Let's be real here - when you're dealing with a product as heinous as cigarettes, there is an argument to be had that any animal involved in the shilling process can be automatically construed as "horrifying". The intention is, after all, to get you curious about a substance that's both highly addictive and recognised universally as hazardous to you and to the people around you. With cigarette advertising I've always found there to be this weird dichotomy; I
see the government health warning splashed across the screen in big
bold lettering and my reflexes are immediately going to want to interpret it
as an anti-smoking PSA - which is of course entirely at odds with what the
imagery itself is attempting to convey. Not that the two forces were necessarily so incompatible - the challenge was to make the deadly look sexy, and I'm sure that advertising agencies were exuberant at the prospect.
In the UK, televised adverts for cigarettes had been banned long before I was born (cigars and loose tobacco were exempt until 1991, which is why the Hamlet campaign endured in popular memory as long as it did) but they were still allowed to advertise them on billboards right up until my late teens and, odiously enough, it was entirely the norm to see adverts for cigarettes (and alcohol) on the billboard positioned right outside my school. The ubiquitousness of cigarette advertising (outside of the chattering cyclops) struck me as bizarrely contradictory at the time - from a young age, a multitude of authorities were keen to impress on us the message that smoking was bad and we were better off not dabbling in it, and yet there was clearly this other, more invisible authority at work, whose voice was, in its way, every bit as loud, and as every bit as eager for us to know that the product existed. The only thing more disconcerting to me than the idea of hawking something that required such a terrifying health warning was my not having the foggiest what any of the featured imagery had to do with cigarettes anyhow. One of the major limitations imposed on such advertising was that you weren't actually allowed to show anybody doing the recommended-but-not-recommended action, so agencies had to resort to strange, abstract gimmicks to get their pitches across. The granddaddy of strange, abstract gimmicks being this 1979 cinema advert for Benson & Hedges, which forged some enigmatic connection between smoking and poolside iguana gatherings. Devised by Collett Dickenson Pearce and directed by Hugh Hudson, who would soon be better known as the director of Chariots of Fire, it spared no expenses and turned numerous heads in its day. I first came across it as part of a YouTube compilation and
immediately wondered what on earth could it be hawking - regardless, it
had a whole lot of weird imagery involving lizards chilling around an
unfilled swimming pool, so it had my attention. When the final reveal
came, well, it shouldn't have surprised me. Leave it to tobacco
advertising to be this aggressively overwrought with its abstractness.
To give "Swimming Pool" full credit, it is properly a cinematic creation, comprised of shots that feel wild, alive and invigorating (set to the sounds of "Wind" by Godley & Creme). In terms of its boldness and originality, it is very hard to fault the thing, even if it is in aid of such an insidious product. The 90-second ad shows a helicopter flying over the Arizona desert carrying some precious cargo, which appears to pique the interests of the various reptiles soaking up the sunshine down below (mostly iguanas in swimming pool territory, but a snake gets in on the observation too). This is all intercut with footage of a camera peering out from behind some Venetian blinds, before the helicopter drops its cargo into a pool and an iguana swims toward it, apparently turning into a scuba diver who proceeds to open the box with a sardine key. The film then closes with an ad-within-an-ad, revealing the preceding action to have been playing out "inside" a billboard positioned alongside Battersea Power Station, and finally that government health warning, to remind us that we're playing with fire, which Collet Dickenson Pearce no doubt saw as bolstering the film's seductively dangerous aura.
The meaning behind the visual punchline with Battersea Power Station is itself not so enigmatic - it represents the grey humdrum from which the exoticism of Benson & Hedges is purported to provide elevation. In that regard the ad might be perceived as much as a love letter to the power of advertising as to the joys of Benson & Hedges, if the billboard image itself is meant to be so alive with suggestive pleasures. The ad displays a fascination with the act of looking, albeit through a predominantly non-human gaze, from the obvious voyeuristic allusions of the seemingly unmanned camera to the pool outlets, which eerily evoke the eyes of an awakening monster. The use of reptiles (as opposed to anything more fluffy-looking) implies an adult-orientated exoticism tinged with menace. The snake, a classic symbol of danger, here seems wary of the approaching crate of cigarettes, indicating that it sees itself as lower down in the predatory hierarchy (clearly, it has the good sense to know what kinds of carcinogens are being hauled above it). Meanwhile, the pool-dwelling iguanas, besides providing a cool visual, evoke a sense of a badland subsisting upon the fringes of your personal play area, a meeting of the wild and the recreational. When a human finally appears on screen, in the form of the scuba diver, his wetsuit-coated body seems redolent of that of the swimming iguana, suggesting that a transformation has occurred. At this point it becomes tempting, however facetiously, to read the sequence as analogous to the opening chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the discovery of the crate elevating these lizard brains to the level of cultured beings given to constructing vast civilisations (hence our journey to Battersea Power Station at the end). Except the silhouettes of the two passers-by in the final frame have a similarly obscured appearance that does not transcend the uncanniness of the lizards' domain, implying that we haven't completely left it. Besides, the film clearly has an affinity for this otherworldly wilderness, consumption of the Benson & Hedges brand being posited as an ideal balance between animal impulse and chic sophistication.
But like I say, weird dichotomy. There's no way I can personally interpret the full-on outlandishness of this ad, as slickly directed as it may be, as anything other than a reflection of how badly smoking screws you up. In that regard it's practically a comedy sketch. Cool lizards, though.
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