Reebok: Escape The Sofa (A Darker Chairy Tale)

At the dawn of the millennium, rival sportswear brands Nike and Reebok tapped into a compelling marketing hook, one that emphasised the value of physical fitness in a manner far exceeding the usual perks of looking cool and having a competitive edge. Regular work-outs, we were reminded, are a matter of meeting a primal survival need, the ability to run and stay ahead of anything on our trail being one of the most basic and effective anti-predator tactics at our disposal. Nobody today would seriously entertain the possibility of having to outrun a sabre-tooth cat on their way to the office, but there is still a plethora of horror to be projected onto the modern world if we care to see it. It was a train of thought that allowed for some creative and tongue-in-cheek campaigning, humorously extolling the benefits of exercise by playing around with the conventions of horror cinema. Nike had a particularly infamous and controversial spot designed to accompany the 2000 Sydney Olympics, in which a gym rat is pursued by a Jason Voorhees type, who quickly throws in the chainsaw when he realises he has no prospect of keeping up with her. (Their "Run. Because of What's Out There" print ad was of a similar vein, but I am unable to put a precise year to it). Reebok tried something all the more knowingly ludicrous in 2001 with "Escape The Sofa", a miniature horror about an aspiring sportsman looking to avoid being devoured by a tatty old couch. If you're thinking that a sofa is too prosaic an item to make for functional nightmare food, then you really should see this one in action. The ad was devised by Lowe Lintas & Partners and directed by Frank Budgen, who previously helmed the "Bet on Black" spot for Guinness. The prospective sofa chow is played by Ashley Artus, whom you might recognise as one of the Death Eaters from Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

What most amuses me about Budgen's ad is how the set-up calls to mind Claude Jutra and Norman McLaren's classic 1957 short A Chairy Tale. That too was about the conflict between a man and an item of animate furniture - a man who wanted to sit and a chair that emphatically did not want to be sat upon. Here the struggle is flipped on its head, so that the sofa becomes the dominant force in the equation, with Artus having to pry himself away in order to assert his status as a man and not the sedentary object it desires him to be. It offers a clever inversion on what we might suppose to be the actual problem going on beneath the metaphor, in which the sofa presents too safe and comfortable a haven for the occupant to have much of a mind to get his keister off of it. The sofa is instead envisioned as a maniacal entity, one intent on smothering the energy and resistance out of whomever might sit on it. It might lack facial features, yet it is strangely convincing as a beast on the rampage. The spot's most unsettling image arises from a brief interlude between the grappling, when both parties find themselves locked in a momentary stand-off and we're left facing the sofa head-on. Here, the sofa doesn't do anything other than pant heavily (how? I'm pretty sure it doesn't have lungs!), a loosened cushion hanging from its base like a tongue protruding from its non-existent mouth, a sight so eerily unnatural that it might bring out a few honest-to-god goosebumps. At the time, I was also genuinely spooked by the sofa's evident ninja prowess, during that specific moment when Artus retrieves his branded sports bag from the kitchen and attempts to make a break for the door, only for the sofa to have somehow gotten there before him. 

For all the ad's potential to inspire epiplaphobic reactions in susceptible viewers, it never loses sight of the fact that it is a story of a man who takes a physical walloping from a predatory sofa. It keeps the tone light, with one foot always in the absurdness of the matter and the other in the uncanniness. The sofa fights by stripping Artus's jeans from his body and exposing his underpants, a tactic as brutal as it is comical. The sofa is, after all, degrading Artus, shooting down his aspirations of entering the outside world and honing his athletic mettle. In that regard, he is effectively fighting himself. The sofa is the only object in Artus's apartment that appears to be alive (excepting the house plants), yet it plays as a monstrous reflection of his broader implied lifestyle. Our first glimpse of Artus in his natural habitat shows him sprawled out in an inelegant slouching position; the unvacuumed floor and haphazard piles of magazines suggest that he is accustomed to leading quite a slovenly existence. At this point, he is harmony with the sofa; it is the desire to get up and become physically active that suddenly pits him against this manifestation of his own slobbishness, one that threatens to swallow him whole. Meanwhile, the dark, somewhat chintzy leaf-patterned wallpaper in the backdrop is a subliminal clue that this seemingly calm domestic space is actually a wilderness, one in which Artus will shortly discover that he is not the apex predator. There is another implicit irony to the arrangement; we will be watching the battle play out from the "comfort" of our own sofas, our attachment to which, the ad suggests, may be consuming us through less dramatic means.

Still, it's a well-known fact that the saddest moment in any monster movie is when the monster dies. Here, the sofa isn't actually destroyed, but it is thoroughly vanquished when the pursuit takes it out of Artus's apartment and down a flight of stairs. The sofa becomes caught in the doorway and, while it continues to struggle, is left largely immobilised. Artus takes the opportunity to slip out from under it, refasten his jeans and exit the building, headed for the gym with his Reebok bag and his dignity salvaged. I am left reflecting at this point as to I really wanted Artus to succeed in the end, or if my sympathies were really with the sofa all along. I'm gripped with an irrefutable twang of regret in seeing this formidable beasts reduced to such a state of helplessness and vulnerability. I wonder if perhaps its intentions were really misunderstood, if it was motivated less by the desire to engulf Artus than by simple separation anxiety. Maybe it feels an attachment to Artus, likes the feeling of his body pressed against its fabric, and is fearful that his implementing a fitness regime will spell the end of their partnership. But it does also get me thinking about the nature of their relationship beyond this single incident. Artus is, presumably, not escaping the sofa for good. He is going to have to come back to his apartment later that same evening, and the sofa will still be there. This possessed item of furniture chomping at his thighs on a nightly basis is something that he's going to have to live with. In which case, is this how we should expect things to play out on every occasion where he fancies a visit to the gym? Are we to assume that the more in shape Artus gets, the more mastery he'll have over the sofa? Or will they eventually reach a peaceful compromise, as the two participants of A Chairy Tale did, one where they each aspire to see things from the other's perspective by allowing the sofa to momentarily lie on Artus? It's a thought that warms the cockles of my heart.