Commercial Critique: Michelob's "Swimmers"

The Chronotope of the Swimming-Pool,
originally uploaded by skij.

The Swimming Pool: a chronotope for suburban encounter, childhood memory and individulaistic athletic activity. In this commercial, subverted through the hyper-reality of rupture of the physical, social, and the ritualistic, the idea and Story Space of the "Swimming Pool" is subverted and ultimately undone.

Michelob's Swimmers : the camera begins with a slow pan on the toned frame of an athletic blonde and then moves onto her partner, an equally statuesque male. Located on the side of a Swimming Pool, encoding readiness, we are to believe they will "compete," in a ritualistic expression of modern gender relationships, with hints at the ritual of pre-sexual-play. What is the symbolic level of their interaction expressed in the form of a game? Perhaps initially we might want to ascribe it as a kind of comment on modern working status and the repression of women (ie entering into a game when the results are previously or "Genetically" determined). Our attempts to divine a simple correlative relationship is frustrated, however, the second our pair enters the pool. Any realistic prediction of the outcome of this race would surely favor the male. If they are a "normal, sporty couple" like any other "normal, sporty couple" (as, no doubt the commercial wants us to believe, that this is a sexed-up Everyman with whom we idenity and then whom we mentally access associatatively in our consuming of the advertized beer-beverage), then do we have a man ironically throwing the competition, given that they come out of the water side by side? Or are we witnessing the ultimate in surrealist expression? The latter answer is clearly the most satisfactory account, especially considering the severity of the features in the gentleman (a sign indicating his intentions to compete to the extent of his capabiltiies), and also considering the direction the rest of the text takes. As the couple swims along the pool, "neck and neck," as it were, the viewer encounters musings on the low-carb and low-caloric nature of the beer-beverage. But as we can clearly not take seriously the images we are viewing on the screen (or only as a kind of "hyper-reality" where our judgment of the physical rules of our surroundings must be suspended), can we take these claims with any measure of veracity? Or it the entire project of low-carbness being undermined? The reality of the commercial-world splinters even further after the turn in the "competition" (now we must put this term into quotation marks not only to denote the abstracted level we demand of considering the term, but also because we cannot be sure any more that any competition is taking place) when the coluple comes out with the 'butterfly' instead of the 'freestyle,' representing a complete inversion of the rules of the game. As swimming is structured, both formally, as well as intuitively (at least in the Western canon), butterfly never follows the freestyle and its inclusion here extends far beyond the Revisionistic and into that of the Improbable (however, given the absurd momentum into this point, maybe nothing less should be expected). The "commercial-hyper-reality" then takes one final splintering. The camera now focuses our attention onto the male swimmer, who finishes strong into the wall, looks up to see where his partner is, only to find her sitting on the side of the pool. What are we to believe? That she removed herself from the "competition", went to the side wall, climbed out, walked to the end of the pool and sat down before he completed his own sport-task (absolutely impobable), or that she beat him so soundly that she had the time-luxury to climb out and seat herself (equally improbable)? This represents a time-space rupture, which serves to further heighten the competition-reality and ritualistic ruptures of the earlier part of the commercial. The man splashes the girl, but why? It may seem upon pre-critical viewing to be that he objects to her action of "getting out of the pool" (dismissing the competition he has himself dismissed? This would be a 'straight' reading by those who refuse to play the absurdist game). However, his splashing of the girl - as a sexualized quest-object - represents his protesting against the unreal-nature of the Pool-World. He, as Suburban Man, is horrified in the rules of his everyday comportment breaking down in a kind of "speachlessness" (notice he speaks not a single line the entire commercial - his only form of expression is the "splash"). His "splash" is a signal of resistance and rejection of his "thrown-in-ness" into the "swimming pool" "competition," and further a signal of his personal trauma (compare to a Dostoevskian character who attempts to speak about his "illness"). Thus, the entire commercial can be broken down as a traumatic-therapudic testimony on the rules and codification of the modern experience, while "swimming pool" substituting by metonymy to be the "average experience of modern occupational existence." The women, as sexualized quest-object, is never reached, and has completely broken down in the hallucinatory Unreality of the "Swimming Pool".