If you found the whole idea of a man who dreams of being a squirrel (or a squirrel who dreams of being a man) to be a little out there, then try this one for size: a bunch of humans on vacation who dream about being maggots (or maggots who dream about being human). A few years prior to our induction into the surrealist delights of Dream Club, Guinness took us on an equally mind-bending excursion which incorporated many of the same themes (among them, humankind's obliviousness to the futility of its own existence), albeit with a darker twist. The matter of The Big Question, The Meaning of Life, is once again evoked amid a slew of confusing sights and bizarrely-placed animal imagery, leading us to a downright incongruous and unsettling conclusion. If the protagonist of "Dream Club" had peered through his peep hole and seen this scenario on the other side, I'm not convinced that laughter would have been his immediate reaction.
"Fishing" was one of the early installments in Ogilvy and Mather's "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign from 1996, a series of ads designed to boost the brand's standing among young adults by emphasising the odd and unexpected. The sixty-second spot consists of numerous images showing hyperactive humans engaged in a variety of leisure pursuits - sunbathing, ballroom dancing and golfing - which are intermittently contrasted with images of maggots squirming away in a gigantic writhing mass. In the final moments, the ad takes an unexpectedly peaceful turn, switching to the silhouette of a lone angler perched stoically beside a lake. We cut once again to the maggots, revealed to be the contents of the angler's bait box. The stinger being that all of humanity are just maggots in a bucket, waiting to be sacrificed in God's great fishing expedition? Have I got this one right?
In the absence of narration, our vital indicator in making sense of this baffling succession of images is in the closing quotation from the poet Spike Milligan: "Fishing is complete and utter madness." Obviously, there's tremendous irony in how the madcap frenzy of those earlier sequences compares to the Zen-like mindfulness of angler, the calming splendour of the natural world against the cartoon-like artificiality of the preceding environs. So what makes the angler the madman of the equation? Is it a simple matter of his non-conformity, a solitary figure far-removed from the masses who have flocked to those gruesomely overcrowded beaches and golf courses? The only conspicuous hint of "madness" in the final sequence occurs in the momentary shot of the maggots, a jarring callback to the franticness of the preceding images. As such, it seems reasonable to suppose that the answer should lie with the ad's animal element. Namely, it's not the angler who's mad but the maggots. And the maggot people.
On the whole, maggots are not a critter that tend to feature often in advertising, much less for any kind of edible product, given their association with death and decay (it's a gruesome job but somebody's got to do it). Viewers would generally agree that, as a species, they rather lack the majesty of horses and the appealing quirkiness of squirrels. Their continual presence throughout the ad is clearly intended to make us every bit as squirmy, a means of magnifying the grotesqueness of the human activity on display. The advert's method of repeatedly juxtaposing the frantic movements of the leisure-seeking humans with the grisliness of the maggots has the effect of making the angler, shown predominantly in silhouette form, seem all the more graceful and god-like by comparison, but it is also intended to create a disturbing connection between the humans in the earlier sequences and the the maggots glimpsed toward the end, suggesting that the real madness is lurking right beneath the surface of this apparent tranquility. After all, the maggots do not exactly have a positive fate ahead of them, and their constant squirming does little to avert this. I guess this is where God's great fishing expedition comes in. The hectic aimlessness of the humans' own pursuits is reflected in the queasy, congested writhing of the maggots, giving us the impression of two worlds that are equally oblivious and powerless in the greater scheme, and whose only recourse, in both cases, is to wriggle itself senseless. So eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow you're on the hook.
The idea of the series of adverts is that the quote made at the end is too simplistic. So yes, one is supposed to be on the anglers side, as even if the past-time may be boring for some, for others it is refreshing
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