If you know me by now, you'll know that I had a long history, growing up, of finding something to spook me in just about every ad break I witnessed, to the point that I remain haunted by certain ludicrous images long after they've slipped the net of popular consciousness. Nestled firmly within my brain, for the past quarter-century, was the memory of this advert about a couple living this eerily barren existence, in which the single greatest pleasure, for both of them, came from getting freaky with a bar of soap, but only while the other was safely out of the picture. For all of this time I'd remembered exactly how the scenario played out - the ad opens with the husband/boyfriend complaining out the state of the abode because a couple of their meagre possessions are marginally out of place, after which we cut to the pair eating a meal. The man then leaves the building, and his wife/girlfriend seizes the opportunity to get lathered up in the bathtub with a bar of soap while he's gone. Significantly, the portions of the ad depicting the couple's typically sterile lifestyle were shot in black and white, but the instant the soap appears we switch abruptly to electrifying colour. Then at the end there is an epilogue establishing that this clandestine weakness for bathtub indulgence is entirely mutual - the man returns to find the woman sleeping, whereupon he sneaks into the bathroom to have his own turn with another bar of the soap in question. I remembered the events of the ad so vividly, and yet the one thing I had failed to commit to memory was the brand of soap being flaunted, which somewhat impaired my ability to dig out the ad on YouTube and face down those lingering childhood demons. And naturally, the memory wouldn't let up. So potent was the ad's lasting impression that it's this couple I automatically have in mind whenever I listen to the Pet Shop Boys' track "So Hard" (a track which seems strangely in sync with the ad's unsettling tone, if only for that unearthly moaning voice that chimes in about three minutes into the song).
I did recall that the ad would have been from 1996, possibly 1995, and so for a while my only recourse was to search uploads of ad breaks from both those years in the hope that it would come up. All the same, without anything more precise it's still like find a needle in a haystack. So I tried adding assorted combinations with different soap brand names into the search bar, to see if that took me any closer, but my search came up equally fruitless. I shudder to think how many hours I expended on this wild goose chase, but about a week or so ago it finally all paid off. I stumbled upon the ad - it was for Cussons Imperial Leather, actually - and it was every bit as deliciously unnerving as my pre-adolescent mind had processed it as being. It was worth all that shooting in the dark.
What we do have to acknowledge is that the ostensibly juicy fragment of the ad, where the woman whips out the game-changing soap and soaks to the sounds of "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)", a 1978 hit for disco artist Sylvester, is in practice its least interesting element. Don't get me wrong, I always love me some Sylvester, but it's here that the ad slips into the language of banality typical of advertisements for run-of-the-mill household products, with its emphasis on familiar pop tunes and radiant colours. The real fascination of the ad lies not in how dramatically a forbidden bar of soap enriches the lives of two ostensibly impassive humans, but in the surrounding material depicting the deadpan stoniness that otherwise dominates their day-to-day living. There is something genuinely, beautifully sinister about this portion of the advert, what with the gaping emptiness of their exotic living quarters, resembling less a practical home than an art exhibit, and the long, eerie silences in which any minor sound, be it the ticking clock, squeak of decor being pushed into line, or the sounds of mastication, seems startling. There is a claustrophobia to these scenes that possibly seems at odds with the spaciousness of their barren abode; like the wife, we spend the entirety of the ad concealed within the walls, and while we are led to believe that an outside world does exist (the husband needs somewhere to disappear into), the internal world seems so strange and cut off from any form of reality beyond that it is hard to envision the two interconnecting.
So great was my perplexity toward this ad, back in 1996, that I felt compelled to ask my mother for an explanation. She told me that they were basically a very boring couple and that the bars of soap they had stashed away beneath their potted plants were their only euphoric outlet in life. Actually, I suspect I'd already grasped that much and was hoping for more of an explanation with regard to their unsettlingly stilted language and the fact that they seemed to purposely avoid making eye contact with one another - somehow, the term "boring" didn't quite seem to cover it. Nor did it count for arguably the single most confounding aspect of the advert - the subtitles. Those subtitles, for me, were what really elevated this ad into the realm of the uncanny. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why they were there, as the dialogue was already in English, and perfectly audible. They were another lightly surreal touch that played into the overall discombobulating aura of the ad. They were, I think, the big reason why I was so driven to find this ad, so many years later, as I wanted to see if I could make any better sense of their presence as an adult. Nowadays, I'm still slightly puzzled as to what purpose they serve (other than to play into the general trend for artiness that characterised TV ads at the time, in an effort to make the ordinary look extraordinary), but I have noticed that there is one instance where the subtitle does not match with what is actually spoken - the woman's second "Yes" is instead represented as "Don't rush back" in parentheses, hinting at the unspoken tensions that are really at play here. The subtitles reinforce the stiffness of the couple's cold domestic landscape, by giving their words a toneless physicality, but also indicate the extent to which they are merely symbols.
