Jan. 8, 2020

I recently resolved to kick one of my least-favorite habits: cryingduring movie trailers. I can weep without shame watchingmovies themselves. But trailer tears are different — not the effectof an emotionally destabilizing encounter with art but, rather, thetacky end result of bluntly Pavlovian marketing machinery, thecomponent parts of which remain clear to me even as my gazegrows watery. Professionally expressive faces projected acrossfield-of-vision-encompassing screens, uttering heart-rendingphonemes rid of all meaningful context, accompanied by hugeswells of music? I am this easily played, I tell myself, somehowrolling my eyes while simultaneously dabbing at them with theback of my hand, in case anyone nearby might think I’m thatmoved by the prospect of seeing, I don’t know, “Dolittle.” Theproblem, at bottom, is one of category confusion. With a tear-jerker trailer, we’re tricked into mistaking a piece of advertisingfor a piece of art — a distinction it’s possible to complicate butnever, if the word “art” is to mean anything, undo.

In November, I saw the same kind of category confusion unfoldnot in a theater but on Twitter. An editor at BuzzFeed posted atwo-minute video with a tantalizing pitch: “when i tell you ifinally realised what i was watching that i SCREAMED.”

David Mack@davidmackau

when i tell you i finally realised what i was watching that i SCREAMED

More than 33,000 people shared his tweet. Intrigued, I clicked andfound myself following a redheaded preadolescent as she stepstentatively into her driveway, where her father is packing up an’80s-era hatchback for a big trip. Signifiers of unslick auteurismare on immediate display — natural light, hand-held camera, adreamy laxity when it comes to the use of focus. All these lend aMalickian heft to the ensuing montage of images: The younghero, traveling, befriends another girl, and soon they’re trading amix tape, sharing ice cream cones, playing on a tree swing,dozing beatifically in the back seat of a car. There is virtually nodialogue, but there is a solemn piano cover of Oasis’“Wonderwall.” When the girls kiss, at the minute mark, they’reteenagers, and they do so in heavy rain. It’s pouring again 15seconds later when the hero’s intolerant father, having discoveredthe romance, berates her and leaves her to sob in the garage.When the girls kiss a second time, having overcome various other

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impediments to their happiness, including an abortiveheterosexual marriage, they’re adults, and soon they are raising apreadolescent girl of their own. At the end, the once-bigoted dadhas grown gray-haired and warm, beaming in the magic hour ashe greets this unconventional family in the driveway where it allstarted. With five seconds left, text reveals what we’ve justwatched: a commercial for “the all-new Renault Clio.”

The history of advertising is often cast as an arms race betweenever-craftier pitchmen on one side and ever-savvier audiences onthe other, who invariably get wise to old techniques ofmanipulation, necessitating the development of new techniquesthat are savvier still. Spots like the Clio ad — long-form “brandednarratives” in which the product on offer is glimpsed onlypassingly, if it’s shown at all — exemplify a subcategory ofcommercial that isn’t brand-new, exactly (we’ve seen versions foryears during Super Bowls), but that seems particularly wellsuited to the social-media ecosystems where we spend so much ofour time these days.

Unlock more free articles.Create an account or log inThe Clio ad amassed around 10 million views between YouTubeand Twitter and won lavish praise from outlets like Fast Companyand Business Insider, gathering attention as a specimen of whathas come to be referred to as “rainbow capitalism”: a sales pitchthat’s harnessed to — and that effectively freeloads off — thepowerful emotions inspired by issues of queer identity. But themore remarkable aspect of so many viral ads today is howbrazenly they defer, as long and as fully as possible, therealization that you’re watching an ad at all. A proven way to rackup clicks and other online “engagement” is to instill in viewers an

itching curiosity (what is a weird weight-loss trick the dietingindustry doesn’t want me to know about?) that we feel compelledto resolve. Branded-narrative ads are a high-sheen version of thisstrategy, compelling us to watch all the way through even if for noother reason than to figure out what it is we’re actually looking at.

The eventual product-unveiling in these commercials functionslike a fourth-wall-shattering twist ending. Sometimes it’s a twistso violent that the entire edifice collapses. Another narrative adthat went viral on Twitter not long ago played like ahypercompressed version of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” —except here, once the kid we followed from birth through allmanner of adolescent mischief and teenage turbulence reachedmaturity, he entered a Subway, the sandwich chain’s logo flashedand the “story” abruptly ended. That shift in register was soextreme as to create an inadvertent comedic whiplash, which ofcourse only helped the ad spread, shared by the affected and theincredulous alike. Another cognitively dissonant brand-revelationcapped off a wildly popular three-minute musical from 2017(viewed 18.6 million times so far on YouTube) in which a chorus ofmen, women and children sing to a religious zealot in a suicidevest, telling him with righteous compassion that he has taken thewrong path. At the end, the would-be bomber is rehabilitated —and we see the logo of Zain, a Kuwait-based telecom behemoth.

Terrorism has yet to show up in a T-Mobile ad, but the posts thattravel farthest online, we know, are those that inspire the mostoutsize reactions. Mirth flourishes. So does indignation. The Cliocommercial entered this terrain and, contra the advertising-as-arms-race metaphor, broke through using one of the oldest piecesof emotional weaponry there is: maudlin sentimentality. Search

Twitter for “commercial” plus “the feels” — a two-word diviningrod for deep wells of internet mawkishness — and you’ll find aphalanx of people attesting to how moving they found the Clio ad,the Subway ad and others like them. Were all of them genuinelystirred? Were some feigning enthusiasm? When it comes to viralsuccess, the distinction hardly matters.

What feels uniquely contemporary, in the case of the Clio ad andothers like it, is how the prerogatives of clickbait and thetrappings of awards-bait jostle against each other within itsborders. In deploying the visual language and tone of indiecinema or contemporary “prestige” TV, these branded narrativesdress themselves up as something we gladly pay for, until theyreveal themselves to be the thing we now routinely, through ourstreaming subscriptions, pay to avoid. This means that theconnection between the narrative and the product (ostensibly)being hawked registers as so abstract that it verges onnonexistent. Renault’s ad, after all, racked up millions of its viewsin the United States, a nation where its cars are not even for sale;and even if they were, why would viewers feel compelled to buy aClio after watching a Clio ad that works so assiduously to avoidselling them a Clio until the last possible moment? What we’releft with is a strange paradox: a commercial that feels bothdeeply insidious and laughably ineffectual at the same time, a bidfor sales that may wind up garnering only clicks.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 12, 2020, Page 7 of the SundayMagazine with the headline: Car Wash. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeRead 68 CommentsScreenlandMaking sense of viral video moments.