In Defense of Tony Scott's Last Ad

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” – Pablo Picasso

Trying to evaluate Tony Scott’s last work, a television commercial for Diet Mountain Dew that he completed weeks before committing suicide, requires looking back at his work in order to understand his style and to appreciate the piece in context. I never really liked Top Gun, so my easy initial reaction was to want to dismiss the director. This would have been a huge mistake.

Here’s a quick analysis of the ad:

• Less than a second: A fast zooming close up onto the Diet Dew logo.
• 14 seconds: the slob’s fantasy of what we later understand Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is offering him in exchange for the Mountain Dew.

Here are some notes on the fantasy sequence:

• Rapid cuts of a man in transit. The man is the stereotype for a slob on his couch watching TV. Speedboat, helicopter – A beautiful woman is waiting for him – now he's in a fantasy reality show mansion, feet up, watching the thinnest screen imaginable – a screen so thin it's not even there. His back is to us – he is our leader – and we watch the screen with him. We are watching Nascar. Now he's at a pool – throwing a tennis ball in the water for a shackled tiger to retrieve submissively. Now he's dancing in a fountain with about ten women wearing sexually evocative outfits. Everyone is soaking wet. Now in a sequence that lasts roughly one second, four symbols appear in rapid succession: 1.) a man shouting maniacally on the bow of a speedboat; 2.) a helicopter landing; 3.) a tiger licking its lips; 4.) A man cheering, nay rejoicing, on what appears to be a wooden bench on a porch.

Cut to the man's face, close up. He is hideous – it's a side-shot, a weird, home-made angle, like something shot on an iPhone – we're back in the realm of the real – then a close up of his frail looking arm clutching the Diet Dew. This by the man who directed Top Gun. Then:

• Over the shoulder close up of the slob. He looks macho now, confident.
• A close up side angle of the slob taking a long, full gulp from the Diet Dew bottle – pure, infantile delight.
• Now the slime green graphic with the semi-real Dew bottle icon. The slogan, "Yeah, it tastes that good." In talking directly to me, the viewer, in printed words and in a generic male voice-over voice, now for the first time, the marketers of Diet Dew have left the premise of their 30 second message implicit, as now the viewer is left to put together an account of what just happened. In leaving me to figure out the punch line on my own, Dew flatters my ego – I'm not stupid because I got the joke of the ad. Ha Ha! Of course no one would ever give up ALL THAT for a Diet Dew!
• Then Mark Cuban, that funny, personable guy you'd presumably like to know or be, is in front of the iconic soft drink refrigerator, giving us what are supposed to feel like improv outtakes. The unpolished aesthetic veils the fact that this is professional marketing of the highest caliber. The series of offhands by Mark – "island," "blank check" also give a little extra time for anyone who didn't get the joke yet.
• The last image is a super close up of Mark Cuban head on. He's looking down, trying to act confused. "But I'm Mark Cuban." Who is Mark Cuban? Why is Mark having an identity crisis in this Dew ad?

It’s easy to want to dismiss someone who made this ad. If art is supposed to lead to truth, then leading the audience to the position that there is nothing more desirable than a bottle of Diet Dew would not qualify as art. Top Gun was commercial pabulum, so let’s leave it at that.

But something was drawing me in. There was something lurking in this ad. The slob was just a little too excited. Mark Cuban was just a little too creepy.

I had to look deeper. I wanted to respect the artist’s work, so I avoided illegal downloads of Top Gun. Netflix happens to be showing Beverly Hills Cop 2, and that seemed as good a place as any to go for a sample of Tony Scott’s style. Here are some notes on the 1987 hit:

• Very fast pace – high percentage musical montage – cuts very rhythmic – artistic camera work – schizophrenic perspective. Whose eyes are we seeing through? Exuberance – love of speed, cars, machines, industrial power, money, women as objects, destruction of property. Innocent product placement – the homage to the auto industry. Vulgar but innocent, like a teenage boy. A raw, unadulterated love of materialist culture. Iconic brands interspersed like part of the scenery. I can feel the joy and excitement of driving an expensive car, buying expensive luxury items and basking in the lusty admiration of young women. Everyone seems pretty nice – There is no real evil.

