1) This is the new Mercedes-Benz winter commercial. Set to a cover of Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love,” it depicts a lovestruck boy overcoming snowy conditions to go on a date with his sweetie at a local movie theater, with the kicker being that both of them were able to make it because their parents’ cars had the four-wheel drive necessary to traverse the slick conditions. It is a sweet little story about teenage and parental love, and it ends with the kid staring at his crush in the parking lot with that look of nerves and excitement that is instantly relatable to anyone who went on a date as a teenager.
2) I hate these kids so much.
3) The characters, I mean. Not the actual kids who play them. I’m sure they’re very nice and I wish them the best in their careers and in life, in general. This is a Pete Campbell situation, where I have no personal animosity toward Vincent Kartheiser, but I devoted hundreds of words to fantasies about his character on Mad Men getting eaten by a bear. I realize and respect that this is not normal. I’m okay with it.
4) Here’s my reasoning: While this is very much the commercial I described in Point Number One, it is also a commercial about two spoiled children overcoming, like, three inches of snow to make out during an empty showing of Jack Reacher: Never Look Back or whatever, thanks entirely to their absurdly wealthy parents driving them there. How truly inspirational and heartwarming.
5) Quick note: I went with Jack Reacher for the movie they’re seeing both because that’s the funniest movie I can picture them watching after this sweet little commercial, and because I’m getting a great deal of joy thinking about that girl’s annoyed face when the boy starts ignoring her halfway through the movie so he can watch violent depictions of bad guys getting murdered, as teenage boys have been doing since the dawn of movies and/or violent murder.
6) The best is that the dad clearly wants no part of driving his kid to this movie, considering his only lines of dialogue in the whole thing are a scoffing “Did you look outside?” while standing in his living room and a cranky “Sure is coming down…” as he is speeding through town. He and his wife are definitely going to have an argument about this in the two hours between this commercial ending and him driving back to pick the kid up in even worse conditions after the movie. I mean, just look at the look he shoots her after she whispers “Take him.” This is not a happy man.
7) Hey, here’s a thought: Maybe instead of forcing your dad to drive you to a movie theater through a snowstorm in the hope that your date will show (and please do imagine this dad’s face in a scenario where the kid makes him wait in the parking lot for 45 minutes before they realize the girl isn’t coming), why don’t you send her a text, my dude? Not to be Johnny Pokes-Holes-In-The-Logic-Of-Commercials here, but the entire emotional weight of this thing rests on little man not firing off a single “where u at im here” text to her when he gets there, or a “u on the way” from the car instead of issuing blind declarations of faith while staring out into the night sky like Fievel from An American Tail. I’m half-shocked he didn’t break into song.
8) There’s another possibility here, though: He did text her and she never replied to him, and he’s running around the theater in a frantic attempt to find her because he’s terrified that she got in a horrible accident in the storm and is like maimed in a ditch or something. This changes the commercial a whole lot, because it means that look he gives her at the end is less “Oh good, you’re here” than it is “Thank God, you’re alive!” Good luck getting this vision out of your head for the 500 times this ad runs between now and spring! You’re welcome!
9) There should be a follow-up to this commercial about a movie theater employee who had to come to work in these conditions because she’s putting herself through community college and can’t afford to miss a shift, and it should end with a split-screen where one half is her getting stuck in the snow on a scary road in the woods because her 1994 Tercel with bald tires and no working heat slid during a turn on her way home and crashed into a snow bank, and the other half of the screen is the boy in this commercial graduating from Princeton with a 2.3 GPA 10 years in the future and walking straight into a six-figure job at his father’s company.
Screw this kid.