A poodle-guzzling gator wasn't the only curious critter to feature in the "Southerners Have Their Own Rules" campaign developed by Court Burkitt and Company for Southern Comfort whiskey in the mid-1990s. At least two of the spots also involved horses. In one, we see the aftermath of a marital tiff where the wife, having slapped her husband with the ultimatum that it's either "her or the horse", is left to begrudgingly trudge her way back to civilisation while a pony assumes the passenger seat in his automobile. Another features a young woman who confides in us her dreams of a white wedding while sprawled out across the back of an unsaddled horse; we then cut to a shot of her screaming in full bridal get-up, before she adds, "What a nightmare." In both cases, the punchlines are entirely self-explanatory; with the first ad, we have a humorous subversion of marital dynamics, made all the more comically grotesque by the fact that the horse, an animal traditionally used for transportation, is riding upfront; a beast of burden and mechanical vehicle uniting and making the unfortunate castaway eat their dust. Again, those southerners and their atypical pet-keeping practices. At least this one isn't roaming around devouring the rest of the neighhourhood fauna. A white wedding, meanwhile, traditionally symbolises purity and virginity, the implication therefore being that the protagonist of the second ad is promiscuous, but also too much of a free spirit to aspire to the lures of tradition. What does intrigue me is that very striking image at the start of the ad in which our heroine is implied to be having her horrifying visions from the back of a horse. Is there any significance to this being the resting place from which she concocts her twisted fantasies of ceremonial convention?
In considering this ad, I'm put in mind of Carl G. Jung's writings on the archetype of the horse in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, in which he identifies the horse as "the non-human psyche, the sub-human, animal side, and therefore the unconscious....it represents the lower part of the body and the animal drives that take their rise from there." Therefore, we might interpret our heroine's reclining atop the horse's back as an indication that she is well-connected with her animal psyche. Jung wrote that, "The horse is dynamic power and a means of locomotion; it carries one away like a surge of instinct." Not only does the heroine's connection with her equine carrier imply that she is an untamed spirit, but the composure with which she embraces the horse's body and lies unguardedly atop it suggests a total trust and willingness to let these inner forces transport her where they will. The horse represents the unbridled passion, yet there is a blissful stillness to this set-up, which is abruptly shattered by the succeeding scene with the heroine is seen screaming in her bridal gear, suggesting the inner despair of the animal psyche that is forced to tether itself to societal norms.
If the horse, as per Jung's analysis, is the embodiment of man's animal instinct, then I wonder what we should really make of the final image of that first ad, in which the horse has effectively taken charge of the automobile, ie: a dead machine, and a mode of transportation of which man does assume full control? The horse is not, of course, actually in the driver's seat, although that might not matter; the driver's presence is obscured and the emphasis is very much on the horse supplanting the human. Again, there is a distrust of marital convention, depicted here as being in opposition to the untamed passions and desires of the animal psyche, and the visual punchline of the ad celebrates the liberation of the animal instinct from its human oppressor, who is left to plough along feebly by the roadside as the horse accelerates toward a wilder future. Perhaps the real nightmare image arises not from the possibility of our internal horses assuming control, but of them abandoning us altogether, leaving us to carry ourselves drearily on our own two feet.
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