You got to hand it to capitalism - selling us our chains, seductively guised as liberation and self-realisation
Here Roxy's "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" - a song about the hollowness of consumer desire, reification of the self and the other - is used to soundtrack a commercial that connects an overpriced fragrance, whose proper realm is Duty Free and the pages of Vogue, with pagan revels and going wild in the country
It's some kind of edit, the song as heard on this Gucci Memoire ad - "standards of living" (intoned numbly by the dead-inside protagonist) shoved up right up against "but you blew my mind" - the trigger for the Dionysian freakout
Ballard would probably have loved this ad
It connects perhaps to his later novels - the rage of the the privileged - how no one secretly craves revolution, or at least chaos / collapse, more than the class that created and maintained the world-as-is
(Harry Styles sounds like a character from hard-boiled fiction, or Performance / Get Carter, or a Colin Macinnes novel maybe)
Given the youth unemployment rate in Italy, which has now surpassed Spain's, I think the commercial would connect most directly with Ballard's 1978 short story "Having A Wonderful Time", in which a British couple on vacation in the Canary Islands slowly realizes they've been stranded there by the government, along with thousands of others, as part of a plan to deal with surplus labor. This video is perhaps a vision of a future in which all of Italy is turned into a giant summer camp for the unemployed, its borders closed, its coastlines patrolled by gunboats, feral youth dancing on the beaches...a Gucci-fied update of "Escape From New York", maybe?
ReplyDeleteha ha, love it.
Deletei don't know that story. i have a giant volume of all his short stories but never got that far into it.