Okay, so. If you've read last Sunday's post, it should make perfect sense to you why I think this commercial is worth sharing. If you haven't, I should hope you'll still appreciate it.
Allow me to walk you through the action.
The moment night falls and darkness envelops the space around his suburban house (that perfect encapsulation of the sacred space of civilization, the modern version of the frontier homestead), his perfectly flat, perfectly ordered lawn begins to rebel. Individual blades poke up in exaggeratedly rapid fashion; vines begin to creep up towards the warm light of the window; a tree's roots burst through the lawn, rending the ground as they expand outwards; perfectly pruned hedges burst forth from their invisible containers, their leaves assuming a wild three-dimensionality. In the last shot we see, leaves blow up over a neatly-demarcated dirt path and cover the camera.
Fade to black for a full two seconds, and we hear a heavy wooden door sliding open, as warm golden morning light reveals the silhouettes of a fully-outfitted wilderness control center -- the garden shed. Standing in the doorway, chainsaw in hand, stance wide and preparing for the day, is our hero from the night before. The door thuds to a halt, revealing a distinctly wild environment where the lawn used to be -- the dirt path has overrun its borders, there are chest-high grasses and man-high bushes everywhere, the trees are huge and have branches going every which way, and the sun shines through their leaves. Right as the door opens, the Husqvarna logo is overlayed:
The deep-voiced narrator announces the company name and tagline matter-of-factly, and the birds continue chirping for a moment more, until the commercial ends.
The implication, of course, is that Husqvarna equipment are the tools that a man needs to do the daily work of taming the wild -- and it is important that this work must be done constantly. At the beginning of the ad / cycle, the man comes inside long after the sun has set, and at the end, he begins anew as the sun is rising in the morning. The ad implies that the work of civilization is round-the-clock and contemporary; that it occurs even in the ostensibly civilized space of a town; that it is the work of a man; that it is un-accomplishable without the assistance of tools and technology (which I'll talk about more in next week's Sunday post)... and, being an advertisement, there's also a whole layer of economic/market/commodity/corporate/et cetera analysis that could be done. And I haven't even talked about the music...
This whole ad is such a wonderful encapsulation of what I've been talking about -- these relationships between people and nature, civilization and the wild, the sacred and the profane, et cetera -- that I was tempted to simply post it alone. Oh well.
That's it for now. I'd love to hear your comments.
Cheers,
Jeff
We only really need two words to describe the ad then: "Manifest Destiny". Or perhaps it is as much to America what Kipling's poems were to Great Britain.
ReplyDeleteManifest Destiny is a pretty distinct term -- referring specifically to the divinely-granted right of the American people to expand their/our particular civilization (and the concept thereof) across North America. It's certainly related, no doubt, but I think that what I'm talking about goes a bit deeper than the American relationship with the continent -- it's the particular American brand of more ancient Western conceptions of nature and civilization.
ReplyDeleteThe other point I'd make, which I just thought of, is that this is the work of defense, not expansion. The man in the ad is not attempting to win a place from the wild, but defend a place that he has already made his against the continued attacks and encroachments of the forces of nature. Certainly, there is an implied contest of expansion in an un-pictured earlier moment, but once that battle is won, the scope of the conflict changes into one where Nature and the wilderness are encroaching on a civilized space. It's the same impulse that allowed Indian raids in the late 17th and 18th centuries to be conceived of as unprovoked or aggressive attacks, rather than as defensive reactions to an encroachment on native lands.
I'd be curious to hear more about your impressions of the British relationship with Kipling. Perhaps some specific writings or poems -- my encounters with him are mostly limited to 'The White Man's Burden' and 'If', I must admit, and I don't know much more about him than could be gathered from reading his Wikipedia page.
Thanks for the comment, and for reading! Hope your summer is going well so far.
Cheers,
Jeff