Let's take a look at a rather risqué Volvo ad from 1998 - one that weirded me out as a teenager, and frankly still weirds me out today, and which I feel particularly compelled to dive into and finally glean some degree of sense out of.
Watch this ad with your volume down low and the content probably seems innocuous enough. We're shown an exterior shot of a perfectly charming-looking abode on a crisp winter's day, followed by a shot of the same house on a crisp winter's night, a warmly lit glow emanating from the bedroom, and finally on a crisp winter's morn. All the while, the vehicle the ad is supposedly promoting is situated prominently at the front. Not a lot appears to happen, but it is a picturesque enough scene, the kind that might make a pleasant image for a holiday brochure advertising winter getaways. Only in the final section do we see something resembling a visual punchline - a cyclist pauses while passing the house, clearly intrigued by something or other within the vicinity. Is it the flash Volvo that's parked out front? Possibly not - the non-stop creaking of mattress springs and the intermittent sounds of a female moaning make it very clear what the occupants are up to, and judging by the succession of temporal skips we've glimpsed throughout the ad, they've been at this around the clock. The owners of this Volvo V40 are certainly horny devils, making it a jolly good thing there's such a distance between their love shack and the nearest visible adjacent building - and yet there's still a sense, by the end, that their insatiable sex drives are infringing on the local community. The biggest mystery, of course, is what this ribald scenario has to do with the car parked out front, which is what we would, in theory, expect it all to come back to. The only real clue on offer is in the verbal punchline: "Now all you need are some kids"...meaning what, exactly? That the couple's relentless fucking is borne less of unbridled passion than of a frenzied desperation to procreate (so that they'd have a few young accessories with which to deck out their swanky car)? Or is the idea more that if the couple did have children, they might have something to distract them from all that unbridled passion, which is engendered by how deliriously euphoric their car makes them feel? Either way, and in spite of the text's suggestion that the two are to be regarded as complementary, the ad establishes an implicit rivalry between the prospective children of the over-stimulated couple, and the car which may be their real pride and joy. The kids themselves are mere afterthoughts, their very existence dictated by the Volvo, conceived in service of it and not the other way around, or as a direct result of the Volvo's profound effect on their parents' lives. The message is that the Volvo is a family car, but the ad goes a step further in positing it as the very nexus of family life; despite the irony that it is never, at any point, shown to be the centre of its owners' attentions (and, since they're so preoccupied with staying indoors and procreating, it does not appear to be getting a lot of use at the moment), the car is privileged as the cornerstone of their relationship. Those kids, when they come, had better know their place.
It does not escape my notice that the car, while entirely stationary, has something of an arc going on throughout the three vignettes, in that it becomes increasingly snow-covered the further we progress along our day/night cycle. What's curious is that it's the only aspect of the mise-en-scene where this appears to be happening. By the final portion, neither the steps nor the surrounding greenery appear to have accumulated any additional layers of snow, and the footprints from the previous day are still as visible the following morning. The only really radical difference we have in the morning segment, besides the appearance of the voyeuristic cyclist (and an unidentified black speck besides the steps that might possibly be a bird?) is the addition of a new white topping across the roof of the Volvo, which I am inclined to entertain as an effort to subconsciously connect the car to the sexual activity unfolding in the room above. In other words, an ejaculation metaphor, to reinforce the Volvo's crucial role in the reproductive process. Might this account for the otherwise incidental decision to set the ad in winter scenery?
So yes, the nature of this ad is all very cheeky. For myself, however, its appeal has never rested in the risqué humor, but in the simple pleasure of its images. As a lover of diurnal cycles, I can't help but be charmed by the simple transitioning from one temporal point to the next, and by the general ambience of the scene as it exists at the different times of day - the howling winds that rage on as relentlessly as the mattress-creaking, the array of tracks and prints that snake across the local terrain, the intriguing architecture of the featured abode, with its lack of lower front windows (I would be curious to know of the filming location). Basically, anything that doesn't pertain to the pivotal joke about our salacious Volvo owners. It is a calming aura that is only mildly offset by what's implied to be going on below the surface. We all know that sex sells, but they could honestly have jettisoned that all-important audio and the entire set-up would have struck me as every bit as titillating.
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