Stop! That’s enough! This has gone on long enough! The world is coming to an end next year and this is the best we can come up with? This is the pinnacle of human endeavour? The human race has been on this planet for so many years that to think about it in any great detail is enough to make anyone but the most eminent anthropologist’s brain burn but all of that might come to an end if those wacky Mayans are right.
Fair enough, the chances of that actually happening are slim but still. The human race has invented powered flight, television, the wheel, the idea of forcing others into poverty to expand your own bank balance, Victoria Sponge; not to mention the rest of the fantastic things that man has come up with.
We’ve all but wiped out certain diseases that used to kill people in their millions and fought wars against injustice and greed. That is what humans are. Inventive. War-like. Destructive, yes but bloody marvellous all the same.
However, imagine if you will: it’s 2012. The world has all but ended. Seas have risen and earthquakes have devastated most parts of the planet with only a few strongholds of humanity left alive, clinging on by their fingernails to the crust of an earth that they never thought would forsake them.
Imagine that you’re one of these people. The struggles of just living are becoming too much for those around you to bear. Food and water are running low as a result of the droughts that came before the tsunamis. The animals were washed away with everyone’s homes and valuables. Everything that you’ve ever needed or loved. Gone. Wiped out by the prophecy of a people who couldn’t even survive until the end of their calendar.
You’re devastated.
Everyone’s devastated.
The world is devastated.
With your last whisper of electricity, the last survivors of humanity decide to lift their spirits. One television, an invention of power that enthralled millions. One DVD player, a symbol of man’s constant struggle to improve on the existing innovations of their time. One DVD. A DVD means so much to so many. It can be a favourite film, a treasured family reel of a child in one of those little plastic cars going round and round in circles on a patio. It can remind us of simpler times, happier times.
So much is at stake, layered onto that tiny, shiny disc. It’s unmarked. It could be anything. Everyone is hoping for a landmark moment in film. They’re looking to the greats. Kubrick, Hitchcock, Spielberg, even a Mel Brooks film would cut it at this point. They’re praying to a God that they no longer worship that it’s not John Cusack’s 2012. No-one needs to see an apocalypse created with better CGI than the real one.
The disc slips into the player. A breathless silence falls over the huddled mass. The DVD starts.
It’s an advertising reel, designed for Ad Execs to put across their ideas to clients. Still. It could be a reel of the world’s greatest and most iconic adverts. That would remind them of the glorious world that had been torn away from in front of their very eyes.
It isn’t.
It’s this. An advertisement in which two jacket potatoes discuss having unprotected sex on a night out. It’s an advertisement where they then engage in a threesome with a bottle of juice drink after a series of lazy puns and weak chat-up lines. It’s an advertisement where regional accents are used to provide the comic relief in a style derived from 90s late-night television staple Eurotrash. It’s an advertisement where the tagline is used to imply both sexual promiscuity of the juice drink and the fact that it can be consumed with any meal regardless of what it is.
It’s an advertisement where TWO JACKET POTATOES GET FUCKED BY A BOTTLE.
Is this tripe what we want the human race’s legacy to be? These people who have created and recreated the world in their own image only to see it ripped away by an apocalypse which is, admittedly, unlikely to happen. Is it a risk that we as humans can afford to take? If this is indeed the pinnacle of human innovation then we might as well detonate the world’s nuclear weapon cache right now and solve all our problems for good.