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COME BACK TO THE SEA

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I am a real sucker for scenes where ambient sound drops away, and the visuals clash against what the viewer hears. Take as an example the infamous “Ear Scene” in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” when the bass line of “Stuck in the Middle With You,” Stealer’s Wheel’s “Dylanesque pop bubblegum favorite,” first rises beneath a bloody closeup at 1:38:

Soon enough the action on screen adds its own sounds to the mix, but the first few seconds of the isolated song as Mr. Blonde creepily dances, switchblade in hand, underscores the policeman’s sudden realization that he has entered a pivotal new world of danger and pain. That “feelin’ that somethin’ ain’t right” has transformed into something much, much worse.

But I will more closely focus on a prosaic piece. This past weekend’s American holiday, Super Bowl Sunday, is a kind of Christmas for commercial storytelling, in which global corporations burn millions of dollars to catch our collective eyeballs for sixty seconds. Several of this year’s advertisements were colossal, wasteful failures that did real damage to their companies’ brands, but a few cut through the clutter to tell a story.

For me, Carnival Corporation’s “Come Back to the Sea” worked on this level. I imagined millions of Americans pausing over their snacks, guacamole’d chip in hand, taking in the transportive imagery of boats and ocean, then turning to their sofa-mates after ten or twenty seconds and saying “Wait, is that JFK talking?”

I see a valid attempt at resetting the cruise experience by bringing it back to — literally — an elemental level. No tackiness, no ostentatious buffets nor obnoxious, water-sliding children. No shuffleboard. Just the sea. Our original setting from millions of years ago, the primordial stew “from whence we came.” The home of our first relationships, now playing vitally in the near background as a daughter holds her father’s hand in slow motion from :18 to :23.

Throughout the piece, it is striking to hear President John F. Kennedy’s halting, Boston Brahmin delivery and a rustle of audience noise instead of the sounds of the ocean, and that dissonance is what makes the spot for me. Upon further review, though, there are undercurrents where audio and visuals dovetail.

The audio is taken from a speech Kennedy gave in Newport, R.I. on Sept. 14, 1962, before the America’s Cup yachting competition, and the president’s expansive poetry echoes the wide, helicopter’d establishing shots of enormous luxury liners. The viewer flies at a high angle until we are finally placed aboard a ship lit by aurora borealis for just a second at :14, then at a low angle in New York Harbor at :16. A closeup on roiling surf as salt-talking Kennedy says the word “ocean” at :32. And a cut to a closeup on the word “blood” at :36, as the focus of the piece is now largely on cruise-goers, people looking engaged, connected with their ancient, watery surroundings as the day ends, and we hear about human universalities such as “sweat” and “tears.”

Immediately after this, as Kennedy insists “We are tied to the ocean,” a narrow depth-of-field shot of two clasped hands is rack-focused back to the sunset-lit waves. Now we are literally “back to the sea” at :42, as a SUP rider paddles out into the faraway sunset, and the cut comes powerfully on the beat at :46 from the “whether it is to sail…” overhead shot to the closeup at  “or to watch it.”

The spot ends at :48 with a visually literal interpretation of Kennedy’s “back from whence we came,” returning to the ad’s opening shot. The camera pulls away from the daytime ocean to reveal the tagline COME BACK TO THE SEA as the speech ends to applause. The applause swells as we cut to a hero shot of dozens of cruise ships at twilight, echoing the different cruise lines in Carnival Corporation.

104 Comments

on “COME BACK TO THE SEA”
104 Comments on “COME BACK TO THE SEA”

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