Nine Commercials by Roy Andersson

The characters in a Roy Andersson advertisement wear whiteface: a memento mori. It’s one of the reasons why one watches these otherwise ordinary scenes with a bit of apprehension; they are ordinary in the way the Truman Show is ordinary. Their characters are like people taken from a Balthus painting. They are working-class, occupied with useful and necessary tasks, wearing expressions of great seriousness or, of reptilian indifference (it’s frankly hard to tell, and there may be no difference). They react but don’t have that much feeling. A blankness settles in their eyes, like people who have lost their memories.

Whereas the characters look a little aloof, their snow-globe worlds have been arranged with a meticulous, exacting, and highly conscious mind. The setting cannot be but the way Andersson has decided it, and the characters are resigned to staying where they are (they have not tried to beautify their surroundings, nor add a personal touch). They do not hurry. In the advertisement Fazer – Andjakt i vassen (1981), two hunters march through thick cattails and pause in a clearing, as if waiting for instructions about where to turn. In Preppens Paret (1987), a couple sits on a couch – confusingly arranged in the middle of an otherwise barren room – with no reason to stand up or go elsewhere. In HSB Spjälsängen (1985), a man lies in a crib as his parents gaze down at him condescendingly, but neither will take him out. They eat chocolate bars and drink beer: capstone signs that they have nothing else to do.

How different these are from our modern commercials! Every Pepsi ad seems to want to transfigure its drinker, protein bars come with mandates to instantaneously Hulk-ify the man or woman who puts it in their mouth. People need those products, these ads suggest, and the industry rounds out that sense of urgency with an aesthetic that grabs our attention, captures our interest, generates desire, and compels action. 

Andersson, the idiosyncratic Swedish director of films like Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000), winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes and En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014), winner of the Venice International Film Festival’s Golden Lion award, has made around 500 ads in his career for household objects. These span deodorant, coffee, three kinds of chocolate bars, beer, yogurt, artificial sweeteners, national lotteries, postal services, newspapers, French airlines, and French frying pans. His playbook across them all is remarkably consistent: ‘well, and I guess there’s beer here too,’ he seems to be saying.¹ The boyfriend in Preppens Paret takes a swig of his beer and does seem happier (he even sings a little song), but the camera locks onto him at medium shot and holds him captive within a larger frame filled out with the stodgy accoutrements of a suffocating middle-class life. The walls flank him and snuff out his pleasure; the beer is no larger than a polka dot there. Andersson’s commercials retroactively mock the vital energy of modern advertisements with displays of an alternate kind of immortality of the plastic-bag variety – they are here forever but are forgettable, cheap.

Let us not forget, though, that Andersson took after Beckett in believing that “sorrow is fun.”² Advertisements do indeed have a comic quality (in the classical sense) because they are so brief. In 30 seconds, Andersson cannot tell you who the characters are, but he can show you what their essence might be (for instance, that the man-baby in the crib is essentially ‘Inept’, or that his mother is ‘Exasperated’). His characters are in this sense more allegorical than they are real. One doesn’t relate to them as individuals, but if you’ve ever felt some kind of ineptitude, you’ll see yourself there.

In other words, we recognise ourselves in these ads, as Andersson said of Beckett’s “fun” scenes (they’re also “meant to create recognition”).³ Recognition is quite different from understanding or relatability – both of which one feels after being put in someone else’s shoes (‘I relate because I’ve literally been there’). Recognition, by contrast, joins together two different experiences on account of something that they share – usually an essential trait, the lowest common denominator in the human experience (‘I see myself in you’).⁴ To recognise each other, people don’t need to understand each other; they just need to see past themselves.

Andersson takes these characters and places them in precisely choreographed social tableaus, essentially doing what astronomists do when they model the movements of planets around the sun, or what mathematicians do when they re-arrange the variables in a formula: he is delivering the bigger picture, hitching our attention to that broader social register, getting us to pay attention to the relationships between people and the conditions that act upon them as opposed to who they each are inside. As an audience, we recognise that we, too, are minor actors standing beside them on this larger stage. By dint of our shared circumstances, we are all equal. “Therein [recognition],” as Andersson says, “lies the source of empathy.”⁵ And yet, to know we are equal is one thing; to take pride in it is another. Some people may find it insulting to be counted among Andersson’s riff-raff, hence Andersson’s choice of phrasing: therein lies the source of empathy. A source needs a conduit. 

