Share the Fantasy

A story in Space (20 camera shots) and Time (30 seconds) of a Woman (late-20s) who kisses a Man (60s) before driving to the desert, where she talks on the phone while receiving gas from Another Man (late-teens), before driving further into the desert, where she meets and kisses a Third Man (late-30s).

The woman is wearing a red button-up two-piece ensemble whose skirt stops just above the knee and high heels. Over her right shoulder is a small purse. She has dark hair and grey eyes. She is wearing hoop earrings. On her right wrist are two bracelets: a charm and a cuff. There are no bracelets or rings on her left hand. The earrings and the bracelets are gold-coloured.

The car the woman leaves town in is black. So too is the telephone at the gas station. So too is the shadow of the airplane that passes over her, and that of a desert feature I will get to in a minute.

The first kissed man sits in a spare but expensively furnished high-rise office. The furniture is pseudo-Georgian, and his chair is not meant for business. He is wearing a dark suit and a blue shirt. The kiss he receives is from above and lands on his forehead.

The second man is wearing a yellow sweater and dark-coloured (black) jeans. The third man is wearing a white shirt with the top button undone. Neither the first or the second man have a noticeable part in their hair. The third man parts his in the middle.

The woman's most noticeable forms of expression are a smile and a dead-on, eyes-locked greeting. She looks up when she is thinking and down when she is accelerating, or up and down after the young man at the gas station smiles at her.

The first man could be her father, but he could also be her husband or her sugar daddy. The third man, because of the nature of their kiss, could only be a lover. The role of the second man is to imagine and encourage her.

Behind the woman and the third man is a stone formation that could be a ruin but is more likely something of -- and, paradoxically, resistant to -- nature. It could be a clenched hand, save the middle-finger, but that "finger" could also be a phallus.

Chanel's campaign at the time was "Share the fantasy", and as men we were asked to see this as a woman's fantasy, and to share it with the women we know or want to know. But really, it is a man's fantasy (for a woman), and thus a male fantasy.  Chanel No. 5 sold well during this period, with most of it given as gifts.

Here is another Chanel No. 5 ad from the 1980s:



I am made of blue sky and golden light
and I will feel this way forever

I love these words and quoted them in my thesis. In hearing them I am always reminded of the last two paragraphs of Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" (1905), in particular her line about "the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands," something Paul will never experience. Not that we have any indication that he wanted to.