The Maxwell House "Deirdre" ad from 1994 is one of those campaigns that didn't really catch on with zeitgeist in any significant way, but that I've found definitely made a quieter impression on the people who saw it - particularly if, like myself, they were young and ultra-susceptible to a gloriously uncanny sign-off. For many years, my quest to locate the Imperial Leather spot about the dishonest minimalists that had so unsettled me in 1996 was impeded by the problem that no one besides myself seemed to so much as remember the premise (much less the brand it was promoting). If I mentioned this freaky black and white ad from the mid-1990s about a couple who lived in a surreal abode and were concealing bars of luxury soap from one another beneath the plant pots beside their bathtub, I was met with blank stares all around. But if I brought up the mid-90s ad about another couple who lived in an eerily drab living room and were complaining about their next door neighbours and how they'd stopped liking them ever since they'd switched coffee brands, then it was a different story entirely: "Oh bloody hell! Yes, I remember, that advert scared the crap out me. That freeze frame at the end was diabolical!" I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the eponymous "Deirdre" ever gave me nightmares as a child, but I do have distinct memories of waking up in the early hours, Skinamarink-style, and being haunted by the mental image of her monstrously contorted face in the darkness. I was certainly old enough to know that there was no way that that woman was going to emerge from the television and devour me, but in practice that mattered little. She had already gotten to me where I felt most powerless. She was, without doubt, one of the most terrifying presences to stalk the advertising airwaves in the 1990s, and I say it's high time we gave her her flowers.
There is actually quite a bit of thematic overlap between the "Dierdre" ad and the aforementioned Imperial Leather "minimalist" ad, in that we glimpse their respective products from primarily the perspective of people who would, on the surface, be inclined to shun such things. We could even combine them with the Toyota Roadster "ascetic" ad from 2000 to form a lose sort of trilogy of advertising scenarios regarding people leading deliberately spartan existences, in which said product acquired a haunting and/or intrusive presence as a sinfully destructive item to be resisted at all costs. They were all profoundly odd and disconcerting pieces that hinged on a tension between abstinence and clandestine desire in a way that clearly rattled me at various stages of my childhood development. In the ascetic's case, he lived alone out in the wilderness and had only himself to answer to for his lurid Roadster-inspired fantasies (and, in the extended cut, the suit and tie he had stashed away), but the other two involved deception amongst couples who'd made a conscious decision to forgo certain creature comforts, whether as a bold lifestyle statement or out of a sense of social superiority. For the Imperial Leather minimalists, the deception was mutual (and potentially something that both parties were fully aware of), but in "Deirdre" it was a joke that only one partner was tauntingly in on. Of the three, "Deirdre" is the most overtly comedic, but it's also by and far the most hair-raising, both on account of the fiendish sting in its tail and the repeated atmospheric dissonance to which it subjects viewers on the route to its psyche-scarring payoff.
The genius of "Deirdre" is that it effectively gives you two ads in one. One is breezy and conventional, the other is arch and sardonic. They represent the opposing characters of two different households, which are intercut with an incongruity so jarring as to evoke the sensation of flicking back and forth between two channels. The couples in question frankly don't feel as though they could inhabit the same universe, let alone live side by side on the same street. The Maxwell-drinking couple (never named, but we'll deem them our "protagonist couple", on account of them being the ones we're supposed to want to emulate) are presented in a succession of exuberant cuts that call to the mind the types of ad campaigns that would have populated breaks a few years back, when the 80s were transitioning into the 90s and there was an extensive reliance on upbeat jingles and sun-kissed images (for an example from Maxwell House's own arsenal, check out "Get The Max" from 1988). The time we spend with the protagonist couple is agreeable, if utterly banal. Taken on their own, it's a straightforward demonstration of how an activity as mundane as downing a morning cup of Joe might become an invaluable ritual in reaffirming familial connections and greeting the possibilities that each new day has to offer, with only the excessive jauntiness of the accompanying music track suggesting any kind of parodic intention. The cliched nature of the images is given a more thorough recontextualisation through the input of our antagonist couple, who comment on the action from their own lustreless confines. The bespectacled husband (also unnamed) is the only one who speaks, while the wife (she's Deirdre) stands expressionless in the backdrop. In their pre-Maxwell days, the protagonist couple were apparently just like them ("our sort of people"). The tale of how they changed their coffee and in the process ceased to be the kind of neighbours the antagonist couple could jibe with is revealed to us as though the husband were divulging some form of community-rocking scandal, with the final assurance that, "We try to avoid them nowadays".
