first feature film, vampire pic The Hunger, starring David Bowie and Susan Sarandon, and whose future directorial credits would include Top Gun (1986), True Romance (1993) and Crimson Tide (1995).  The new ad, which promoted the upcoming Macintosh Office, was aired during the Superbowl XIX on 20th January 1985 (an advertising slot for which Apple payed $900,000), but lightning didn't strike twice for Jobs, Wozniak and co.  Instead, the Canned Food Information Council stole their thunder with an ad about a CGI robot's hankering for tinned asparagus.  "Lemmings" could be called a textbook example of the sophomore slump, only that doesn't quite do justice to how much people reviled this thing.  The ad, with its unsettling but still very flippant depiction of a mass suicide, went over like a lead balloon, drawing the very reaction that the Apple Board of Directors had presumably feared when they expressed their doubts about "1984". 

The title "Lemmings" is, of course, a nod to the erroneous idea that lemmings commit mass suicide by hurling themselves off cliffs as a means of self-regulating their populations.  These kinds of myths about the animal kingdom tend to be perfectly silly and harmless, until Disney gets it into their heads that it would make for great documentary footage and decides to induce their own lemming mass "suicide" while the cameras are rolling, resulting in a pile of dead furry bodies and one of the most disturbing stories in Hollywood history.  Speaking of Disney...what the hell is that song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs doing here?  Yes, I know that it's a convenient shorthand for conveying that this morbid ritual is somehow business-related, but tonally it's all wrong for this scenario and has the effect of making the ad seem even more crass and mean-spirited than it otherwise would have done.  It's also odd that Disney apparently approved the use of their song in this incredibly dark context, but then maybe the runaway success of "1984" was enough to sway them.

The general consensus among commentators (including Daniella Hernandez in this article on Wired) is that "Lemmings" failed because it committed the cardinal advertising sin of openly scorning the very consumers it was looking to resonate with.  Turns out, when you liken prospective clients to mindless drones marching blindly toward oblivion they might interpret that as you giving them a particularly brazen middle finger and respond in kind.  There was also the small matter that, for the product itself, the promised launch date of 23rd January 1985 proved to be premature - Macintosh Office could not deliver the business revolution the ad had (somehow) intended to convey, because the file server on which it depended would not be available until 1987.  It was a PR nightmare for Apple; in their haste to capitalise on the momentum of "1984" they had touted their upcoming product too soon, and now all they had to show for their efforts was a sixty-second commercial that was insulting to IBM fans and lemmings alike.

Still, Luke Dormehl raises an interesting point in this article on Cult of Mac, when he questions if the much-loathed "Lemmings" was really that far removed from its highly-acclaimed predecessor "1984" (above).  Both offer visions of a bleak dystopia in which the unquestioning conformity of IBM users is contrasted against the defiance of a lone Mac devotee.  In both cases, the former are depicted as oppressed masses, stripped off all individuality, shuffling submissively in single file.  How is it that one should be held to such esteem and the other should be so reviled when they were essentially cut from the exact same cloth?  (Dormehl's report that Apple received a complaint from an Auschwitz survivor who saw "Lemmings" as making light of the Holocaust is particularly interesting as surely, of the two, "1984" contains imagery that's more obviously reminiscent of concentration camps - in fact, according to this Forbes article, that was one of the reasons why the board of the directors had felt so shifty about showing it).  In many respects, "Lemmings" was very transparently an attempt to recreate "1984", on the assumption that if the public had eaten up that ad then they would presumably want more of the same - bleak, dystopian visuals with a message suggesting that Apple represented boldness and non-conformity in a world where consumers were goaded to believe that that they were all stuck with the same one choice.  One assumes that the executives who'd objected to "1984" were also more reluctant to speak out against the formula this time, making it a bad combination of bolstered confidence and the wrong lessons being taken from the success of "1984".

Where "Lemmings" went wrong, Dormehl argues, was in lacking any kind of cathartic conclusion where the Mac's defiance ends up saving the day or at least putting a dent in the all-powerful IBM's authority - after all, the single "lemming" who removes his blindfold and stares into the abyss potentially saves his own skin but there isn't any inkling of him discovering the power to turn this situation around in any way.  In fact, the implication at the end of the ad is that this grim ritual will continue and all that the enlightened lemming's only recourse is to discreetly step out of it.  Dormehl is quite correct, but there are two further points I would add to his analysis.

