Lady Blue Shanghai--A Look at the Art of Nostalgia

    Memory:
All alone in the moonlight.
I can smile at the old days.
I was beautiful then.
I remember the time I knew what happiness was.
Let the memory live again.

-Cats

 

     Her feet carry her down the ornate hall, the trappings and decadence of Shanghai apparent around her.  Like the familiar scent of an old home or a favorite meal, the music grows and swells.  Where does it come from?  A growing sense, not quite dread and not quite excitement, tells her it's coming from her room.  She finds a record playing inside, and a mysterious blue bag.  Who left it here?  She's new to Shanghai; she doesn't know anyone who would.  And yet...

...She feels as though she's been here before.

     In 2011, Dior launched a campaign for the Lady Dior handbag, featuring a different film and different director for each color of handbag, starring Marion Cotillard in all of them.  The relatively recent time of the campaign has lent itself to not having exactly quantifiable, tangible, or, more importantly, available results.  Fortunately, I'm not a marketing major, I'm a film major.  So fie on results.  Let's look at what's going on in this commercial, Lady Blue Shanghai, by David Lynch.  Lynch's work, if you're familiar with it, is typically surreal and based  upon atmosphere, mood, and ideas.  The pacing in this piece, like many of his other works, is slow, drawn out.  Most of it is simply a brief exchange between Cotillard's character and the hotel workers.   

      This commercial appeals to the consumer's nostalgia, personifying her in the form of Cotillard.  Nostalgia is not just our memories of childhood, but our longings and pinings as we idealize them.  I remember when I was young I often had a dream I was in a ballroom, all the walls were clear, reflective glass, and light was shining upon a spinning chandelier that functioned like some sort of elegant disco ball.  I think I was watching a newly-married couple dancing together, alone.  The scene was very minimalistic.  I'm certain, though, that if I came across something, some object, some song, some talisman, that hearkened back to this vision, I would buy it in an instant.  

     In this same way the people at Dior most likely wanted people to long for their bag.

     Listen to the music, though--not just the piece she hears upon entering the room, but the growing ostinato in the background.  It's slow, sensuous.  It wanders.  This is not the vulgar, incidental music of many movies, but an internal monologue of sorts.  It has its own life, like the mind, and it has depth even as it has no form, like a memory that is there but just out of reach.  

     There are extensive, romantic sequences, in which the camera's frame rate is jarringly low--meaning that the picture is less smooth because less images are shown each second, usually film is about 32 frames (pictures) per second--creating a swaying, dreamy atmosphere.  We don't know if it's a dream or a memory, because, really, does it matter?  Our dreams and our memories are both similarly stored in our minds, and ordered in their importance with similar priority.  Love is the center of our nostalgia, and even my own dream was about lovers dancing.  We long to be loved, or maybe to belong, or maybe to be free, and thus what we long for most will fill us with the most nostalgia.  For in our minds, achieving our goals will give us a feeling of contentment that is like returning home.  

Even if we never lived in that home. 

      A moment should be taken to point out that Lady Blue Shanghai has a moment of nearly astonishing aesthetic vulgarity.  It is at a climactic moment; the lovers hold each other at the top of the pearl tower, and the man looks into the distance and says "It is so beautiful."  What he's looking at, though, is a less-than subtle image of Cotillard holding the handbag, staring almost angrily from an advertisement.  As if this were not bad enough, the image grows, probably key-framed in Final Cut Pro, basically meaning the editor took the image of the purse and magnified it.  It kills the mood of the piece the way product placement can pull a person out of the movie.

I suspect this is no mistake.

  

Disclaimer:  There is brief strong language at the beginning.

    

     In a way, it seems silly that we tie our life experiences to a product, and even more so that a company could prey upon this human tendency.   This tendency is natural, though, and human.  It is even recognized in canonical Christian scripture, when Christ compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a merchant finding a pearl of great worth and selling everything he had for that pearl.  Perhaps the merchant was not compelled by nostalgia, the story is brief and anecdotal, but nostalgia is, in many ways, the closest concept a Christian has of heaven.  In this sense, the kingdom of heaven is like a blue Dior handbag, appearing in your life unexpectedly at the behest of an unseen lover, and the existence of the lover's memory in your mind renders time and space irrelevant.

Don't you want a Dior handbag now?