The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #30: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Citreon Xantia)

Next up in my continuing case that the tiny window from the mid-90s to the dawn of the new millennium that represented something of a golden age for mindscrew advertising is this thirty-second spot from 1995, which sought to illustrate the air-conditioning capacities of the Citreon Xantia through the imagery of a motorist being pursued across the desert by a rabid bloodhound. It was surreal, spooky and, as with all the best ads from this particular era, played like a chintzy exercise in persuasion second, a beautifully encapsulated micro-nightmare first.

It all makes sense (kind of) if you're familiar with the idiom "mad dogs and Englishmen", used to indicate when it's really hot outside, the implication being that you would have to be a member of one of the two cited classes to even contemplate setting foot in such scorching terrain. The idiom derives from a popular cabaret number of the same name - penned by Noel Coward and first performed by Beatrice Lillie in 1931, the song takes a humorous look at the reluctance of the Englishman abroad to adjust to the custom of the siesta in tropical climates, and how this behaviour nets derision from everyone else. The lyrics capture something of the tension created by the British Empire, which in 1931 had yet to hit its period of significant decline:

 

It seems such a shame
When the English claim
The Earth
That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth.

Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The toughest Burmese bandit
Can never understand it.
In Rangoon the heat of noon
Is just what the natives shun.

 

Coward is often thought to have been inspired by an observation of Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim: "Only the devils and the English walk to and fro without reason...and we walk as though we were mad or English."

In the Citreon Xantia television ad, all three main players in the equation - the mad dog, the Englishman and the midday sun - put in an appearance, and are helpfully identified using captions. The major twist is that the Englishman, far from sharing in the dog's dementia, gets to brave the heat in style, in the comfort of a Citreon Xantia equipped with air conditioning. The implicit narrative of the ad concerns the vehicle's imperviousness to the unforgiving aura of the desert outside, of which the dog serves as an apt manifestation. The effectiveness of the advert is rooted in the minimalist approach it takes to sound and visuals. The desert has an inertia, but not a calmness. The glare of the sun is oppressive, there is a great sense of discomforting, agitated restlessness, as conveyed in the relentless movements of the dog, and the initial succession of images is blurred and unfocussed, giving the ad a distinctly hallucinatory feel, as if we, like the dog, are suffering from the effects of the midday heat. It is only once we join the Englishman inside the featured vehicle that we get reacquainted with some form of clarity. Inside the Citreon it is completely silent - the sounds of the desert, along with the heat, are kept firmly at bay. The formal attire and collected demeanour of our English motorist stand in obvious contrast to the furious quadruped with whom she shares his noonday territory. Both are covering the sweltering terrain in good speed, but while the dog seems to be lumbering along on a senseless journey ever deeper into disconcertion (represented by a psychedelic orange tint presumably intended to constitute the dog's rabies-addled perspective) the driver is cool and unflustered and presumably knows exactly where he's headed. And of course he also has everything at the touch of a button, as illustrated in the shot where he adjusts his AC to max, shortly before breezing across the desert, comfortably ahead of the demented bloodhound on his tail. The final promise, thus, is one of complete control in a deeply chaotic universe.

But never mind the virtues of the Citreon Xantia - with its eldritch imagery and eerie undertones, the advert gives the sensation that we've strayed, momentarily, from the safety net of normalcy and into a way-out ferality too perplexing to be expressed in words. The mad dog and the Englishman, while presented as polar opposites, in practice end up feeling like two sides of the very same coin, in a manner that seems befitting to the Coward ditty that inspired the ad's unsettling visual metaphors. Both of them convey a distinctive kind of freakishness - the dog in its distorted, feverish frenzy, the motorist in an intense silence that serves less as a counterpoint to the heat-inflicted dementia outside than a deepening of the overall disorientation. The interior of the Citreon becomes a vacuum, offering not refuge but a vast unnatural emptiness where some kind of presence should be. The vehicle may be perfectly insulated from everything beyond it, but that silence comes to feel every bit as oppressive as the glare outside, and as unnerving as the dog's discombobulated howls. The Englishman might fancy himself as the master of his environs, but he's really just another curiosity in a mind-bending landscape, confounding in his determination to shut himself off and remain willfully oblivious to everything around him. This is something to which the ad appears to concede in its final image, which shows the dog in hot pursuit of the Citreon - for as assured as the driver feels in his self-contained domain, it's painfully clear that if he were to set foot outside, he'd be well-broiled dog chow. What we therefore have is an illustration of the gulf between the motorist's self-perception and how the rest of the world perceives him. In his fully air-conditioned bubble, he's the top dog, while in reality he's the quarry of a very different dog. 

That, or it's a cute visual punchline showing that even mad dogs in the sweltering middle of nowhere cannot resist the playful urge to chase after moving vehicles.