I'm a staunch proponent of the notion that TV ads are at their most delectable when you can perceive them as miniature horrors in their own right. Bite-sized chunks of bizarre imagery, disconcerting hyperbole and fragmentary storytelling, attacking in groups every quarter hour...I knew growing up that there was a wealth of nightmare fodder to be mined from the cracks in between your favourite shows, and this ad for the Toyota MR2 Roadster has long struck me as a particularly underrated example. I remember catching it a lot during late night blocks in the germinal days of the Y2K, and it was very effective, knowing that soon the darkness would be upon me, and I would be at the mercy of whatever fantasies were about to flitter across my own brain. It's a strange and beguiling beast, rife with muted, atmospheric dread, and helped along by Toyota's willingness to cast their own product as the villain of the scenario.
The ad concerns a lone character, a young ascetic who has ditched civilisation and carved out an existence of solitary mindfulness far removed from the materialistic fixations of human society. The opening shots show him roaming the mountain wilderness in all its splendour, as he monologues on the spiritual bliss he has procured in the company of nature. There is, however, a fly lurking in his ointment, one that completely belies his claims to have attained liberation from earthly desire. His emotional purity lasts for only as long as the sun is up - he admits that he lives in fear of the night, which he spends writhing about in a fit of sweaty terror, grappling with nocturnal visions of a sports car known as the MR2 Roadster. For all his good intentions and diurnal discipline, night is when his wordly id creeps back into view and exercises its rapacious influence, reminding the protagonist that even he can't resist the allure of a flash Toyota, albeit vicariously, via a dreamed image. That the Toyota should be the source of such rampant night terrors is, fundamentally, all a joke, and the ad happily lets the mask drop in having the protagonist's monologue become a lot more frenzied (and unambiguously sexual - he uses the expression "the prick of earthly pleasure", for Pete's sake) as the car hurtles into view, in contrast to the collected stoicism of his earlier words. But this doesn't preclude the fact that the ad does manage to be genuinely unsettling in its build-up, like the opening to a horror narrative about a person trying to find themselves out in the wilderness and instead happening upon a much more disturbing reality. There is an underlying menace in those opening shots, a sense of an eeriness perpetually lurking beneath the beauty - in part, it might be that the vast silence, or the softened ambience of his surroundings, seems almost unbearably vacant to ears accustomed to the hustle and bustle of city living. But moreover, straight off the bat the ad puts heavy emphasis on the intense isolation of its protagonist, conveying his vulnerability through various wide shots in which he is dwarfed by the scope of his surroundings. The only other living creature we see with him out there is an owl, and it serves less as a companion than as a herald to that impending darkness he dreads so much. Already there's an empathy for his fear of the transition into nightfall - if you're this on your own, then of course you're liable to feel shifty in the dark.
His isolation is, I feel, key to the eeriness of the ad - and even when the Roadster, the lingering imprint of the world he has left behind, enters the picture and the narrative takes a more overtly comical turn, that isolation does not dissipate. His vision of the Roadster is at odds with the world he currently inhabits, its angry, abrasive whirring (matched with the sound of the protagonist's heartbeat) a startling contrast to the mountain ambience, as it as it thunders along a metropolis of high-rise buildings. These environs seem washed-out and lifeless, stacked up against the magnificence of his digs out in the wilderness, giving them a convincing sense of unreality, in spite of their mundaneness. One thing that these duelling panoramas do have in common, however, is a near-total lack of human presence - aside from the vague outline of the driver of the Roadster (assumed to be a projection of the protagonist) the streets seem eerily devoid of residents. This proves even more unsettling than those establishing shots of our protagonist alone in the wilderness, creating as it does a sense of a post-apocalyptic landscape from which man has disappeared and machine now sits at the top of the pile (a dynamic reinforced in the implication that, although the protagonist sinfully fancies himself as the driver of the vehicle, the allure of the Roadster is blatantly driving him). The narrative I was always tempted to apply to this scenario, however fanciful, was one in which our hero might potentially be the last man on Earth, having witnessed the violent reckoning that resulted in machines laying claim to the streets and any human survivors being driven to the far reaches of the wilderness. Naturally, he fears sundown because that's when he's haunted by his memories of the mechanical objects that have displaced humanity, and which he fears may still be hunting him, with an acute awareness that humankind's attachment to such technological luxuries is what facilitated its downfall.
