OUT ON A LIMB: Jaguar and Volvo’s ads are both terrible. We’ve beaten the Jag ad to (a quite well-deserved) death, so let’s quote from Neal Pollack’s look at the Volvo ad, which was also the subject of a (slightly less) spirited debate on Twitter this past week:
On the other end of the cultural spectrum, you have Volvo, a company that’s doing quite well and is still making cars that people actually want to buy. Recently they put out a nearly four-minute-long ad, shot by the cinematographer of Interstellar and Oppenheimer. I first saw this ad at a Volvo launch in southern California this week and instantly proclaimed it “horseshit.” Apparently, I was alone in my opinion, because the internet went berserk for this thing. But I stand firm.
In this ad, you see a very Euro man and woman in a Scandinavian-designed apartment. They have learned they are pregnant — and the man is telling his mother over the phone that he’s scared. We then see the child’s entire life flash before us, told in short bursts, including melodramatic fights with her parents, the heartbreak of young love and what appears to be a pungent semi-career of partying hard in Ibiza.
Finally, nearly three minutes into the mini-movie, we see the pregnant mother crossing the street with some groceries. Some gal who we haven’t yet seen is noodling down the street in her Volvo. As the mother enters the crosswalk, the Volvo’s extraordinary AI safety features engage, braking just in time to avoid hitting the mother, thereby preserving the unborn child’s future of rolling on molly while dancing to a Roger Sanchez set live at Pacha.
We see the words: “Sometimes the moments that never happen matter the most.”
How profound!
This ad is ridiculous and manipulative and contains all the elements of modern storytelling I despise the most: voiceover, dark, grainy lighting and, most of all, a non-linear narrative. It does highlight Volvo’s longtime signature selling point: top-of-the-market safety features. But it does so in the most pretentious way possible — and hides the actual car until the end of the movie.
People loved this mini-movie, but to the conservatives who think this is an “anti-woke” model: this family only has one kid and they live in Europe. And also, the car is electric. As for the non-ideological people who are responding to the excess sentiment, well, there’s no accounting for taste. I guess we all want to feel safe.
At the beginning of the video, the parents-to-be live in an environmentally-friendly tiny apartment with Bauhaus-style tubular steel chairs and pootle their electro- Volvo around what is likely meant to represent an EU-approved “15-Minute City.” In addition to “preserving the unborn child’s future of rolling on molly while dancing to a Roger Sanchez set live at Pacha,” as Pollack wrote above, it’s a pretty safe bet that she’s going to grow up to become Julia, whether it’s Orwell’s version, or Obama’s. But at least the people in the video are recognizable as some species of humans, rather than a cross between the extras from Mike Myers’ Sprockets sketches and the cast of Teletubbies. In the (hopefully) waning days of the uber-woke, perhaps we should be thankful for small favors.