There came a time, around the mid to late 1990s, when Guinness, Ireland's favourite brand of draught stout, decided to get weirdly arty with their UK advertising, generating a slew of TV ads that ranged from the strangely beautiful to the flat-out nightmarish (often at the same time). What with all the human maggots squirming around your holiday camps, the tigers menacing your chicken coops and the fishes making off with your bicycles, it was a confusing time to be alive and to be tuning into Frasier. This assortment of surreal delights had its genesis in the desire to make the brand more appealing to younger adults, who were largely dismissing the stout as the drink of their parents' generation. (Guinness weren't the only brand to have such an epiphany at around this time and to traverse the WTF route in the hopes of perplexing the younger demographic into submission - Levi's jeans tried their hand at being purposely odd and confusing across the summer of 98, with some freakishly misguided results.)
The first phase of this new, mind-bending look for Guinness was the "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign, developed by Ogilvy & Mather in 1996, a series of ads filmed in black and white that used surreal and unnerving imagery in order to confront the viewer with the unexpected. The most famous ad of the "Black and White" campaign is, ironically, the one that never aired. Entitled "Men and Women Shouldn't Live Together" (based on a quote by actress Diana Dors), it offered a cunning play on gender archetypes, chronicling the morning routine of a slovenly young businessman, and his fastidious partner's never-ending endeavors to clean up around him, revealing only in the closing moments that the two are a gay couple. Although the ad seems ridiculously innocuous by contemporary standards, the 90s were a vastly different world, and LGBT issues were still regarded as taboo by a lot of the mainstream media. For an ad like this to have run in 1996 would have been radical as hell (one man even gives the other an affectionate peck on the cheek, making it plain that they are indeed lovers and not just housemates), and Guinness proved that they were simply not that cutting edge, losing their nerve and ultimately declining to air the ad (leaving the gate wide open for Impulse deodorant to claim the first depiction of a gay couple in a mainstream British advert two years later, with the ad "Chance Encounter").
Next up was the "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait" campaign by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, which many would argue peaked in 1999 with "Surfer", an ad likening the extended amount of time it takes to pour a pint of Guinness from the tap (119.5 seconds, according to "Swimblack", an earlier ad from the same campaign) to a surfer waiting on a beach in Hawaii in anticipation of that perfect wave. With its mix of dazzling visuals (inspired by the painting "Neptune's Horses" by Walter Crane, the waves manifested as a fleet of galloping white horses) and a poetic, strangely haunting narration from Louis Mellis, "Surfer" achieved enormous acclaim and was voted the greatest television ad of all time in a poll conducted by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times in 2002 (of course, Channel did a lot of these "100 Greatest" polls throughout the decade and they tended to be much the same mixture of flavours of the month and 1970s nostalgia). By comparison, campaign's final installment, "Dream Club", which centred around a crowd of bar patrons waiting for an ambitiously visionary dreamer to wake up with his latest epiphany, was a relative flop, generating little interest and failing to significantly boost Guinness sales figures during its run in the spring of 2001. Both ads were directed by Jonathan Glazer (who went on to direct the 2013 feature film Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson) and were concocted from relatively similar ingredients - "Dream Club" adhered to the brand's then-cemented fetish for black and white oddities, using the same combination of uncanny animal imagery and gravelly narration that made "Surfer" such a runaway smash. And yet the two ads arrive at what seem like polar opposite conclusions. One ad celebrates life's endeavours, championing the fortitude of those who are willing to pursue their dreams and rise to the challenge of the elements, while the other ends with its protagonist laughing derisively at the very futility of human existence. One is positively stirring, the other is almost deliberately alienating.