Already there is an atmospheric unease, generated by the rapid intercutting of the motion and blaring party music characterising the coffee-induced euphoria next door and the silent inertia conveying the coldly puritanical flavour of the antagonist couple's lifestyle. It will likely not escape us that the protagonist couple are always seen surrounded by greenery, embracing the open world, while the antagonist couple never venture from their living room, making them prisoners of their own close-mindedness. But it also rests on a tension between what plays like a feverishly heightened fantasy and a cartoonishly tedious reality. Neither side feels particularly real. For all of their vapidity, the scenes with the protagonist couple have a surreal, dream-like quality, suggesting an exaggerated proposal for how a consumer product could transform your life, and with the framing commentary from the antagonist couple implying a self-awareness on the ad's part of its own falseness. The antagonists' world has, on the one hand, a stronger grounding in reality, with its lack of music and frenetic energy, but that's negated by the humorously caricatured nature of their conservatism. Although the two worlds appear to be at total odds, they represent the perfect balancing act - the make-believe paradise of the protagonist couple is both a knowing joke and a sympathetic refuge from the overbearing austerity next door. The antagonists' angle might give us an outlet for sneering at the more banal advertising conventions in which the protagonists are revel, but they themselves are ultimately too grotesque to elicit much affinity.
Which takes us to our infamous ending. A third-person voice-over imparts the slogan, "The full of beans coffee for full beans people", suggesting that this is the fundamental distinction being drawn between the two sides. Some people are "full of beans", possessing all of the enthusiasm for life that Maxwell House typifies, and those who aren't a part of that privileged group will simply not comprehend. The closing twist, however, implies that it is a potential that just about anybody can unlock. The antagonist husband acknowledges his wife for the first time: "We don't like change, do we, Deirdre?" Deirdre has spent the entire ad in silence, which ostensibly signals accordance with her husband's sneery sentiments. In the final seconds, she maintains her silence, but gets in the last word regardless. Her face alters dramatically as she holds up a jar of the forbidden product and demonstrates where her own allegiances really lie. She is willing to embrace the Maxwell House revolution, if literally behind her husband's back, and change is coming, whether he's ready for it or not. While her husband embodies the smug front of people set in her ways, Deirdre expresses the latent potential yearning to break free.
As a twist, it seems cute and logical, but the execution is disproportionately disturbing. Deirdre doesn't merely hold up the jar of freeze-dried beans with an air of surreptitious triumph. Her face contorts horrifically, in a manner that is presumably intended to indicate an intense and uninhibited elation bursting belatedly to the surface. In practice, she looks like she's possessed, a testament to the insidious power of the Maxwell House brand and its ability to warp everything it touches beyond recognition. It was an expression that sent shivers down the spines of innumerable young viewers, its horrors amplified by its insistence on lingering for good measure as a torturously drawn out freeze frame. I swear that the folks responsible for cutting together advertising blocks knew exactly what they were doing and had a penchant for inserting it right at the end so that the cursed image would be prolonged even further. It seemed to persist for an eternity regardless, a perfect vision of unfiltered monstrosity forever etched onto my brain, ready to strike whenever I was feeling in any way vulnerable. I don't think the closing sense of dread was entirely accidental either. The way Deirdre holds up the jar at the end, it frankly looks as though she could use it to bonk her oblivious husband on the head. Maxwell House takes the form of a deadly invading presence, already much closer than the husband assumes, being right behind him and inside his seeming place of safety. The barriers have been eradicated and we're left with an uncanny intersection between the exaggerated caricatures of one world and the excessive animation of the other. A distressing transformation indeed.
The original Deidre ad is the only one I remember seeing at the time, but there was indeed an entire series spun around the premise, in which the husband got to exercise his equal disdain for Noel Edmonds (who'd also infiltrated their house unbeknownst to him and was unambiguously looking to strike his head with the jar of Maxwell House) and for Penguins (the brand of chocolate-coated tea biscuit and not the bird, although odds are that he didn't care for them much either). I'm not 100% sure, but I could swear the actress who played Deirdre kept changing with new installment - a subtle commentary on the inevitably of change and the husband's ongoing obliviousness? And then there was at least one ad that swapped out the cast entirely, centring on a different set of couples divided by Maxwell House, and with a holiday-making theme. The protagonist couple were there identified as "Ron" and "Fran", with Deirdre having been supplanted by "Laura". The antagonist husband still went unnamed, but here had acquired a wetter sense of humor to go with his new rain-soaked environs. I'm not sure, but I think this might have been the only installment in which the husband actually cottoned on to his wife's being a closet Maxwell drinker. "This isn't our usual coffee, Laura? LAURA!!!"