Ideally, you shouldn't be far along into "Ride", Jonathon Glazer's 2000 ad for Wrangler Jeans, before figuring out that it's a promotion for the denim trousers its protagonist is fond of wearing. I'll admit, though, that when I first had the pleasure of catching it, there was a fleeting moment, just toward the end, when I thought it had taken me to a darker place altogether. That I was looking at a stealth PIF, the kind that wants to catch me off-guard by pretending that everything is sweet and upbeat before hitting me with a heavy dosage of psychological scarring. I've seen this trick used before, I know how it is. Forty-six seconds into the minute-long ad, we're drawn down an ominous black road obscured by smoke, happening on the image of a particularly brutal looking car wreck. I took that as a sign that our heroic backpacker had met a terrible end and was fully expecting a slogan along the lines of "KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD" to flash across the screen. But no. The protagonist is revealed to be alive and well, lapping it up in the warm red glow of roadside hospitality as a herd of buffalo, an obvious symbol for the untamed spirit of the American terrain, charges on unabated. It'll take a lot more than a few horrific images to perturb this drifter's wanderlust, thank you very much.
Truthfully, the feeling that this could, at any instance, turn into a PIF about some kind of unseen peril is integral to the appeal of "Ride", an ad that runs the whole gamut of emotions when it comes to solitary travel. The exhilaration and romanticism are tempered by scenes of loneliness (our protagonist huddled by a deserted bus station in the dead of night) and of drudgery (him attempting to bum rides from flooded streets in the drizzling rain). Whatever the mood, the momentum of the ad absolutely never lets up, the fast cutting from shot to shot meaning that we always feel that we are going somewhere, with further sights ever on the horizon. Yet we never know exactly where we are going (it could be that the protagonist does not either). It is a ride that, joyous though it may be, is constantly threatening to veer out of control. Flirtation with danger, and the omnipresence of risk, is part and parcel of the drifter lifestyle, the appearance of that dreadful smoking wreckage an acknowledgement of what could potentially happen if we allow ourselves to be lured down the wrong path. It is not the only potential bad end that presents itself throughout the ad. In one shot, we see a rattlesnake lunging at the camera. In another, we glide through an ostensibly immaculate suburban neighbourhood, only to pass a house going up a deadly blaze - a warning that danger could be lurking around literally any corner and that we're perhaps no safer in the comfort of our homes than out in those snake-filled grasses. Elsewhere, the protagonist hops aboard a moving train carriage only to find it occupied by a strange figure lurking in the shadows, who could potentially be a threat or a pleasant travelling companion. He transpires to be neither (he's also wearing jeans, so for the purposes of this ad we are presumably to see him as another aspirational figure, but this is clearly no basis for he and the protagonist to make friends).
Glazer's piece is a curiously mind-bending one, given that most of the images are of a fairly mundane variety - motels, road stops, highways - with only intermittent glimpses of genuine weirdness. The choice of accompanying song, "We're Off To See The Wizard" by Victor Young & His Orchestra (taken, of course, from the evergreen Hollywood musical The Wizard of Oz) injects a sense of playful fantasy, that the America the protagonist is traversing might be every bit as bizarre and wonderful as the land of Oz, and at times potentially as fictitious. Of particular note, and key to the ad's philosophy, is the line "Follow the fellow who follows a dream". Our protagonist clearly lives outside of the bounds of society, as signified in a scene where we catch him bathing in a river. He is able to wander in and out of towns and taverns and integrate himself with others here and there. In one scene, we catch him stirring following an episode of physical intimacy, a same sex one night stand in a motel room (queer heroes were an unusual sight in mainstream advertising in 2000, adding to the general subversiveness of both ad and protagonist), but as soon as he slips those pants back on the outside world beckons (his partner, who remains naked, feels no such urge to follow, a point he expresses by turning his head in the opposite direction). His instinct to eventually leave it all behind and trek onward is celebrated as having set him apart. He is a Y2K throwback to that most quintessential of American figures, the pioneering cowboy, setting out across a turf that is still deeply suffused with the spirit of the old West. Glimpses of that old West sporadically make their way to the surface - a car is seen rearing up and down like a bucking horse, suggesting that the march of progress and technology hasn't quelled the fundamental sense of uninhibitedness that a land so vast and filled with possibilities can inspire. Meanwhile, the mysterious figure our protagonist has the pleasure of stowing away aboard a train has the aura of a Hollywood movie star from another era - that the mystery man and the protagonist are never seen in the same frame raises
questions as to whether the former is even there, or whether he's a figment of
our young drifter's imagination, a lingering image from a bygone slice of Americana. "Ride" suggests an intersection of the assorted mavericks of the American mythos, each very much alive and very universal attuned to the same urge to keep moving in the manner of those noble stampeding buffalo. The distance maintained, in the end, feels less like unfamiliarity than it does a mark of respect, two like-minded, denim-clad souls each acknowledging their right to share a physically and ideological plain in which they may be equally and blissfully untethered to anything, including one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment