It’s funny that Gap, with
its new David Fincher ads, has had to go back to the 1940s and ’50s to find
some semblance of “normal” for our stylistically fractured age.
In fact, Film Noir, from
which Fincher lifts the Drive ad’s aesthetic,
could be defined as a classic movie genre about people who are pushed far
outside their normal—crime, sex and mayhem. But then nobody ever said fashion
advertising makes sense. Wholesomeness and sleaze are hinted at in equal
measure, as if the concoction averages out to achieve some predetermined sales
metric.
“The uniform of rebellion
and conformity,” declares the text on the screen, after the lithe young women in
the Drive ad takes off her jeans and
throws them into the front seat where two other handsome young people are
sitting, looking quite serious. Not only do the words contradict each other, they don’t connect with
the images, either. Disposing of the evidence after disposing of the body of a murdered
lover in a river, as a noir heroine might do, hardly counts as “rebellion” (or
conformity, for that matter). The image here is all desperate depravity, playing against the words of modern marketing.
Then
the lightness of Fincher’s Stairs conjures all the sexual charge of a 1980s Sprite commercial done in ’50s jazz style.
The Fincher commercials
create a mystery which is then answered (but not solved) by the celebrity
endorsements of the print ads. The familiar faces of Anjelica Huston, Elisabeth
Moss and Zosia Mamet provide recognition in lieu of meaning; they are talented
actors filling in the holes of a dodgy script with their performances. You can
sell tickets to any unholy mess if you have the right cast.
All the murk disassociates
Gap’s “normal” from the normcore trend of hipsters dressing in unedgy clothing, even as the campaign capitalizes on it.
“Normal” has insider meaning to those who follow style trends, but, at the same
time, can be interpreted as an opportunity to be stylistically lazy, old-school "normal," for those who don't.
No wonder Fincher’s Gap ads
retreat into history. Like a sci-fi time traveller who goes to the past to
change the present, Gap must scour other eras to dislodge “normal” for the
purposes of selling black denim. They have to make “normal” mean exactly
nothing…. And, therefore, everything.