Saturn Attacks!
Appliances ,
produced by Hal Riney and Partners Advertising for the Saturn Corp.
Appliances opens with
a scene straight out of Spielberg: A premonitory light shines from the upstairs
window of a darkened suburban house. Thunder claps, lightning strikes, and
Promethean electricity crackles down the pole. Let there be light! And so there
is, in the desk lamp that begins to move on its own.
Appliances all around the
house activate, leaping and flying off counters and tables to the ground,
moving purposefully together across the floor. Although unplugged from their
sockets, the appliances continue to function, hinting at the battery-operated
product Appliances is selling--the Saturn EV1 electric car. The spot
alerts us to the promise of electricity made mobile, the next electric
revolution. Light is a metaphor for life here, with animated appliances that
produce it scattered among the moving gadgets.
This procession of
appliances spilling out onto the sidewalk also borrows heavily from Steven
Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind , in which the elect are
inexorably drawn to Devil's Tower, where they await the arrival of
extraterrestrial spacecraft. The appliances gather in nervous expectation at
the curb, fidgeting and looking down the empty street. The vehicle that
represents the future doesn't descend, but glides down the street in a morning
dawn that seems to herald this new miracle.
As in Close
Encounters , at first we see only the vehicle's lights. The video camera on
the sidewalk records the proceedings on its own, its lens auto-focusing on the
distant car. We get a glimpse of the car, refracted through a blender's thick
glass and reflected in a computer screen--our eyes going from the most
traditional appliance to the most modern to this postmodern vehicle, which, we
assume by now, is powered by electricity, not gasoline. The toaster waddles
into the street, and the other appliances on the sidewalk fly or move closer to
the car. We hear the narrator's voice for the first and only time, the text as
spare as a biblical prologue: "The electric car is here."
The spot touches the
responsive chords of modern mythology and ancient religion. All cars are
mobile, of course. But this new, rather squat automobile is introduced in a
context that confers on it the mythic feel of transformative incarnation. It is
both substance of the present and symbol of the future.
The spot
also reminds us of the power of television. This ad has to be seen to be
appreciated. Here, the very arrival of the product is enough to fascinate and
move us; it is almost as if the future had just happened. Unlike many
commercial and most political ads, the spot couldn't be put on radio with just
a few tweaks to the language. What would be a mundane announcement on
radio--"The electric car is here"--becomes on television a compelling,
self-mocking event.
--Robert
Shrum