Firstly, there's the incredibly confused tone of "Lemmings", with its mix of authentically harrowing imagery and failed attempts at warped humour.  "1984" got the balance just about right - it was a pretty cheeky ad, with its depiction of Apple as feisty freedom fighters and IBM as Orwellian villains, but it took itself and its message seriously enough to be genuinely gripping and exciting where it needed to be.  "Lemmings" takes a nightmare scenario and tries to make it more mind-bogglingly twisted by pasting an upbeat Disney tune on top.  It's a case of taking itself too seriously and then not seriously enough.  There's a certain degree of absurdity in the depiction of the blindfolded business folk as they go shuffling along blithely to their doom, but the bits in which we actually see them falling, and their companions' hands reaching out feebly in confusion, are genuinely shocking, and the accompanying choice of music does the sequence no favours.  Really, the inclusion of "Heigh Ho" may be this ad's single greatest sinking factor.  On the one hand, using a Disney tune in an ad where corporate underlings are shown to fall to their deaths from atop a cliff is eerily appropriate in that it calls to mind that time when Disney callously murdered a whole bunch of lemmings for the sake of a fake documentary, but something tells me that wasn't what Apple had in mind.  I cannot wrap my head around the sheer wrongness of how that tune is incorporated here; it's so incongruous that it's simply spiteful, and detracts from whatever poignancy and tension the imagery might have offered, making the ad horrifying in a manner that's more off-putting than involving.  Maybe there is a potentially powerful message to be mined from this type of scenario, but Apple's execution doesn't come close to nailing it.

Secondly, "Lemmings" has much the same problem as Levi's Kevin the Hamster ad from 1998, in that it presents its audience with a deliberately unsettling scenario and doesn't justify it by clearly linking it to the product it's attempting to sell them.  The metaphor in this case flat-out doesn't fit, and you can tell that the ad's scriptwriter really had to stretch things in order to give off the impression that it does.  The whole "you can look into it" line, pertaining to the surviving lemming removing his blindfold and gazing down at his deceased brethren, feels entirely forced.  What does not stepping off a cliff and falling to your death have to do with whether you're a Mac or a PC anyway?  Unless of course it's to suggest that the type of people who'd use IBM are such an unoriginal, obedient lot that they wouldn't think twice about walking straight into peril if everyone else was doing it.  True, "1984" portrayed them as submissive masses too, but there the joke was more at the expense of IBM itself than IBM's users.  Here...well, it's obvious why people weren't won over by it.

On that note, this article by Ken Segall contains some interesting information on the ad's conception, including the revelation that it was actually taken from a discarded pitch idea which had been devised for General Electric by British advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP) some time prior and was originally intended to signify the state of the US economy.  That might go some way toward explaining why the central metaphor here seems so forced, as it was adapted from an ad outline which had set out to convey something different altogether.  In Segall's words, the thinking behind the revised ad was that "American business [was] stuck in its ways and needed something better".  Maybe it sounded workable on paper, but it totally doesn't come across in the finished ad, particularly if being "stuck in one's ways" is treated as tantamount to mass suicide.  Then again, if you're going to use imagery of any kind of mass killing to try and sell a product, then common sense dictates that you had better tread extremely lightly.  Maybe the concept wouldn't have worked out any better in CDP's original intended form.  Perhaps General Electric dodged a bullet in not getting it.

Apple were left so wounded by the negative reaction to "Lemmings" that they abandoned all aspirations of making their Superbowl advertising into a yearly tradition and it took until 1999 for them to get back in the game, this time with an ad featuring cinema's most affable artificially intelligent baddie, HAL 9000.  Whereas Apple had previously sought to reassure people that 1984 would not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four, here they were looking to capitalise upon pre-Y2K anxieties by goading them into believing that 2001 could very well be like 2001: A Space Odyssey, at least in the sense that all non-Mac computers might go rogue and start conspiring to bump off their owners.  "Look Dave, I'm sorry that I'm a murderer and all, but it's really not my fault.  The Millennium Bug made me do it."  Yeah, needless to say, that one dated fast.

There is one additional advantage that "1984" had over "Lemmings", and that's that it will always have resonance due to Nineteen Eighty-Four's enduring status as a literary classic. Despite tying itself to a specific year which has long been and gone, George Orwell's chilling vision of dystopia will forever be timeless.  Apple's "1984" was very much an ad of the moment; it came along at exactly the right time to springboard off of the book and into zeitgeist in a way that could never again be repeated, but it's a cultural reference that people will always understand and appreciate.  "Lemmings" is based on a pretty obnoxious misconception about lemming behaviour that frankly needs to dissipate.  And bringing Disney into the equation only makes it worse.

Still, despite my own deep-seated dislike for the inspiration behind this ad, I'll admit that there is something about "Lemmings" that resonates with me, in that it plays out like such an authentically pure nightmare.  Tony Scott made good on his end of the deal and produced a visually arresting piece, one which, provided you take out that intrusive Disney song, could form the basis of a really effective horror short.  I just think it was terribly misguided to think that it could be used to sell Macintosh Office.