The message of the ad is straightforward enough...almost to the point where the voice-over narration assuring us that "Some indulgences you can never give up" seems intrusively redundant. Where I would disagree with my mother's interpretation is in the suggestion that these characters are "boring". To the contrary, I think they live a pretty fascinating existence. Their house is a borderline nightmarish work of art. The gag here is not that they're dull, but that they're ultra-modern minimalists, and that the lifestyle they lead is the very antithesis of the luxury that Imperial Leather embodies. Everything here is hard and stony, from their verbal exchanges to the spartan bed they sleep on. I'm not saying I would replicate it, but it makes for an arresting atmospheric flavour.
The underlying gag is effectively the same as one later used in a 2000 ad for the Toyota Roadster (which also spooked the heck out of me in its day), involving a hermit who'd ditched material luxury for the solitude of the woods, but whose spiritual tranquility is intermittently disrupted by nightmare visions of temptation in the form of said sinful vehicle. As with this ad, the most impactful fragments lie in the surrounding material, with the appearance of the product itself feeling more like the intrusion of banality than materialism. Here, though, there is an additional troubling element in the small window we get into the relationship dynamics of this couple. In some respects, the basic set-up feels vaguely reminiscent of Harold Pinter's 1963 play The Lover (which started life as a profoundly unsettling television film staring Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant), the first half of which also centres upon the stilted morning and evening interactions between a husband and wife. As per their routine, the husband sets out for the office every day and the wife is well-accustomed to letting her hair down in his absence (although there is a deliciously good twist in Pinter's play that I'm certainly not going to spoil here); on either side, their relationship is characterised by affected verbal sparring and emotional sterility (in the original television film the couple don't even sleep in the same bed). Here, there is a similar air of artificiality to the character's interactions, with the one subtitle that does not correspond to the dialogue being spoken confirming that it is all an act designed to keep their true emotions/desires in check. The lingering question, not resolved in the ad, concerns whether or not, like the couple from The Lover, this is a mutually knowing arrangement, or if both parties are genuinely trying (unsuccessfully or not) to pull the wool over their partner's eyes. What are we to take from that rogue subtitle? Does it represent what is actually communicated in that second "Yes", or merely what our female participant is privately thinking, the emotional reality lurking beneath the apathetic surface?
The implication, certainly, is that the couple's respective
clandestine interludes with their bars of soap constitutes the only point
in their routine where they drop the mask - or shed their skins, as
symbolised in the momentary discarding of their homely black suits - and
are fully in touch with their "mighty real" selves. The soap equals
reality, hence the sudden appearance of colour, and it brings out the
earthy animal passions (represented by having our heroine produce an
actual tiger roar) that are otherwise tethered by the constraints of
social convention. Indeed, we might interpret these chic minimalists as
being not so different to ourselves, in practice - they go through the
motions of everyday living (however unconventional that everyday living
may be in their case), so that they may enjoy a momentary lapse of inhibitions behind
closed doors. What is unsettling, however, is that here the ruse seems
designed purely as a means of maintaining the facade for one another
(since we have no way of knowing how the husband behaves when out in the
open). The two seem to have constructed their routine so that their
respective realities do not overlap, and their partner sees only the
performance. One gets the impression that this is all part of an
established diurnal cycle for them, and that they will go through the
exact same process the following day. The ambiguity of the ad lies in
just how complicit each participant is in their partner's soapy
infidelity. Comparing the ad to Pinter's The Lover, it had crossed my
mind that the husband possibly makes himself scarce for no other reason
than to allow the wife time to play around in the bathtub, in exchange
for her obligingly going to sleep (or feigning that she's
sleeping) by the time he returns, so that he may be permitted to have
his own allotted slot with his personal bar of soap. This somehow strikes me as being more plausible (and infinitely more interesting) than the alternative reading, with both partners living in mutual ignorance. Either way, what we have is a scenario with a couple who are incapable of communication but, whether consciously or subconsciously, have settled upon an arrangement that enables them to function and to tolerate each other. Imperial Leather saved their marriage.
What does strike me as seriously unsubtle about the ad now are the individual hiding places chosen by each partner for squireling away their forbidden bar of soap. She uses a bonsai bush, while he favours a very phallic-looking cactus (and you've got to love the fleeting glimpse we get of the two plants on opposite sides of the bathtub during the bathroom montage, subliminally cluing us in on the final plot twist). On that note, it occurs to me that, given the frosty nature of their interactions and the bed they sleep on, these two possibly don't have much of a sex life, and with that it mind, I'm inclined to interpret that soap as a metaphor for masturbation. I mean, it's kind of obvious. I don't think you have to be Wilson Bryan Key to see that one.
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