That last bit is what really stands out about Beverly Hills Cop 2. There’s a serial killer duo, and neither of them really seems menacing at all. The main villain is Brigitte Nielsen, who is an icon of erotic farce.

There was something else going on. An undeniable artistic sensibility was at work, but there was no way to reconcile that with the totally absurd commercialism of the subject matter. Then I saw a clip from 1983’s The Hunger.

The incredible contrast between the raw commercialism of the Diet Dew ad and Beverly Hills Cop 2 on the one hand, and then the utter freakiness of this nudist monstrosity could not have been more stark. Having worked myself into a terrifying spiral of nihilism and despair by contemplating the cruel irony that the last video Tony Scott had made before jumping to his death was a ludicrous commercial for Diet Mountain Dew, my mind was fully open to the meaning of The Hunger.

• The beginning of the movie shows an Eden of sensual delight. Sex is here deified. The next segment shows the horror of aging as the clock winds down. The aging man continues to lust after young women, but his hideousness makes him repulsive. Interspersed are clips of a spine-tinglingly terrifying monkey going ape shit in a cage. Is this a symbol for the evil in human nature? The rapidly aging man desperately tries to preserve some taste of youth. Hideous and deformed by age, he begs the regal Catherine Deneuve for a kiss. She refuses. He’s just too hideous. She refuses to put him out of his misery, and he falls down stairs in a mock-death, but he lives on, only to become more and more hideous until his humanity is totally unrecognizable. . This is the first of two critical falls in the film.

The rest of the film, almost in an effort to deny the dreadful death fixation of the first half, depicts the lesbian seduction between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. There is proper reverence to erect nipples, and a braless Sarandon provides what is the film’s one and only moment of humor as she spills brandy onto her white t-shirt. In the very end, the man and the two women all die in another prolonged falling sequence, including faces aging before our eyes into skeletons and then crumbling into dust.

The Hunger depicts the horror of aging. It shows an intense dread of the repulsive aesthetic of death. The commercialism of Scott’s later films and the energy he put into actual commercials make perfect sense in light of this earlier, purely artistic statement of his own overwhelming anxiety vis-a-vis inevitable aesthetic decay. In The Hunger, Tony Scott made clear his sense of utter hopelessness in the face of aging and death. In a world where the grotesque truth of death is totally unacceptable, denial becomes the most important thing. If denial is the highest goal, then distractions like Diet Mountain Dew really are that good.

And through extensive use of nudity, he also made clear that probably the only way to escape this horror is to chase fleeting sensory ecstasy, either in sex, or in the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods. The parade of commercialism and eternal youth which comes in the next 25 years of his output might be described as so much sound and fury, but what it really signifies is the aesthetic denial of death and the choice to cling against all hope to a feeling of eternal youth.

In ancient Greek myth, Tithonus was a Trojan prince who became the mortal lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos wanted to enjoy her lover eternally, so she begged her father Zeus to grant him immortality. Zeus did so, but didn’t grant eternal youth. Doomed to live with increasingly unbearable old age, Tithonus ends up as follows: “but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.” (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

Having seen in The Hunger the depths of despair to which Scott’s true artistic vision of human life had sunk, it becomes possible to understand the defiant absurdity of the Diet Dew ad. Mark Cuban is already a rotting corpse. Seeing the futility of all wealth and power in the face of death’s grotesque mastery, the Diet Dew truly is worth as much as Mark Cuban’s hoard. Artistic production itself from the view of someone fully conscious of the horror of mortality is as good as the endless babbling of Tithonus. The Hunger was a powerful artistic statement, and it’s comforting to know it’s still freely available on YouTube.

Which brings me to my last point. In my research of the Diet Dew ad, it emerged that there is a song called “Diet Mountain Dew” by Lana Del Rey:

The song deals with the same fleeting sensuality as The Hunger. The haunting chorus, “you’re no good for me, but baby I want you” echoes the film’s depiction of ecstatic indulgence as the only medicine for the horror of mortality. None of it’s any good, but we want it nonetheless.