Ads I Hate!

Call me cold and uncaring if you will but that certain Saturn ad not only fails to make me feel warm and cozy, it creeps me out. I'm referring to the one where the young woman is trying to get the hell out of a Saturn dealership with her new car.

I worry about that young woman, I hope she made it out with her sanity - nay, her very soul - intact. For in this ad, Saturn comes off as every bit as much a cult as a car company.

As the commercial opens, she's been waiting, in isolation, for, what, an hour? A day? A week? We have no way of knowing but she certainly seems relieved at the opportunity for even minimal human contact. Have they even let her use the bathroom? I suspect not. A man enters, an artificial smile plastered on his face, a certain glassiness in his eye. "Are you ready to see your new car?" he asks and, though she tries to keep calm as she answers in the affirmative, I believe the subtext here is, "Hell, yes, I'm ready to see my new car. I've been locked up in here for hours. Not a bite to eat, nothing to drink, not a friggin' Car and Driver. What the hell are you people running here?" But let's face it, even the strongest among us would wilt under the weight of such deprivation. It's a common syndrome among kidnap victims and others held captive against their will that they come to identify with their captors. So, though some voice of reason may still be crying out from deep within the soul of this poor victim, her defenses are down; she'll resort to anything to gain favor with her torturers, for how else might her torture cease?

"Are you excited?" the sinister one asks. "I'm real excited," she says hopefully, doing her best to appease him. For if she is not enthusiastic, perhaps he will - oh, heaven let it not be so! - place her back in confinement until she bloody well is excited.

As they enter the room where her car awaits, there is a group gathered. Who are these people and why are they here? Is this the first car this dealership has ever sold? Don't they have jobs to do? They surround the poor woman, the same sinister smiles on their faces that we saw on the first man's visage, and now that man, apparently the cult's leader, dangles the keys before the young woman - teasing, taunting, tormenting her a bit further. And before she can have those keys, he must first announce, "This is Ellen. And this is her first...new...car." The group applauds, perhaps only to muffle the rhythmic under-their-breath chanting - "One of us...one of us" - and I fear, though I pray it's not true, that they are right, that she is now one of them.

I fully expect to one day see Ellen behind the wheel of that Saturn, an eerie smile plastered on her own face, her glassy stare turned skyward as she watches, waiting, for a certain passing comet.


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