The Neccessity of the Unneccessary
When we stumbled on the commercial above over at Adland, we couldn’t helping thinking about why such ridiculously labor-intensive processes as elaborate domino falls are so much fun to watch. We’re not sure why, exactly, but people love things that are useless, but in some way graceful or pleasing.
Moreover, our choices as consumers are rarely as rational as we might think. Wine experts, for example, tell us that traditional, troublesome, aromatic cork stoppers do not produce better flavor for wine than ugly, easy-to-use plastic twist-offs — but who would spend $50.00 for wine with the same screw-off top as on a bottle of Thunderbird?
Cars are a more obvious example. Take spoilers. They can be functional in race cars, but are largely either aerodynamically useless or counterproductive for more conventional autos. The real function of spoilers is to feed the fantasies of us car buyers, many of whom are basically grown-up children who still fantasize about driving race cars while we slog through 10 mph traffic. And what possible job does a fancy hubcap or a spinner do? Sometimes, “looking cool” is its own justification.
In fact, though it may not always be good for us, we humans really do seem to enjoy the ridiculously inefficient. Engineer-turned-cartoonist Rube Goldberg made his name into an adjective (”Rube Goldberg-like bureaucratic processes,” for example) with his many entertaining single-panel depictions of wildly inefficient mechanisms for performing simple tasks. Goldberg’s work inspired the still-popular board game Mouse Trap and countless homages by amateur and professional engineers around the world, including this amazing, six-minute long, Japanese contest winner.
There’s no doubt about it, we enjoy the blatantly un-utilitarian, the brazenly inefficient. In his classic work, Understanding Comics, comics creator and media theorist Scott McCloud somewhat controversially defined “art” as any act not specifically needed for survival or reproduction, and he cannily made his point graphically, depicting one possible scenario of the birth of “art.” Whether or not that his tale of a prehistoric Bronx cheer is actually on the mark, the impulse behind it it is a gigantic part of what makes us human. Certainly, the manufacturers of spinners know how much money can be made from an entirely “useless” product.
And what right-thinking company would pay millions to have one of the world’s most famous, but also artistically unpredictable, filmmakers create a short-film length commercial where its product would figure for only a few seconds? Well, Spanish sparkling wine manufacturer Freixinet did just that, with this delightful, gorgeously designed, utterly useless mock-documentary/Alfred Hitchcock-homage directed by Martin Scorsese, which refers to the product only in one or two shots. “The Key to Riserva” has been circulating on the Internet for weeks on countless blogs (including this one, now) and has had countless writers, referring in passing to Freixinet’s product. Now, the commercial itself has been willingly seen and happily appreciated by very same same media savvy, often TiVo owning, consumers who ordinarily do whatever they can to avoid watching typical advertisements. Sometimes, you have to be do something wholly useless to be of any use at all.