Like many, I’m a fan of David Lynch and his strange, often disturbing movies that manage to turn mundane experiences terrifying, and make terrifying experiences unsettling and baffling. You’d think Lynch, talented as he is, would be a strange choice for a car commercial, but once-bold Nissan was willing to give it a shot.
The 2003 commercial is for the Nissan Micra, a charming little Nissan with an oddly feline face we never got in the U.S. Here’s the commercial, in all its blue-cast, Lynchian glory:
It’s strange, yes, but less unsettling than I’d maybe expect from the man who gave us Sting in a rubber eagle bikini in Dune.
While maybe not actually disturbing, it is pretty damn weird, with a disembodied pair of blue lips floating about speaking in a special Micra- language composed of portmanteaus of words like “spafe” and “aggrendly.”
Here’s what Lynch himself had to say about the commercial:
“I like the Micra, particularly the headlamps. They are like jewels. And I like the concept of ‘Do you speak Micra?’. I like modern and retro put together to make modtro — that’s a very good concept.”
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Okay, that seems about as commercial as you can get out of Lynch.
The vivid blue color theme of the ad suggests something else to me, though, a bit of a continuity with the movie he would have made most recently to when he did this commercial: 2001’s Mulholland Drive.
In Mulholland Drive, that same color blue is used almost exclusively for some crucial supernatural and sinister elements: a key that indicates that a murder has been committed, and an otherworldly counterpart to that key, a stranger key that fits a strange box.
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The same blue is also called out in the hair of an enigmatic woman found in a strange, secret club. Here, look at these blue things:
I’m not exactly sure what Lynch is trying to suggest, but he does seem to be tying the Micra into this set of blue objects, which contain strange, and at the very least amoral if not malevolent powers.
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So, Micra-owners—have you ever felt like your car was a part of a vast, unseen network of darkness and ever-present, unrelenting yet strangely calm terror? I think David Lynch may think so.
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