Life Done Right™

Humor has many purposes. It can be used as a sarcastic weapon against your bully friends who may lack the intellect to grasp the nature of your assault. It can be used to sell ice cream from a truck that goes by the name of Good Humor. It can be used to tickle a grown man’s funny bone in just the right place that he’ll double over in convulsions from laughing so hard. And it can be used to sell cars.

Toyota is peddling a quasi SUV called the RAV4 (who comes up with these idiotic names that are meant to sound hip and edgy; are we all wayward Studio 54 club kids at heart?). I suspect car companies are avoiding the word SUV these days, given their propensity to eat gas as if it’s a ravenous pac man. But that aside, the commercial for the RAV4 is quite humorous. It features a married couple fighting over who will get to lay claim to the car. They go to extraordinary lengths to sabotage each other’s chances, but miraculously survive to construct another trap.

It starts off with a bird chirping shrilly in our ear. The wife wakes up, thinking she’s getting a jump on her husband. She bolts into the bathroom, hops into the shower where we see the husband has placed a hair dryer, plugged in, and she’s thrown across the room with a jolt.

Hearing his wife scream as the volts are running through her, the husband wakes up, stretches out his arms, and pokes his head out the window, where we get our first glance at the prize: the Toyota RAV4. Suddenly the window comes down with a thud and the husband’s head is nearly crushed. He straightens his neck and notices that his wife has cut the rope attached to the counter weight holding up the window (a bit of a bluff, since this hardly looks like an old Victorian fixer upper with ancient window mechanisms).

They both go about their morning rituals, pausing a moment to let the other know the war has just begun. The wife enters her walk-in closet, where suddenly a bowling ball falls on her head from a shelf above her. The husband, meanwhile, repeatedly pulls on a string to turn on the closet light and discovers the bulb has been replaced by a propane tank spewing out flames onto his head, catching his hair on fire. He runs and douses it in a nearby fish tank. Then, he trips over a wire at the top of the stairs and tumbles down them, as we pause just a second to catch another glimpse of the Toyota RAV4 out the window, before cutting to the wife who smiles devilishly as she flosses her teeth.

They both race out the front door looking half-dressed before realizing they forgot their keys. The husband makes a fake move like he’s heading back inside, as the wife clamors to beat him. The husband stops, pulls out his key, and heads toward the RAV4.

The wife slides into the kitchen, smells gas, quick cut to the burner, then a cut over to the microwave where we see a metal pot glowing red, about to explode and ignite the gas. The wife’s fate looks cooked as the husband drives off in the RAV4, stroking the dashboard as if it was thigh of his secret lover.

The house eplodes in the background as the husband drives down the street — but miraculously the wife is clinging to the roof.

Finally we dissolve to the punch line: RAV4 A Car to Make Your Own.

What this commercial says about the current state of love and marriage is obvious: couples will kill their spouse for the chance to possess the Toyota RAV 4 for themself.

The commercial is underscored by The Turtles classic hit, Happy Together (1967). You know:

Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night, it’s only right
To think about the girl you love and hold her tight
So happy together

Oh, the irony, it tugs on my wallet strings like a deaf man humming Jimi Hendrix in a subway station.

Christopher Lasch once wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism back in 1991. This commercial is a case study in the generation that has evolved out of that feeling. Call them yuppies, DINKS or whatever, it’s the same idiotic group that pulled the lever in the voting booth and elected President Bush.

Freud was right: you get what you wish for.

The pitch:

The all-new Toyota 2006 RAV4, formidably equipped with a powerful V6 engine, is now available at your Toyota dealer at a starting price of only $22,335. But the first ever V6 is just one of the features that makes the all-new RAV4 so uniquely capable. Its body is now larger, yet the RAV4 has more agility and responsiveness. And it’s more utilitarian, too, while being sleeker and more stylish than ever. What it boils down to is this: The all-new 2006 RAV4 can handle anything. And that means you can, too.

Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch

Death wish: The desire, often unconscious, for the death of another person, such as a parent, toward whom one has unconscious hostility.