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Andersson has spoken before about the “sense of timelessness” he chases in each of his films, which comes out of the “memories from the time [he] grew up in Gothenburg.”⁶ During those postwar years, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Sweden introduced a slate of “universal, noncontributory, and unified social programs” that covered everyone from fishermen to factory workers, regardless of their employment status.⁷ Other corporatist or liberal models in the U.S., UK, France, and other countries, matched citizen contributions or extended existing citizens’ privileges to marginalised groups – othering them socially by that logic – but Sweden’s model was far more expansive, accordingly named folkhemmet, meaning national family, under the pretense, as SDP leader Per Albion Hansson explains, that:

In a good home, there are […] no favorites and no stepchildren. No one is looked down on. No one tries to gain advantage at another’s expense; the strong do not oppress the weak. […] Applied to society as a whole, this would require that we break down all the social and economic barriers that now divide citizens into the privileged and those left behind, the rulers and their dependents, the plunderers and those plundered.⁸

Accounts from that time suggest people really felt this way. “Bostadsbolaget [a public housing company] upgraded all their flats every ten years in a rolling programme, at no cost to the tenant,” one Swedish writer remembers.⁹ “If you wanted a new kitchen, or just a new fridge or cooker, or a new bathroom, you could – in fact you should – have it.”¹⁰ Andersson remembers how “one share[d], and fe[lt] responsibility towards others.”¹¹  

Should people’s prosperity fail to naturally stoke their goodwill, Andersson made an ad for the Swedish Employers’ Association’s (SAP) campaign with the unsubtle slogan, “Why should we care about one another?” (SAP – varför ska vi bry oss om varandra?, 1985). It doesn’t try to persuade, but nudges its viewers to pay attention to the obvious camaraderie that economic conditions had already engendered.¹² “You can loosen up now,” the slogan reads.

Once in power after the 1985 election, however, the SDP began to deregulate Sweden’s banking industry and stimulate private industry to hedge against the economic drop-off following the postwar boom. Those decisions are largely understood to have precipitated the following decade’s financial crash, and the SDP made cuts to its welfare programs to compensate. Publicly, they framed those cuts as ways to manage the house that folkhemmet had built (as Budget Minister Odd Engström put it, “You can’t all the time solve the problem by building new houses. You have to use the house sometimes!”), but their logic to cut welfare funding to preserve the welfare state would have been a tough sell, regardless of its contradictions – for messaging can enhance but cannot completely overwrite the lasting behavioural changes that economic conditions put into place.¹³ In the years following those austerity measures, Andersson observed that “Where people can exploit one another endlessly […] you will lose your respect for other people.”¹⁴ As Sweden “step by step moved away from that solidarity,” a “feeling [of being] lost, or like a stranger; having no sense of home… [became] the most prominent feelings of our time,” he continued.¹⁵ In 1990, five years after he made his SAP ad, he laid out an alternate playbook where he distinguished between the things public messaging could achieve from those it could not:

In a society in which values can be bought, there is no morality. In an amoral society, nihilism rules. There is no other value than immediate gratification, no sense of responsibility, no future. People sell their heads to the highest bidder. There is no need for examples. Total pillaging has already taken place. People have given up. A maker of commercials with his own morality can do nothing but make commercials that reflect his own values.¹⁶

One does not expect an artist to make their art ‘about’ anything. But most of Andersson’s ads overlay his values upon the stranger events within his scenes. In the insurance company ad Trygg-Hansa Glasrutan (1977), a car swerves and almost hits all the workers, who then accidentally break the glass they’d been carefully transporting. One feels the shock of that shatter, then receives Andersson’s easygoing slogan: “Not all accidents can be prevented, but we prevent many.” The line’s steely nonchalance settles over, but does not eclipse, the obvious stress of the scene. The same thing happens with the chocolate bar in Fazer Bussen (1979). It is “A piece of the good life,” the slogan reads, holding back from the full-throated declaration. It is a good life, but only a piece. The beers in Preppens Paret, too, are “A bright spot in existence, a ray of light in life.” Andersson hedges here and there with this forgettable spot, that ephemeral ray. The slogans insist on themselves but with a level of enthusiasm that is commensurate with the small, quotidian scenes to which they are joined.

