Those of you who reside in Britain and are staunch Guardian readers will be familiar with the DVDs that come free with the Saturday edition. The films on offer are never interesting enough to entice you buy the paper when you wouldn’t otherwise – with some sort of cinematic karma, for every mildly welcome movie, there’s a particularly naff film like Letter to Brezhnev to balance it out. Still, it’s certainly worth a look before chucking each week’s offing into the bin.
Jaap and me, after our cozy nine minutes together
This Saturday’s edition came with a film whose name did not ring any bells. Eureka, it was entitled, with the strapline The best ideas come from the most unlikely places. God god, could this be about a scientist, some heretofore unrecognized example of ‘lab lit’? My heart rate accelerated ever so slightly. The cover showed a wistful, unshaven, vaguely foreign-looking European man staring into the distance, a background of green fields and mountains behind him. A zoologist, perhaps? Or a botanist? So far, so good.
And then I saw it: the familiar yellow and red logo in the bottom right-hand corner, and the small white print: ‘a Shell Films Production’.
A what?
Flip over the case. The ‘film’ is in fact only nine minutes long. Under a banner stating this to be a story inspired by real events, the synopsis reveals that the story is actually an advert thinly disguised. Chief Shell engineer Jaap van Ballegooijen, who is “passionate about saving the world’s energy resources”, comes up with an idea for a new technology to drill for inaccessible oil after a chance encounter with his son in Amsterdam. The ‘film’, in fact, is clearly a shameless advertisement packaged as fiction.
What the hell, it was only nine minutes – I couldn’t resist. With swelling music that would not be out of place in a Spielberg production, and Dutch subtitles for the cringe-worthy sequences when the intrepid Jaap has to interact with his teenaged boy, it’s made up to look like an arthouse film. But the acting and dialogue are terrible, and the content is sheer propaganda. A journalist who challenges Jaap’s vision of tapping occluded oil is told sharply that there are two sides to every story. Naturally, Jaap assures her, as he grits his teeth heroically out of the helicopter window, this method of scraping yet more oil from the nearly empty reserves is just to tide us over until alternative fuels are ready. Later, back in Amsterdam, when the Coke-drinking, spotty son complains that his father is always off galavanting in tropical countries instead of watching him play football back home, Jaap sharply retorts that he should grow up: geen olie, geen fris (loosely translated as, no oil, no infrastructure that would provide that beverage you’re drinking).
I’m not sure why this DVD annoyed me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve just returned from an editorial trip to the 29th Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, where there was a lot of green love in the proverbial room. I guess, mostly, that I am disappointed at the Guardian for peddling this infomercial as part of series in which its readers have grown to expect legitimate fiction. Although the warning signs are all over it if you look closely, in no place is it clearly marked ‘advertisement’ (a required notification had the equivalent fare, in essay form, been printed in the actual paper). Fiction, it seems, has become a clever medium for worming around the devices that protect us from taking self-promotion at face value.
On the lighter side, the DVD also came with extras: a ‘making of’ (all 90 seconds of it) and something alarmingly described as ‘interactive film mind challenges – creative brain teasers’.
I passed on those, needless to say.
(warning: the link to LabLit.com above constitutes shameless self-promotion)
I saw that insert this weekend and had no desire at all to watch it. I can’t believe you actually wasted 10 minutes of your life on it! 😉
Hey, all in the name of research: the sacrifices I make for my readers!
Hsien-Hsien, I am horrified to discover a creeping belated morbid curiosity to check out the ‘creative brain teasers’. My imagination is running wild:
Question 1. What is the maximum amount of fossil fuel you can waste by taking your boys to soccer practice around the corner in your Land Rover?
Forgot to tell you I think the pic is cute, though. hehe
As for the Land Rover, guess we should also assume the soccer mom waited in the car with her engine on and the aircon blasting. I’ve seen lots of people do that in Singapore, especially. eek
All joking aside, I am genuinely uneasy about the prospect of other big companies subverting fiction for the purposes of advertising. I suppose this already occurs with product placement in films, but that seems much more innocuous.
Landies run on fossil fuel? Good grief, I thought they ran on turnips and cow farts. Have I been wrong all these years?
Various snips of this have been running on US television for several weeks.
Ooh, really? Thanks for the intelligence from across the Pond, Bryan. Amusing that Shell repackaged it especially for Britain.
I have a strong feeling I’ve seen this film, or something very like it, quite some time ago. Sounds like the Guardian is scraping the bottom of the barrel, after their poster series that started so well with ‘How To Spot Trees From A Long Way Off; wound down with ‘Antique Trombones of Britain and Europe’ and concluded ignominiously with ‘Table-Tennis Balls Of The World’.
So not just propaganda, but tired old propaganda. Shell really needs to up its game.
In defense of the poster series, we have the imaginatively entitled ‘Cheeses’ edition hanging on the editorial office wall and are systematically working our way through trying each one. (Tip: for god’s sake, do keep your distance from the Vacherin du Haut-Doubs! Smells like Brussels sprouts, tastes like gym socks)
“tastes like gym socks”
The question arises,
“how do you know?”
gym socks aside…
The Shell ad/video appears to be part of a concerted effort on their part to cultivate (pun maybe intended) a green image.
Interesting. Bryan, do you think it’s warranted? (Is Shell actually doing it or just talking the talk?) I would have thought a better way to get this message across would be to focus on all the amazing biofuels research they may or may not be doing. So if the only way they could show greenness was by talking about plundering 100% instead of 99% of the remaining oil reserves, but with a cuddly human interface, it sort of implies there’s nothing else to show.
I’m sure they are spending money on research for alternate fuels. It is probably a substantial part of their R&D budget. Every oil company out there has to be acutely aware of the finite nature of their primary resource.
I think the intent of that ad was to show that they could access the resources with less environmental impact from the drilling. Offshore drilling and its impact on marine ecosystems is a big issue for the gulf coast states over here. I’m pretty sure that’s where they were aiming that ad.
BP (British Petroleum) has been running ads on US television for a a year or more to try and promote a green image. They emphasize their E85 (the 85% ethanol/15% gasoline mix) product.
So I think they are sincere, to a point. They have to be aware of the growing number of people who are concerned with the environment, and these ad campaigns are trying to convince environmentally conscious consumers to buy their product.
On the other hand, some of these companies (ExxonMobil) have been funding anti-global warming groups (groups who deny any human contribution to global warming).
So I don’t know. I’d like to believe that the big oil companies are honestly trying to “go green”. It seems like a no-brainer. Oil is finite, therefore the future profitability of the company is guaranteed to decline unless alternate products can be brought to market.
I didn’t see any corporate scientists on the podium at the SBFC, but I suppose they are keeping their R&D results close to their chest. (This is in contrast to the agricultural meetings I’ve attended in an editorial capacity, where half the speakers tend to be from Dupont, Bayer and the like.)
And I have no beef with them promoting their kinder, gentler green image. I only object to them hijacking a prominent fiction forum without due notice.