Jaguar, the British luxury vehicle manufacturer, recently released an unsettling 30-second advertisement. 

For a creepy half-minute, a group of more-or-less androgynous characters in idiosyncratic costumes and hairstyles exit a yellow elevator and take up various unsmiling poses in front of the camera. They eventually congregate by a boulder in the middle of a pink-tinted desert landscape to stare uncomfortably into your soul.

All the while, iconoclastic slogans repeatedly appear on the screen, moving from the somewhat inspirational “create exuberant” and “live vivid” to the somewhat disturbing “delete ordinary,” “break moulds [sic],” and then the climax—”copy nothing.”

This slogan finally yields to the Jaguar logo itself as the characters leave the scene.

Most of us would find this ad somewhat gross, and as we analyze its various components, it shouldn’t be hard to see why. The music is unsettling—no melody or harmony, just a syncopated beat that sounds like it’s being played underwater. The hairstyles are just weird; one lady sports an afro with a 90º angle cut taken out of it.

The costumes appear to be the product of a modern artist going to town with brightly colored trash bags (perhaps using TeleTubbies for inspiration), and the awkwardly located gaps in the females’ attire doesn’t help matters much.

On a deeper level, there is simply no joy. 

Seriously, the eight characters never even smile. As they enter the scene from the elevator, pose for the camera, and sit on a rock, all they do is stubbornly stare straight ahead—and at you. The only time they interact is when they suddenly each turn their heads to level the same defiant stare at their neighbor for a brief second. 

It’s pretty evident that these eight characters share nothing in common other than the fact that they are all rejecting commonality together. They sure make “delete ordinary” seem like a pretty lonely life calling.

Even deeper than that, there is just no life in the ad. The video begins by depositing the characters on an unnaturally tinted, completely flat, barren, rock-littered desert landscape. After some shots of the characters in no less inviting settings, the ad finishes when the characters march backwards off the set leaving you to contemplate the Jaguar logo superimposed over the same pink, sterile wasteland. 

No plants. No sun. No sign of life other than the characters themselves—and they all look half-dead anyways.

Unsurprisingly, the YouTube comments for this ad do not exude sympathy for Jaguar’s marketing choices. And by “not exuding sympathy,” I mean exuding universal ridicule.

“I’m sorry what exactly are we trying to sell with this ad? Elevators, rocks, or being gay on Mars?“

“Cats have nine lives, I think Jaguar has just used all of them.“

“Jaguar’s pronouns are Was/Were.“

(You might want to scroll through the comments thread yourself—there are far more humorous takes than I can copy here.) And though the video has 2.4 million YouTube views, I don’t see a single “like” recorded next to that thumbs-up button.

At this point, there are a couple directions I could aim my commentary, and I’ll even have a whole other article coming out soon about why, on a fundamental level, Jaguar is promoting anti-culture—a concept which can never last long. But before we get to that, I’d like to point out how this ad is yet another example of normalizing the unnormal. On the outside, it sounds fun. On the inside, it’s seriously dangerous.

When you watch this ad, there’s a certain amount of disgust you ought to feel. This is because the characters are outfitted very abnormally. No one dresses like that. No one (ought to) wear makeup like that. Their hairstyles and outfits are so eccentric that you probably can’t even definitively identify the gender of each one. (I’m guessing the character in the yellow spacesuit is a male, and the character in the orange dress is a female… maybe?)

But this ad makes the eccentric features the whole point—it glorifies the abnormal. And thus, given that it has over 2.4 million views on YouTube, it’s doing its part to make the abnormal more normal.    

For context, please read my three–part series on the philosophy of drag (yes, there is such a thing). In those articles, I provide a more thorough explanation of the basic point I’ll make again here. As innocent, playful, and carefree as the outlandish makeup and odd costumes may seem to the naïve viewer, these kinds of androgynous outfits are a subtle way of undermining real gender distinctions in our culture.

Consider this: Our culture has different dress expectations for men and women because men and women are fundamentally different. 

If you’ve ever walked up behind a dude with long hair and said “excuse me, ma’am,” the awkward uncomfortableness on both your and his face when he turns around should explain it all. In order to treat men and women differently, we need to be able to distinguish them as different. 

Accordingly, the “molds” that the Jaguar characters rail against are actually important cultural norms that bind us together and help us live in harmony.

However, when we glorify the aberrations from our cultural norms, we start eroding the visible differences between men and women. Which, in turn, starts eroding the real differences between them in our minds. As I wrote in my piece on drag:

“There’s a reason we have different hairstyles, dress, and even subtle mannerism expectations for males and females. How you dress and how you act are real, tangible forms of communication and an important part of the sexual order. They ought to always line up with who you are.       

However, if you’re a man wearing women’s clothing, you’re presenting mixed messages about who you are. And thus, you are blurring—and so defying—the standard categories of male and female. Initially, you will be the one who is shocking because you are mixing things that obviously don’t go together. Yet, if you do this enough, eventually you will seem normal, the standard categories of male and female will appear malleable and revisable.”

That’s precisely the philosophy behind drag queens. That’s why they infiltrate your kids’ schools—to blur the visible distinctions between male and female.

I believe we can see echoes of this in Jaguar’s own ad. 

When you glorify the distinction-less abnormal, you begin to make real distinctions seem abnormal. The more we see pseudo-men and pseudo-women like those in Jaguar’s ad, the more we begin to believe that “men” and “women” are just pseudo-categories. 

That has real psychological consequences as we begin to believe that modesty, decency, and propriety are just artificial tyranny, and that male and female are just fluid concepts. 

Media has a powerful effect on culture, and even automobile ads do their part towards turning cultural beliefs in the wrong direction.

So always remember that there is a very real blessing to being normal. Don’t let the discontented steal it from you. 

They don’t look like a particularly hospitable bunch, anyway, and they have positively no sense of fashion.