Summer Event

For any thinking adult who has children, keeping at bay the destructive, absurd, relentless fascination with commodities and acquisition is a very high priority.

Little children stand about, one hitting a pinata, but all the others focused on something . . . . off camera, something so compelling that like in The Village of the Damned the children's attention is over THERE . . . What is it?

"Summer is for children," the "Hello, I'm-your-doctor voice" intones. More and more children stare like the sun is exploding or a giant spaceship approaches. But it is in fact a car.

In the moment of realizing these connections, we are supposed to become the kids — "like a kid in a candy store" — and want the car ourselves. That is what the ad suggests it is up to.

But it is not. The watcher is really being asked to accept something new, a framework yet unnaturalized. It is too achingly wrong for small children to be lusting after new cars, too much of a gap with what we know.

The desire being evoked is really being invoked — by the hugeness of this gap: an emptiness at the core of the ad, that can only be filled by new desire.

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This is one of the new stretch of ads that has as its penalty for "working" a residual depression in the viewer. Thanks!