Discussion for article #230426
People who wanna bitch about shit are gonna find shit to bitch about.
What they’re really angry about: the Christmas Truce, even to the extent it was only marked by a smattering of small events like this one as opposed to them being widespread, sort of holds a mirror up to the brutality and barbarism forced upon the masses by their masters in service to the divisions between us that they foist upon us and indoctrinate us to believe in for their own gain. It’s a stark and uncomfortable reminder that almost all wars are ultimately, for the people dying in them and the families destroyed by them, someone else’s war.
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If I recall correctly the generals got wind of the impromptu Christmas Truce and orders were sent down to cease and desist.
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Aside from the general accuracy problem–no contemporary accounts mention a football game–there’s the risible contrast between the male models in the ad and the actual squaddies:
Who do look like they’ve spent the last week sleeping in a dugout.
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I’d much rather see ads like this than the–at least in America–OH MY GOD, only seven count then S E V E N days until BLACK FRIDAY! You must shop until you drop. SALE SALE SALE. SUPER NEVER BEFORE SALE AT BEST BUY!!!11!!1!!! Check it out, my man! This is the Dominator X-10. Thirty inches of thigh-slapping, blood-pumping, nuclear brain damage! If you can’t afford it, FUCKING FINANCE IT! So what if it’s as big as a Subaru and costs as much? You’ll never have to trade this in! This is gonna be with you for the rest of your life! And when you die, they can BURY you in it!
And then THEN there is CYBER MONDAY and CYBER TUEDSDAY!!! WOH HOOOOO!!! (Thank the goddess for adblock.)
Fast forward a week.
ONLY 28 SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS!!!1!!! YOU MUST MAKE THIS A DECEMBER TO REMEMBER!!! BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY!!!1!!!1!!11!11111!!!
Well, that’s about how it seems to me. A poignant though not exactly historically accurate ad is far better than all that.
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Oh, they’re just mad that they don’t have a Kenyan Muslim atheist usurper illegally doing what our former War-starting-based-on-lies-President did to fuss about. They’re just jealous that we have so much to rant and rave about. I mean, they can’t appeal their “socialized” health care (and don’t want to either). It’s getting to be the Christmas Season – time to organize complaints and put them in stockings and wish everyone a HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
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The orders were ignored in a kind of benign, and unpunished, mutiny. But once the holiday was over, they promptly ordered a series of particularly mindless artillery bombardments and over the top attacks everywhere the truce took hold. When Christmas 1915 came around, the generals on both sides ordered especially savage and continuous artillery bombardments to make it impossible to repeat. And when mutiny began to break out in the trenches in 1916, they sent them to the firing squad in their hundreds.
People from the north who don’t understand why (white) southerners are still hung up on the Civil War have never been in Europe on November 11. Wars that put a fifth or a sixth of the military age male population under the ground leave societal wounds that take centuries to heal regardless of the justice of the cause. A fact they’re intimately familiar with in Alsace-Lorraine, where the World War I dead they still commemorate every year fought for the Kaiser, not France.
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I don’t want to dive too deeply into a faculty-room weighing of rights or wrongs, life being short, but with this sort of thing you want to soft-pedal the selling part, and they did—it was just the name of the business at the end.
BUT FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY COP THE MUSIC DIRECTLY FROM THE 2010 TRUE GRIT YOU UNIMAGINATIVE MONKEY-SEE-MONKEY-DO BASTARDS AAAARRRGGGGHHHHH A COUPLE OF PEOPLE ALREADY SAW THAT MOVIE AND IF YOU HAVE IT RUINS THE AD JEEEEEEEEZZZE!!!
OK, calmer now but seriously the Coen version of “True Grit” was a big hit in, among other places, Britain, where it won eight BAFTA nominations. Why use a piece of music inextricably associated with a hit film? It’s hugely, hugely distracting. Production costs for this commercial were easily in the six figures in dollars, and any competent composer could give you a piece of wistful, touching, hymn-like music for maybe $500. It just doesn’t make sense.
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“Would we welcome an advert next Christmas showing a touching little scene between a Jewish child and a disabled child in Auschwitz, swapping gifts for Christmas and Hanukah on their way to the gas chambers?” he wrote. “I would hope not, yet I fail to see any great moral difference.”
Oh, lord - what a load of high moral poop!
Here’s the difference: the 1914 Christmas truce ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!! - Maybe someone should tell him?
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Wait a minute. So the message that there’s maybe some hope for the future of the human race if we let our hatreds go is the same as a commercial about kids on the way to the gas chamber? What kind of stupid analogy is that from whoever the hell Ally Fogg is?
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Bigger thing for me is that this ad rips off like six short films that already tell the same story.
Several people a year are killed in those battlefields by WWI ordinance that is still dangerous 100 years later.
France and Belgium have teams to remove old artillery shells, mines, and other explosives that are found each year.
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John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches” is one of my favorite Christmas songs.
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That’s not a picture from WWI as that is clearly Paul McCartney third from the left.
“…Stirs Tears and Outrage.”
Count me on the “tears” side of the ledger.
And it’s also one of my favorite songs.
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If memory serves they were even a couple places where they end up having to the rotate units out to different parts of the line in order to get them fighting again, but yeah they went all out the following years to see that there was no repeat.
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I, too, recall reading this. Also, these guys are awfully clean looking for men living in the trenches with cooties and rats.
Case of the mythology getting bigger than the actual events.
I had a late uncle who was a dough boy in WWI. He wasn’t terribly sentimental about it.
Wait, what?
“While it’s not the first time war has formed the backdrop for an ad, previous efforts tended to be light-hearted.”
So laughing at killing is OK, but soldiers pausing for a solemn moment of shared humanity is over the line?
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Updated from the film ’ Oh ! What a lovely war ’ c 1969 / 1982 .
More and more stores are kicking the Christmas season off on Thanksgiving. Black Friday is so 2012.