Property: "The Redrow Man and Dystopia’s Dark Appeal"
From The Baffler:
Dystopian visions of a cold and emotionless future: so hot right now.
In a bizarre commercial that, following criticism,
has been pulled from circulation, luxury developer Redrow London
boasted that its fashionable apartments would transport buyers into a
totalitarian nightmare.
As tumblr user piercepenniless notes, the ads’ protagonist
lives in a world of almost continual night, with the hungry eyes and
dead affect of an Ayn Rand wet dream: his world is constituted of
chrome, glass, a palette of white-to-taupe, a spatter-pattern rug and
one book, a single book, on graphic design…. Our man does not have
conversations, but stares out at the city from the fifteenth floor (he
does a lot of staring). The concept of conversation is alien to him,
though he is shown having a screaming argument; as you see from his
inventoried shelves, he has a passion for objects and this is how he
treats women, as well.
The footage culminates with our hero perched in his Redrow eyrie, a
solitary figure looming above a London that, the narrative implies, he
has conquered, incinerated and then sown with salt. “To look out at the
city,” a voice intones, “that could have swallowed you whole, and say,
‘I did this.’ To stand with the world at your feet.”
Marinetti’s proto-fascist Futurist Manifesto—“Hoorah! No
more contact with the vile earth!”—comes to mind, except we sense Redrow
Man would be incapable of an exclamation as colloquial or enthusiastic
as that “hoorah.”
“If it were easy, it wouldn’t feel as good,” he says, in the flat tone of someone who feels nothing at all.
It’s that robotic individualism that undercuts the production’s Leni
Riefenstahl vibe. The occupant of a Redrow apartment cares nothing for
fascism’s ecstatic fusion with the masses; on the contrary, his triumph
of the will manifests itself first, foremost and always, in a victory
over himself.
And this ad seems to be just one in a trend. Take the recent promotion for the Microsoft Band,
featuring a corporate over-achiever flaunting her fitness tracker as
she hangs grimly to a bus strap. Again, the dead staring eyes; again,
the chiseled features from which all emotion has been bleached. Then,
the tag line: “This device can know me better than I know myself and
will make me a better human.”...MORE
