If you're reading the paper to get away from the TV, then I'm sorry because this might send you right back there. (What follows is all subjective and if you have an opinion I'd like to hear it, so here goes.)
Have you seen the new McDonald's ad? It's one of those things that make you go, "Hmmm?"
It depicts a group of attractive young people enjoying life on the ultimate trip: a bullet-like train shooting through a lush landscape where distant mountains shine and trees glimmer in an outside world that references the heightened reality within. The kids are in prime party mode, colours saturate the screen as we're introduced to the "Billabong Burger" and the "new taste menu".
My proposition, my concern and my quandary is that the ad appears (and this may just be me) to have a subtext informed by, and drawing from, contemporary drug culture. Surely this couldn't have been the advertiser's intention. I first saw it in all its epic jaw-dropping glory, although it's more often segmented into three or four bite-sized pieces:
(1) Once "aboard the night train", we take on a distinctly "dance party" atmosphere with smoke filling the bottom of the carriage. Normally if there was that much smoke in a train, you'd be a mite concerned, but, unperturbed, a girl in a dreamlike glide slides forward after snacking on the new Tahitian Waffle.
Meanwhile, another lass, seated beside a "beaming" girlfriend, peels from the "cone" a pill-like (I reckon) lolly and "pops" it into her mouth. It's getting hot in here, get me an apple pie! So hot that the windows are steamed as our smiling-loved-up-roller-skating-Tahitian Waffle princess traces a glittering "M" on the glass.
(2) We return to find our heroine sporting a red-hooded jacket. She seems to be a cross between Little Red Riding Hood (innocence, naivety) and the Virgin Mary (nice biblical lady and mother of our Lord) and is seated in what may reference a spiritual pose. (If things weren't freaky before, they really start to crank up the weirdo meter now.)
We ascend into the girl's eye (mirror of the soul) to discover the burger (eucharist/host) hovering (inside/outside) her waist. The girl is transcendental. The "ingested" burger releases an hallucinogenic flood of goodness (it burns with an inward fire, light richly bursting from the lettuce and tomato, the damper roll illuminated and surrounded by a mandala).
She is at one with the burger, it has flung wide her "doors of perception", it is her "Sacred Heart" and through the ingestion of the burger she's consuming divinity and thus becoming divine (in my humble opinion). Ring any bells?
(3) If you're fortunate enough to see the longest version of the ad as the train pulls into a station, it's difficult to dismiss the teeth-grinding-suspicion that we've made friends with "Ebeneezer Goode". It feels like morning, everyone is tired, our red-blazered protagonist, who reached the dizzy heights of enlightenment, is on her way back down the mountain.
She's subdued, half-asleep (one might say groggy) and her eyes (I speculate) seem "pinned" as if she's "off in another world". She's so far gone that, as the train hits the station, she must be roused from her reverie by a friend.
She stumbles dazed and confused, exhausted from travelling on the "love locomotion", as if (I conjecture) she has been to an all night-hardcore-rave-in-a-long-thing-club-on-wheels and is now (it may be reasoned) off to the golden arches for a delicious gut-calming thickshake. She may just be weary, but she looks a bit to me likes she's "whacked out of it after tweaking on an E, know what I mean?"
I believe we all understand the value of advertising, its reflection of social values and the way it tentatively pushes the boundaries of sensibility allowing us to gradually expand our consciousness and grow as a society. But I have to ask you once again: "HAVE YOU SEEN THAT NEW MACCA'S AD?"
Surely a "Billabong Burger" should contain one jolly swagman and/or a jellied jumbuck, a hint of eucalypt and be disconcertingly damp. And three other things concern me:
1) When was the last time food and drink was allowed to be consumed on this sort of transport?
2) There've never been that many attractive people in a train carriage in the history of locomotion. It doesn't ring true. If you're in a carriage now, have a look around, see if I'm lying.
3) There's also a card-playing scene that may have something to do with "gambling" because on slo-mo replay, the "Joker" in the deck is Ronald.
article link here.
)
