Yes, I realize this isn’t cinema. But it should still make sense. And, look, I have nothing against this product or this company. Unlike my hatred for Mattress Firm / Sleepy’s, this is purely a narrative thing. When you’re writing an ad and have a product that does one thing — in the case of Afrin, decloggin stuffed noses — you have a pretty simple baseline. It’s not a complicated financial product or service. There is no technology that has to be explained. If you have a stuffy nose, you take Afrin and it goes away. Simple stuff.
So why can’t this commercial get this right? Dude is painting a portrait of a woman. Okay, that’s fine. Dude has a stuffy, red nose that is both running and also congested. Okay, fine. Then, in his painting of the woman who is sitting for the portrait, he paints HER nose as gigantic and red. What the actual fuck? Dude. If you’re going to do this, have HER nose be running and red and sore and the guy shows her her portrait and she takes Afrin, resulting in a new portrait where her nose is a normal size and is no longer red. And, yes, it’s all really stupid. But, in the reality of reality, she should realize, only after seeing the portrait of herself, that she looks terrible. And her seeing the portrait and realizing how bad she looks should lead to her taking Afrin to clear that shit up. But, of course, she probably wouldn’t come pose for a painting if she was feeling that crappy to begin with — but you can only expect so many layers of reality in a fifteen-second commercial for nasal spray, I guess. Again, this isn’t Citizen Kane, but clearly someone somewhere got their wires crossed. Because that’s the only thing that could have happened. This is utter nonsense otherwise.
Also — and I know that art is subjective — this dude kinda sucks at painting. The portrait — both the big-nose and the small-nose version — looks nothing like the woman who is posing. And his “art” looks like perhaps a 12-year-old doodled this in his notebook during geometry class. It’s… not good. To add, why does the guy look like 1988 Rob Lowe mixed with Skippy from Family Ties? This throwback vibe has to be a choice. He’s rocking some pretty retro, round glasses, double-pierced left ear (something that I too rocked in the early 90s, but abandoned because it hasn’t been in style since) and is oddly wearing what looks like a wedding ring on both his middle finger and pinky. And I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but the guy is clearly left handed. He paints with his left hand and later holds the Afrin bottle in his left hand as if he’d just sprayed it. But when they show the close-up of a hand actually spraying the Afrin, it’s being done right handed. It’s not actually his hand!!! Because, as a lefty myself, I would never, ever spray nasal spray with my off hand.
To add, I truly hope this woman isn’t paying for this portrait. I have to assume that she’s just posing for this guy because she’s either humoring her gay, talentless friend, or will treat him like Jon Hamm’s “beautiful dummy” character on 30 Rock, praising him and fawning over his obvious disastrous attempt at painting just because he’s good looking. Point being, this commercial is not reality-based. Nothing about it tracks with how life or runny noses work. And, yes, I know most commercials break down over just the smallest bit of scrutiny, but maybe we should start asking for more reality in our reality. Or maybe I’m the asshole. Yes, that’s probably it. **sniff**
