thelma and louise

In her fascinating series “Erotic ’90s”, Karina Longworth, creator and host of the long-running podcast You Must Remember This, discusses Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s early ’90s pop-feminist modern classic. (Should I leave out that “modern” once a film is over 30 years old?) I remember being faintly aware of the cultural conversation about Scott’s film at the time, but as a teenager in the pre-internet age I certainly didn’t get more than the occasional snippet. At school, our English teacher had a subscription to Newsweek, so I may have read an article about the film, but other than I wouldn’t have been known about the brouhaha in the US that Thelma & Louise prompted. Listening to Longworth’s podcast, it’s crazy to imagine the culture wars hysterics that gripped especially male critics – but then, in 2023, no amount of culture war craziness should come as much of a surprise.

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Every now and then YouTube disappoints me. Today is one of those days. I was looking for a Guinness ad – one of my favourite TV adverts ever – that makes great use of that song from South Pacific, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair”, a feminist quip and surreal imagery. There’s fish in there – Dave McKean would’ve liked it.

Why did I want to blog on a Guinness ad anyway? I’ve been re-watching the final cut of Bladerunner, this time with the commentary track. (Ridley Scott commentaries are sometimes interesting but often frustrating; the guy is a great craftsman, but he doesn’t really have much to say that is very interesting, intelligent or enlightening, and he comes across as somewhat arrogant. And the Thelma & Louise commentary is one of the worst I’ve ever forced myself to sit through.) Watching ’80s Rutger Hauer on screen, quite logically I thought of the Guinness ads he did a few years later (ah, the glorious days of Sky Channel), and from that I moved on to a Rutger-less, more fishy ad.

However, since I didn’t find that one, here’s one of the Hauerian adverts – short and sweet, at a point where the pretentiousness had already turned to irony. Enjoy! (And tomorrow I might post something on Buffy or on a comic series I liked rather more than Preacher.)