Despite the overt absurdity of the reveal, the ad ends with a return to daylight, and into that original uneasy silence, as we see the protagonist atoning for his material indulgence with an act of self-flagellation. The character is stuck in an unending cycle of peace (although not really) and despair; the final look on his face conveys a distinct bitterness, with the knowledge that his human desires, and by extension the materialism that thrives on them, will forever get the better of him. The final shot of the ad shows the Roadster of his nightmares - despite its cold inexpressiveness, the car is clearly having the last laugh here.
I should confess that my interpretation of the film was always based on the 40-second version of the ad making the TV rounds of new millennium, and which I long assumed to be the only version in existence. Only very recently (by which I mean last month) did I have the pleasure of discovering that there is, in fact, a version that clocks in at a whole minute long, and which had been sneakily squirrelled away from me this entire time. I can't confirm it was a recipient of theatrical screenings, but I'm guessing it's the one you would have likely seen included in cinema trailer reels. The 60-second version isn't radically different to the shorter cut - the establishing shots of the protagonist's peaceful diurnal existence run on for a little longer, with extended pauses, and the monologue incorporates a few snippets of additional dialogue. Below is a complete transcript, with bolding indicating what was exclusive to the 60-second cut:
"I have found peace, liberated* from the daily pursuit of gain. Mind: pure. Body: cleansed. I am free. I fear nothing, but the night. For the night brings - sports cars! A true sports car! A Roadster! The painful prick of earthly pleasure! The Yin of performance! The Yang of design! Yeah! Go baby, go! Oh, mama!"
*He says "free" in the 40-second version.
The most striking difference between the two is the inclusion of an additional visual punchline before the hero's act of self-flagellation, in which he opens up a crate, revealing a snazzy suit and tie he has illicitly stashed away, and which he proceeds to rub against in a sensual manner. This overt expression of pleasure creates a much more salient contrast when we leap to the succeeding close-up shot of him grimacing whilst flogging himself - we see the polarity between the ascetic Jekyll and the indulgent Hyde, each occupying opposing ends of the day/night cycle, and each persisting in their alternating leverage of the protagonist's urges. The entire situation puts me in mind of of that equally unsettling Imperial Leather ad with the two minimalists concealing their carnal bathing habits from one another, only with the additional complication that he's having to negotiate the arrangement with two conflicting facets of himself. What does the suit and tie have to do with the Roadster? My best guess would be that it's a vestige of the life he left behind, a glimpse of the person he may once have been before he ditched civilisation (or before the machines brought it crashing down, take your pick). We can see the suit as the skin he has attempted to shed but never fully been able to sever his connection to, with the car being the insidious little toxin that momentarily teases that buried identity out of hiding. It adds an additional layer of irony to the outcome - in the daylight, the ascetic reasserts control, but in a way that implies a reversal of the dynamic expressed through the monologue, with peace coming at night through his embracing of that luxurious suit, and anguish with the sun as attempts to beat his material yearnings into submission. His intentions may be laudable, but his wordly human nature dictates that his life might be less complicated if he just submitted to those infernal desires and rejoined the rest of us consumers. Like the soap ad with the minimalists, it is fundamentally an ad designed to make us similarly crave the product on offer, not sell us on the virtues of his chosen lifestyle. From where he is, though, I'd say he still has the infinitely better view of things. His woodland abode might be lonely and a tad unnerving, but it feels real and vibrant; those imagined Toyota night drives, by contrast, are bombastic, but also kind of wan.
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