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)