On that note, there's little mystery to me as to why "Dream Club" resonated with the public so poorly compared to "Surfer". "Surfer" is a perfectly paced adrenaline-builder that pours its all into promoting empathy with its protagonist, so that the viewer feels as if they too are being transported into those tumultuous waves along with him. Whereas the 1999 ad handles its central concept with a heady degree of gravitas, "Dream Club" is considerably lighter and wackier in tone. And while the visual centrepiece of "Surfer" - those prancing aqua ponies - provides a powerful metaphor for the hero's struggle in battling the forces of nature, the animal element in "Dream Club" - a tavern of stout-swigging sciurines - plays like a bizarre non-sequitur, a throwaway interlude that has no bearing on the ad's final pay-off. Vexing and irreverent, "Dream Club" is an easy ad to dismiss as a lot of madcap visual weirdness with no deeper substance behind the confusion and technical spice. And yet, it is an ad about a man who dreams of being a squirrel. Or a squirrel who dreams of being a man. One of the two. And ultimately, that's too wickedly, deliciously absurdist for me to ignore. Hence, I'm compelled to go the unpopular route and bat for "Dream Club" as being, if not the objectively better of the two, then certainly the more fascinating and inventive, and meriting leagues more admiration than it received at the dawn of the 00s. And perhaps there's a charm and a flair in its unapologetic zaniness. If "Surfer" ever struck you as being a tad too self-important, then "Dream Club" should be right up your alley.
The hero of "Dream Club", our narrator informs us, is in the business of seeking answers to the questions of fellow bar patrons by embarking on metaphysical adventures in his dreams. Tonight, he has been taxed with "The Big Question" - that most quintessential of all absurdities, The Meaning of Life. Actually, I'm not convinced that this aspect of the ad wasn't also a factor in why "Dream Club" failed to resonate with viewers - despite the all-out weirdness-baiting of the premise, there's an air of predictability in how it will ultimately play out. We're already savvy enough to know that whatever our hero glimpses through the hole in the wall will not be revealed to us. Meaning of Life gags where the answer is obscured or ridiculously mundane were already old hat by 2001 - obviously, Douglas Adams wrote the ultimate example of such a gag in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and everything since has been little more than an ersatz variation on that. The closing punchline of "Dream Club" is not, at first glance, a remarkably innovative one. In the end, I look to those eerily non-sequitur squirrels to provide clues as to the real takeaway for this ad.
The anthropomorphic squirrels of "Dream Club" are its single greatest puzzle. Their inclusion in the ad might strike one as being just a little too random, until you notice that they feature in the backdrop of the regular bar scenes as static taxidermy jobs. The moment in which the hero slips into unconsciousness beside a pint of Guinness, only for his squirrel counterpart to appear and to fly suddenly into consciousness, comes as a startling interruption that threatens to off-set our perception of the ad entirely. This most unexpected of turns could easily have provided the punchline in itself, only the protagonist's quest immediately resumes and leads to a climactic struggle as he is tasked with ascending a mountain made up of frantic human bodies, a set-piece that I assume was devised in order to replicate some of the cinematic qualities of "Surfer". The squirrel interlude introduces a curious paradox, whereby the central squirrel reels in horror at having experienced, by way of his own dreams, the absurdity that is being human, while also holding up a borderline grotesque mirror to the behaviour of the humans with his distinctly anthropomorphic stout-swigging. We see ourselves in a squirrel who is visibly shaken at having just seen himself at us, and who expresses his rejection using recognisably human traits. Despite these ludicrous contradictions, the squirrel represents a fleeting moment of clarity and awakening, before the human narrative starts up once again and we are lost amid the sheer chaos of the sea frantic souls clamouring for an answer to a question that most likely doesn't have one. If our tendency to fixate on such self-imposed absurdities as The Meaning of Life is what makes us human, then we are a ridiculous species indeed, as is suggested elsewhere in the ad with the image of a horse rolling on its back as if laughing uproariously at the futility of the humans' endeavours.
"Dream Club" concludes with our hero making it to the top of the pile, peering through the hole and erupting with fits of laughter. Because of course, life is a tremendous joke with a punchline that is perpetually hidden from its participants. Yet the final image is unsettling - we see legions of people gathered outside the bar in stony-faced silence, waiting passively for an answer to this eternal head-scratcher while the hero effectively laughs at their expense. They wind up the butt of a gag that they have no means of comprehending. Unlike "Surfer", which concluded with the viewer sharing in the hero's moment of triumph, "Dream Club" ends with the viewer being exiled out into the cold with the other unenlightened onlookers; despite the slogan's assurances that "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait", we exit the ad none the wiser. The ad's closing line, "Welcome To Dream Land", uttered just as we are expelled into the streets outside, would imply that this is where the actual dreaming takes place, only in place of madcap visual zaniness, we simply get a sea of expressionless inertia, the futility of holding out in vain for an answer that will most assuredly not be coming.
I always liked this one, because the implication is that he may laugh himself to death.
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