The immediate aftermath of Peugeot's "Drive of Your Life" ad saw a number of interesting (or utterly banal, depending on your outlook) attempts to replicate the formula, not least from Peugeot themselves. Few of these imitations launched with quite the same degree of grandiose self-indulgence as the Peugeot spot - booking out an entire three minute News at Ten ad break for its debut in February 1996 was a stunt that seemed to turn enough heads while garnering little adulation from the press - but the intrinsic narrative was set in stone. Your everyday journey from Point A to Point B was represented as an opportunity for spiritual cleansing - the time when you got to cast off your established identity and embrace your full aptitude as the kind of liberated soul who drives X vehicle. The idea, I suppose, being that your car was a transitory vessel for moving in between two static poles, your time therein a precious and ephemeral phase in which nothing was fixed and solid and you could momentarily defy definition and simply be an individual riding a wave of unspent potential. The outcome of your diurnal routines were unlikely to change in any substantial way just because you were embarking on them in a flash new set of wheels, a fact that I doubt many consumers were truly unwise to - what auto manufacturers were attempting to sell you (besides the obvious) was a moment, and how to purportedly make the most of it.
This ad for the Nissan Primera feels more modest in tone than its Peugeot counterpart, ditching its more abstract elements (there's no obvious equivalent here to our so-called average person's Nicolas Roeg-drenched fantasies of pursuing a girl in a red coat), although the central energy is much the same. A nondescript businessman's morning commute to work becomes a transcendent ritual in which he gets to revel in his yearning for some kind of higher fulfilment. "Lifted" by Lighthouse Family is used as an analogue to M People (both acts were commonly lumped into what at the time was derisively categorised as "coffee table music"), with the succession of pretty accompanying visuals once again evoking the sensation of watching a truncated music video (on the subject of the actual "Lifted" music video...anyone else consider it slightly curious that it takes place in an arid desert when the lyrics explicitly and repeatedly reference rain?). The grand twist here being that our protagonist works from a home-based office, alongside his wife, meaning that he was out there facing the world just for the hell of it. The Nissan answers a very different need in his life - one which, having been working from home for the better part of two years now, I can certainly comprehend. When, early in 2020, venues that encouraged mass gatherings became forbidden territory and we were all regulated to our own private spaces, the loss of that daily commute came as an unexpected blow; more than just a functional necessity, it provided an opportunity to connect with the outside world and reaffirm that we were all a part of something larger. I know a number of people who were still setting out every morning, if only to immediately turn tail and head back home - if nothing else, it offered alleviation from staring at the same four walls all day. In this guy's case...well, a person could do a lot worse than having to stare at the swanky-looking walls he has around him. But the basic human need is duly recognised.
Viewing this ad in 2021, it's hard not to see it through the lens of the post-COVID world, in that the great outside the hero traverses seems puzzlingly deserted. You do see the silhouettes of what looks like a trio of cyclists as he first sets out on his journey, but otherwise he's got the entire road, and the world as a whole, entirely to himself. Even when he reaches the city, which we might initially assume to be his stopping point, there's nary another soul in sight. The brand new morning looks fresh as a daisy, golden and picturesque, but there's something very eerie, even borderline post-apocalyptic about the conspicuous lack of life stirring therein. The obvious answer is that the outside world exists here purely for the benefit of our protagonist; when he heads out for his symbolic commute, he isn't so much escaping his self-contained bubble as wallowing in an extension of it. The bigger picture is, for all intents and purposes, his own private and personalised backyard, with no other humans with their own intersecting agendas there to smudge up his pristine view.
Still, what really intrigues (and unnerves) me about this spot is how the couple therein play like worldlier counterparts to our minimalist chums who, at around the same point in advertising history, were down in their spartan lair, struggling to come to terms with their shameful addiction to Imperial Leather. Again, same energy. This couple, in direct contrast, have an unashamed hankering for luxuries, but the world they inhabit seems every bit as jarringly surreal, cut off from anything resembling conventional civilisation and steeped in a mind-bending artificiality. As the ad opens, and we find our leads contemplating the day ahead from the comfort of their ultramodern bedroom, their reflections are fleetingly glimpsed amid the bizarrely fluid purple mise en scene, cluing us in that there is an element of duality at play. Like those minimalists, they speak to one another in a stilted manner that suggests both are playing up to their assumed roles; visually, there is enough of a contrast between the couple's casual and working environs, even if they are apparently both situated underneath the same roof (one is flamboyant, borderline illusory and something of an eyesore, while the other is ordered and decorous, if no less elaborate), although it is curious that they insist upon the formality of addressing one another as "Mr Jones" and "Mrs Jones" in both modes (thus telegraphing the ad's plot twist at the start). I would hazard a guess this done to facilitate a closing echo, so that the viewer would be crystal clear on the revelation that his wife and his colleague are indeed the same person - and besides, compared to the Imperial Leather couple, I suspect that their repeated insistence on these austere monikers is intended to come off as more playful than sinister (implying that the novelty of being both marital and business partners has yet to wear off for them). The suggestion of artifice does, nevertheless, go along perfectly with the general queasiness of that purple decor; it plays like an illusion, a dream from which our protagonist is required jar himself loose every morning as he eases himself down to Earth, traversing the open and unpopulated road back to reality (and, potentially, on into some other falsehood) in his trusty Nissan. Which Mr Jones and Mrs Jones, if either, represent the "real" people and which are just roles they are obligated to play in between is immaterial - as with the Imperial Leather ad, human relationships are depicted as a drawn-out ritual of gestures and insincerity, with intimacy with the product in question representing a momentary gasp of clarity amid it all. Our protagonist finds his release in an act of ostensible play pretence - that he needs to drive himself to work - by intermittently purging his identity to that of a Nissan driver on his way to somewhere. That he isn't discovering much out there except a mirror to his own wanderlusting ego is likewise immaterial.
No comments:
Post a Comment