Andersson gently projects the text onto the closing frame of the ad, giving it the air of a spontaneous conclusion, towards which the scene has been building, though unawares. We understand that real life could maybe build out into the good life. The characters are laconic, yes, but not, Andersson suggests, because they’ve lost the will to live. They are full of potential energy.

In 30 seconds, ads can only deliver a short resume of that aspirational journey. It falls to Andersson’s feature films to build out the rest of the arc. Du levande (You, the Living, 2007) quite literally glues scene upon scene. If one character mentions a tablecloth, there he is in the next scene pulling it off the table, breaking all the china. Then in the next he is getting sued. Then he’s in court. Then he is on the electric chair. One wonders how long Andersson will let this go on. Will he show us his corpse? Will we see how he’s buried? It seems inevitable, somewhat logical, that we should follow this man’s earthly life through to its atomic end.

Scenes plow ahead in the film until we have exhausted each of the character’s possible variations. Think, for instance, of the pickpocket who is also a doctor, who then tells us he hates his patients. Or think of the curt man who gets a haircut, then becomes enraged, a little xenophobically, who then reverts to a tame businessman, then a solemn funeralgoer. Over the course of these mini sequences the characters step into new settings, put on different faces, and play different roles. They become octagonal and incohesive – both overdetermined and anonymous. You recognise them when you see them, but you have no idea what they’ll get up to next (it is not up to them). The scenes end when characters run out of room to change. At times this is because they’ve literally come up against a wall in this society where there are only so many things one can get up to, and in other cases, change is impossible because… they’ve died (think of the man in the electric chair again, or the daughter in the nursing home who keeps talking to her mother, who is obviously senile).

While the characters may be condemned to live out their lives in this rote fashion, these scenes feel remarkably free to me. The filmmaker’s consciousness alights from person to person, indifferent about their fate but ambiently interested in what they’re doing. It’s a kind of detachment any consumer or social media user will know well, but we’re not trying to buy anything, nor like anyone in particular here. The joys and opportunities of voyeurism are ours, the pressure to judge, compare, and conform are not. It is quite a different way to be with other people – an opportunity rarely found within our own lives – without the interference of ourselves. Andersson lamented the way people exploit each other in modern society. Here, we hold space for them, quite literally, watching them patiently as they live. It is not exploitation, but it is not quite community, either. I did yearn for one though.

Reklamfilm Trygg-Hansa Glasrutan (1977 Sweden 1 min)
Prod Co: Roy Andersson Filmproduktion AB Dir: Roy Andersson Phot: John O. Olsson

Reklamfilm Fazer Bussen (1979 Sweden 1 min)
Dir: Roy Andersson
Cast: Lars Amble

Reklamfilm Fazer Andjakt i vassen (1981 Sweden 1 min)
Dir: Roy Andersson Phot: John O. Olsson
Cast: Lars Amble

Reklamfilm Trygg-Hansa Bröllopet (1982 Sweden 1 min)
Prod Co: Roy Andersson Filmproduktion AB Dir: Roy Andersson Phot: Hanno-Heinz Fuchs

Reklamfilm SAP Varför ska vi bry oss om varandra? (1985 Sweden 2 min)
Dir: Roy Andersson Phot: István Borbás

Reklamfilm HSB Spjälsängen (1985 Sweden 1 min)
Prod Co: Studio 24/Roy Andersson Filmproduktion Dir, Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: István Borbás

Reklamfilm Lotto Soffan (1985 Sweden 1 min)
Prod Co: Studio 24/Roy Andersson Filmproduktion Dir, Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: István Borbás

Reklamfilm Preppens Paret (1987 Sweden 1 min)
Prod Co: Roy Andersson Filmproduktion AB Dir: Roy Andersson Phot: István Borbás

Reklamfilm Lotto Restaurangkök (1989 Sweden 1 min)
Dir: Roy Andersson

Endnotes