If we gleaned nothing else of value from Quentin Tarantino's rise to prominence in the 1990s (aside from trivia regarding menu items at McDonald's restaurants across various European locales), it's that there is an infinite amount of entertainment mileage to be had from watching Samuel L Jackson talk at a protracted length, even when what he's saying doesn't actually make a whole lick of sense. The verve, the presence and the potency were undeniable. It was inevitable that, eventually, some corporation would attempt to harness that monologuing magic for their own commercial ends. Hence, the "Fluent In Finance" campaign from Barclays bank in 2002, which hinged on just how enthralling it is to hear Jackson rave his loquacious heart out. And threw in a smattering of unnerving animal imagery while it was at it.
Celebrity endorsements can be an odious business, of course - plunderphonics group Negativland dedicated three whole tracks of their 1997 album DisPepsi to skewering the practice - and conventional wisdom dictated that if there was one thing guaranteed to chip away at Jules Winnfield's badass sheen, it was having him turn to the camera to hawk a product. But Bartle Bogle Hegarty made good one on this one. Celebrity endorsements were the tactic favoured by Barclays at the dawn of the new millennium, and they weren't exactly modest when it came to the magnitude of the celebrities they ensnared. The "Fluent In Finance" campaign was preceded by the "Big World Needs A Big Bank" campaign, directed by Tony Scott and featuring Anthony Hopkins, and was succeeded by a trilogy of ads featuring Donald Sutherland and Gary Oldman (note: that was a seriously epic combination). Getting an actor of Jackson's magnitude was certainly no mean feat - he'd already racked up considerable cultural credentials thanks to his major roles in two Tarantino pictures, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997), and by 2002 he'd graduated to the Star Wars leagues as Jedi Knight Mace Mindu. And if you're going to fork over a gargantuan sum to have some Hollywood hotshot extol the virtues of your product, you might as well aspire to do something slightly mind-bending and flat-out unsettling with them.
The campaign consisted of a series of television ads in which a solitary Jackson walked the Earth, roaming across various landscapes, each one more deserted and eerily desolate than the last, delivering monologues directly to the camera in the style of a kind of artsy, folk horror take on Wayne's World. The ads were directed by (who else?) Jonathan Glazer, the offbeat genius behind that perplexing Guinness advertisement about the visionary squirrel, and much like that ad, were clearly engineered to make you feel a little out of water - or "to be thought provoking" as per this Campaign article. Jackson's monologues were strange, bewildering and and had a delirious, foreboding tone about them, as if Jackson were delivering some cataclysmic prophecy in deeply cryptic terms. The brand name "Barclays" never once came up, although all of the monologues were connected by the common theme of money. In "Tale", Jackson tells the cautionary fable of a foolhardy swine who fails to heed the warnings of a matador about the drastic differences between bull and bear markets. In "Sold" he describes a vexing encounter with a belligerently lyrical shoe salesman. In "Evil", Jackson challenges assumptions about money being the root of all evil, and in "Drama" he recites a passage from Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. The campaign yielded at least one other ad, although I have only my personal memory to go on for this one. There, Jackson narrates the story of an audacious golfer who opted to play out in a turbulent thunder storm, closing the ad on an unresolved cliffhanger: "Does he get the score card of a lifetime, or does that lifetime get scratched right there?" This particular ad appears to have been a later addition to the series - it is not mentioned in the linked Campaign article from the time of the series' launch, nor does it appear to have been preserved for the YouTube generation, but trust me, I'm not quite morbid enough to have manufactured a tagline so fitfully macabre on my own.
All of the ads concluded with a visual stinger, usually involving an animal alluded to in Jackson's monologue (the golfer ad, if memory serves me correctly, was an exception, closing with the imagery of a golf course being lacerated by a lightning bolt). The seemingly innocuous chicken that appears at the end of "Evil", only to scream bloody murder at the viewer, is self-explanatory. It is the punchline to a question Jackson poses in his refutation of the popular assertion that money is evil - namely, that if humans used chickens as currency instead of dollars, would that make chickens evil? The stinger to "Tale" serves as an epilogue to Jackson's fable, in which we see our porcine hero fleeing from the roars of ferocious bears, while "Drama" takes a more surreal turn in showing a centaur (mentioned in Shakespeare's text) bolting surreptitiously through a woodland. More baffling is the closing imagery of the "Sold" installment - an ad which, according to the aforementioned Campaign article, is intended to illustrate "the secrecy that often surrounds money issues". The animal explicitly referenced by Jackson in this particular monologue - the cat who surely did not have possession of the garrulous salesman's tongue - is nowhere to be seen. Instead, we get the imposing form of a black bull bucking repeatedly in a dusty field. In the preceding monologue, Jackson recounts his efforts to break through the merchant's impenetrable sales technique - a technique so abstruse that it seems almost purposely designed to prevent him from claiming ownership of that desirable pair of shoes - and it is not immediately obvious how the bull fits into that. It could potentially be a nod to the "Tale" installment, and to the matador who insisted on giving bear markets a wide berth on account of being a "bull man", or perhaps the bull is an allusion to the materials used to make those unobtainable shoes (hence why it is so riled up). Although I think it has more to do with the bull's display of raw, untamed fury, which seems startling in its capriciousness; it momentarily regains its posture, only to begin jerking its body again, almost as if willed by a force outside of its own control. Thus, I am inclined to see the bull as emblematic of the kind of misspent energy underpinning the sales ritual described by Jackson, in that it's a frenetic (and infuriating) dance that ultimately goes nowhere.
Back in 2002, my dad was dismissive of the "Fluent In Finance" campaign for much the same reason that I was transfixed by it - he pointed out that the ads were exercises in confoundment for confoundment's sake, and that Jackson's oblique dialogue made it something of a nightmare to ascertain just what the hell he was really on about. In other words, they were pure burbling. But burbling brought to life by the combined talents of Jackson and Glazer is burbling that's bound to possess a contorted personality all of its own. This isn't your Lucasfilm Jackson, and it isn't quite your Tarantino Jackson either - his sleek, deadly dynamism is there, but is an altogether uncannier, more feverish Jackson, one who rants about demonic chickens, and who, when he speaks about a cat not having your tongue, could well be referring to the literal possibility of a cat making off with your severed body parts. If there has ever been a movie role where Jackson's monologuing abilities have been used to such gloriously arcane ends, then I implore you to bring it to my attention.
See, at least the Bear and Bull one makes sense. Pig needs to know when it's a buyer's or seller's market.
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