In the late 1990s, Irish draught stout Guinness continued their "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign with an ad lampooning our susceptibility for a neatly-packaged statistic that at the same time found ways to unnerve us with more bizarre imagery featuring freakishly misplaced animals. Of all the ads in the "Black and White" campaign, "Statistics" stands out to me as, if not the strangest of the lot (that particular honor was bagged by "Fishing is Madness"), then the one which held the greatest emotional resonance for me. It's as baffling and nightmarish as you'd come to expect from Guinness (or a good proportion of 90s advertising) at this stage, but there's something disarmingly poignant about this one too. In part, I put this down to the stirring background music, taken from "The First Big Weekend", a 1996 single for Scottish indie duo Arab Strap, in which vocalist Aidan Moffat describes a memorable weekend of sleeping on European cup matches and watching Simpsons clip shows charting the characters' various failed romances. Here we have actor Enn Reitel reeling off a series of statistics in a manner designed to evoke Moffat's deadpan, matter-of-fact narration. Reitel's voiceover is beguiling enough that it's tempting to take his statements at face value. As with "Fishing", though, the ad climaxes with a quotation that seems intended to flip everything we've just seen upon its head - in this case, the wry observations of comedian Vic Reeves, who warns us that, "88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot." In other words, if you actually did swallow any of these nuggets as concrete truths then you were a grade A sucker. So, the question the ad ultimately poses would be why such an unlikely collection of figures (which, somewhere in the back of our brains, we all intuitively sense are perhaps a bit suspect) should prove so alluring to our credulous brains.
Some of these statistics do have the ring of credibility (we all know that cows are tremendously gassy animals, and I'm not sure about 98%, but given Manchester United's global popularity, it wouldn't surprise me if the percentage of fans who've never visited Old Trafford was in the high zone). Others seem less probable (88% of clowns never fall in love? Nope, not buying that one - when the make-up's off, clowns are just the same as anyone else). I'd say that the appeal of the ad lies broadly in how it evokes the various uncanny connections that enable individuals from seemingly divergent walks of life to intersect, some of which seem hilariously ironic (the convent-educated strippers), while others have darker implications (the Ku Klux Klan one). The Manchester United sequence offers the most heartening example of the lot, in illustrating the extent to which humans the world over can be allied by a common affinity.
The real curiosity of the ad, though, would be the portion that occurs at about thirty-six seconds in, when we're treated to the unnerving imagery of a tiger prowling through a darkened neighbourhood, terrorising a coop of resident chickens as Reitel informs us that, "Every year over 300 animals escape from zoos and circuses." The tiger, a lone, shadowy beast, stands in ominous contrast to the flock of brightly-coloured chickens who, boxed in behind a wall of wire mesh, signify a kind of orderly, prosaic domesticity. The climax of the sequence, which sees predator and prey each losing their cool and letting loose tumultuous cries is hair-raising stuff; indeed, it was a showdown that proved almost too intense for me as a kid, and I was well-accustomed to feeling a tight knot in my stomach every time that eerily unlit street loomed into view (of course, it's all down to the tautness of the editing, since the tiger and the chickens never appear within the same frame and were blatantly nowhere near one another in real life). And yet I have to admit that my empathy was always with the fugitive tiger. He might be approaching those unfortunate chickens in the manner of a slasher villain closing in on a prospective target, and the sight of the burly striped cat rubbing shoulders with a couple of nondescript trash cans seems almost gut-wrenchingly surreal, but at the same time there's a loud and irrepressible part of me that can't help but rejoice that this magnificent beast has made a bid for freedom and now has the world at his paws. Still, this isn't the kind of wilderness that a tiger hopes to uncover when fleeing his captors, and our feline interloper, despite his threatening presence, comes off as the really vulnerable one in this scenario, in that he's visibly out of his element within the neatly-trimmed gardens of modern development. A loose circus animal trampling around your dustbins in the dead of night is a nightmare image for sure, but there's the sense that the tiger, far from being an intruder in these urban environs, is simply a stranger in a strange land, a wild beast attempting to reconnect with a wilderness that's been warped beyond all recognition.
Does the sequence have any significance regarding the ad's broader theme of uncanny and ironic connections? Yes, insofar as suggesting that not everything can be so easily boxed in and compartmentalised. Elsewhere in the ad, there's a lot of emphasis upon the nature of identity, partly in its exploration of the assumptions made by a society that's forever seeking to pigeonhole according to superficial preconceptions (odds are that most don't think too deeply about a stripper's education or a clown's love life, and that old "men think about sex every six seconds" cliche is one heck of a dumb stereotype), but also the masks and labels we willfully assume in assimilating our personal identities into the ideologies of a wider body, be it something as benign as a sports team's global fanbase (although even that has the potential to turn ugly) or a group with a far more abhorrent agenda. Perhaps that lonesome liberated tiger, and his ability to ruffle the feathers of a flock of homogeneous chickens, stands as a call to walk on the wild side, stay true to one's independent spirit and defy classification.
I can't ascribe any deeper significance to that cow statistic, however.
Incidentally, I think there may have been a variation on this ad that included another statistic about the percentile of women who find men with beards and mustaches sexually attractive. All accompanied by a queasy close-up shot of a mustached man downing spoonfuls yogurt and getting tiny flecks of it in his whiskers. It was enough to put you off yogurt (and mustaches) for life.
No comments:
Post a Comment