This is a bizarre and beautiful commercial for the Verizon Rhyme cell phone. We’ve got a very high-tech Sci Fi-esque setting, looking a lot like the inside of some cosmic space craft, and inside we see a multi-armed woman with a dissociative identity disorder-like condition acting like she herself is in actuality the cell phone. It’s weird enough that she’s got six arms, and that she lives in this high-tech cocoon, and that she’s coming across like some sort of bionic cyborg, but this acting like she’s the cell phone thing makes everything else she says extremely doubtful. I mean, how can we trust someone who fuses themselves with a computer, lives in a spaceship, surgically grafts other people’s arms onto herself, and all to try to get us to buy a cell phone? She’s obviously schizo! But maybe if we don’t buy the phone, she’ll vaporize our planet! Yikes! I guess we’d better buy the cell phone, lest we endanger our very existence!
You know, I’m shocked that Verizon would partner with such an obviously unbalanced but apparently incredibly powerful woman. Maybe they got scared too, and decided they’d best humor her and let her do ads for this phone, rather than make her mad. I guess that’s understandable. But why did they have to show her that phone? That’s what started this whole issue to begin with! That was very irresponsible of them, I must say! But honestly, they probably let her do whatever she wants to without criticism just because she’s pretty (beautiful women can get away with anything)!
Okay, so all jokes aside, this is a pretty freaky spot that people seem to either love or hate. I really like it in some ways, and not so much in others. But like my above comment, I like it party because she’s very pretty. But I hope this ad doesn’t make Hindus mad. But hey, if they can stomach the existence of McDonald’s when they revere the cow as sacred, then this ad is probably small potatoes (or a small order of fries). The idea of the many arms to indicate it is many things at once is partly inspired, but it also subliminally communicates the idea that perhaps you will need six hands to be able to use it effectively.
But what’s especially funny to me is how this “many things rolled into one” idea is also visually communicated subliminally in her dress: it looks like a cigarette rolling paper, and she looks like she’s being rolled into a joint. And behind her, that circular lighted area looks rather like a hot cigarette lighter from a car, doesn’t it? If it glowed orange instead of lavender, it sure would. So it looks like someone is about to smoke her. And based upon this whole scenario, it feels like we’ve all smoked something when we see this spot. Pretty freaky!
(But for anyone who has watched enough of that show Ancient Aliens knows, they suggest that some Hindu stories involve spaceship wars, and so this ad seems to meld the idea of a Hindu Goddess with a spaceship environment, which is exactly what the show Ancient Aliens is all about suggesting. And since mostly potheads probably like that show, this visual metaphor of the rolling paper dress and the cigarette lighter back lighting probably all works really well with the melding together of the show, its ideas, and its fans. So it was probably thought up by fans of Ancient Aliens. At least, that's how it looks to me.)
(But for anyone who has watched enough of that show Ancient Aliens knows, they suggest that some Hindu stories involve spaceship wars, and so this ad seems to meld the idea of a Hindu Goddess with a spaceship environment, which is exactly what the show Ancient Aliens is all about suggesting. And since mostly potheads probably like that show, this visual metaphor of the rolling paper dress and the cigarette lighter back lighting probably all works really well with the melding together of the show, its ideas, and its fans. So it was probably thought up by fans of Ancient Aliens. At least, that's how it looks to me.)
Here’s the cell phone cosmic communion commercial:
