New From Jaguar

The English-born Jaguar once epitomized class. The British upper class, to be exact. The Jaguar XK's most recent ad campaign, however, is a major brand reorientation. The Jaguar is still being sold as something uppity. Only now, it's uppity with an American spin, realigning the fancy car with the American upper class: celebrity.

At first glance, the new Jaguar XK campaign makes you want to drive, own, and make love to a Jaguar. It's smart, it's sexy and it involves partial nudity. On second glance, the ad is downright sinister.

The spot begins with a series of black and white images flashing across the screen, accented by featured colored objects. Overlapping words and close shots of individual vehicle features make the ad resemble a moving collage. Some of the images move, but the bulk of them are single frame stills put together like a flipbook. Spoon chant the chorus of "I Turn My Camera On" in the background and the Jaguar XK moves from the road to the side of a bright blue pool, where a robust model in aviators lets a wet, bikini-clad woman into the passenger seat, directly from the water. The letters XK and other undecipherable script flash across the screen in a frantic flurry. Behind, men rush around the Jaguar and a helicopter rises in the background. Finally, in a surreal climax, the face of a woman laughing in ecstasy or screaming in agony appears suddenly behind a spinning Jaguar wheel. Then the screen goes black and only the three white words remain: "New from Jaguar."

But what is really new about this Jaguar?

On one hand, watching the ad is like watching the Jaguar shoot a centerfold spread for a fashion magazine. It's clearly all about look and lifestyle — and it's horribly effective. Own a Jag: be a part of the fast-paced life of the fashion model. But in the ad being shown on TV, and in the two ads featured on the Jaguar XK website, "Want" and "Options," the car is pictured not as an accessory to this kind of lifestyle but the center of it. The helicopter, the pool, the girl in the pool — they're all secondary. The Jag swallows the limelight. The rest, the helicopters, the six-pack abs, the aviator sunglasses, these are accessories to the Jaguar's lavish lifestyle, like the Bose speakers and the moon roof.

In a way, this works because the ad is reminiscent of the way we dream, and we interact with it as if interpreting a dream. The color accents, the jump cuts, the strange shifts of scenery, the words that flash by without making sense — the actions within the ad tie loosely together, not necessarily because there is an overarching narrative, but because we create one. Is this car, this lifestyle, the stuff that dreams are made of? Or is it easy to make the car into a dream-mobile because the Jaguar ad men are flashing every symbol of sexiness one-by-one in a row?

Good question.

Focus for a moment on the most obscure images. Sex and wealth are there, obviously. What is less obvious, and perhaps more insidious, is the part of the ad featuring the screaming/laughing female face behind the spinning wheel. Viewed frame by frame, the indecipherable script that has been flashing across the screen finally takes form: the words "road, XK, trip, go for a ride, gorgeous, loves, and kill your parents," flash across the screen.

Ok, not the last bit. But the rest are all there, flashing through the spinning tines of the Jaguar tire, eerily reminiscent of a hypnotist's wheel.

It is doubtful that Jaguar actually crosses the line here between imbedded messages and subliminal programming, a la A Clockwork Orange. And they don't need to. The wet models, the stylized glasses, the mountainside pool — it's all overkill. Personally, they had me at the helicopter.

— Colin Alexander (colin_alexander at hotmail dot com)