Fizz in film: how Coca Colonised cinema

In-film advertising is a common thing these days – much too common (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display). But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film – however fleeting – can add layers to the narrative? Take the case of Coca-colonization, a term that links the world’s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism (and with enterprise, vitality, crassness and all the other supposedly American qualities that infuriate and fascinate people around the world).

Coca-Cola and cinema are roughly the same age (the drink was first bottled in 1894, a year that also saw the first copyrighted American film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and they have had many pleasing meetings over the past century. Once in a while, Coke has been central to a film’s plot – Billy Wilder’s One Two Three has an executive trying to get the drink into the Russian market during the Cold War years – but more often it has made humorous cameo appearances, as in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! where a bed-ridden German woman, unaware of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is startled by an enormous Coca-Cola banner outside her window.

In movies by directors as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Frank Capra, Coke has been used to denounce or celebrate aspects of Americana. Sometimes both things have been done in the same sequence: in I am Cuba (which I wrote about here), a distraught farmer sets fire to his crop when he learns that his land is being sold to capitalists; but simultaneously, in a joyous scene set at a nearby bar, we see his children drinking Coca-Cola and dancing at a jukebox playing rock music.

A lovely early sequence in the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death takes place in a black-and-white Heaven where deceased soldiers from battlefields everywhere (rugged Sikhs and excitable Frenchmen among them) are just arriving. When a group of Americans burst in, the background music becomes loud and strident, almost as in a radio commercial. The soldiers survey this strange new place, then point excitedly at something; the camera draws back to reveal a Coke machine, and the Yanks are feeling right at home again.



In a film that is largely about the differences between the English and the Americans (and the need to come together for a common cause during WWII), this good-natured but wary scene suggests the ambivalent attitude of the former Empire to the brash young country that was about to become the next superpower. ("Officer's quarters, of course," says one of the armymen, Coke bottle still in hand, to Heaven's receptionist. "We're all the same up here, Captain," she replies stiffly.)

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I confess to not having seen the 1950s Hindi film Miss Coca Cola, but the oldest instance I know of the use of Coke branding in a non-English-language movie is in the Ozu classic Late Spring (made in 1949, which was coincidentally the year Coca-Cola came to India for the first time). It’s just a two-second shot – as the heroine Noriko cycles with a male friend, we see a Coke ad in the foreground – but a notable one in a movie made just a few years after the war, and by a director who was known for calmly observing his society’s gradual shifts toward a more westernised way of life. (Here is a post about another later Ozu film Good Morning, in which television comes to Japan in the 1950s.)


My favourite cinematic Coke moments though are the ones that align comedy to subtle social observation. In the uproarious The Gods Must be Crazy, Kalahari bushmen discover an empty Coca-Cola bottle that introduces them to the concept of personal property; when this ferments feelings of envy and possessiveness, they decide that the ghastly object must be chucked off the edge of the world. But an equally funny – and more caustic – reference to Coke as a symbol of the Capitalist Way came in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. With the nuclear destruction of the world looming, a British group captain named Mandrake must get a crucial code across to the US president. He needs loose change for the phone booth, so he asks an American colonel, Guano, to destroy a nearby Coca-Cola machine and get a few coins out.

“That’s private property,” Guano bristles, “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!”

The words are said with such reverence that there’s no missing the point: even at a time like this, corporate profit gets right of way. And when the Coke machine is eventually shot open, it’s almost like an apocalyptic prefiguring – because not long after this, the film ends with the planet blowing up. What we thought was just a fizzy drink turned out to be a cornerstone of our civilisation.

[If you remember any other notable Coke scenes in movies, please share them here]

Mix and match: fragmented women in Mean Streets and Contempt

This is part of an occasional series I'll be doing about little connections between films – scenes that echo each other in some way, even if it's a couple of fleeting shots that may have been conceived as a tribute (and even if it's all only in my head!). Apologies if this sounds film-schoolish – that isn't the intention. Just being self-indulgent really, and sharing an aspect of movie-watching that I personally find rewarding.

There’s a playful scene in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, which reminded me of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. (As mentioned in this post, Scorsese admits to being a big fan of Godard's movie.) The Contempt sequence, quite a famous one, has a nude Brigitte Bardot lying on her stomach – she plays Camille, the wife of the film's protagonist Paul, and they are in bed together. As they talk, she asks him to look at various parts of her body and assess them. “Do you like my ankles? My knees?” “What do you think of my behind?”

The back-story is that Godard was instructed by his producer to include a few nude shots of Bardot (what's the point of having Bardot in your film if she's covered up?) – something he was reluctant to do because it was such an obvious sop for the mass audience. Eventually, he retained some of his integrity by coming up with a scene where the sex symbol deconstructs herself (or her screen image) by explicitly drawing the viewer’s attention to parts of her body. The idea was to de-eroticise Bardot, though I'm not really sure that happened: I think the scene is still quite sexy in its own way, partly because of how it suggests the relaxed intimacy between a married couple who are very familiar with each other's bodies – it just isn't sexy in the way that more typical Brigitte Bardot films tended to be.

Now for a scene in Mean Streets, made a decade later. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is in a post-coital moment with Teresa (Amy Robinson). They banter, he gets defensive about something, she gets annoyed, jumps out of bed and stands at the window naked. They fool around some more, and Scorsese fools around too; when Charlie forms a gun with his hands, points it at Teresa and pulls the “trigger”, we hear a real gunshot on the soundtrack.


Then she starts to get dressed and tells him not to look. Charlie obeys, but after putting his fingers over his eyes he splays them so he can see her. He moves the hand covering his right eye from a vertical to a horizontal position and spreads his fingers out again – it's like a film’s clapboard opening and closing. Effectively, he's changing the angles, like a camera shifting perspective. (It reminds me of Godard's use of colour filters while photographing Bardot in that scene in Contempt.)

Finally there comes a moment where Charlie, still looking through his fingers, contemplates Teresa's bare bottom (partly covered by her shirt) from an unusual side-angle – there's nothing erotic about this image, in fact it's faintly ridiculous, and Charlie can't stop himself from giggling at the sight.

But the undercurrent to this lighthearted scene is that Charlie knows he’ll never be able to marry Teresa (his family has warned him not to get involved with her, and he’s an obedient, partly repressed Catholic boy). Being aware of the barrier between them, he keeps trying to distance himself from this girl. In this scene, I think the detachment takes the form of his “fragmenting” Teresa, so that he can view her as a set of dissociated parts rather than as a whole woman, a person with feelings. And it’s typical of Scorsese that he pays homage to a favourite film in such a way that he enriches his own movie in the process. There’s nothing gimmicky or derivative about this scene – it’s an echo, but it works perfectly well on its own terms.

Two or three things I love about Godard's Weekend

The very mention of Jean-Luc Godard can send shivers down the spine of a middlebrow movie buff – or a highbrow movie buff for that matter. He stirs up some very extreme reactions. Students of cinema (self-taught or institute-taught) learn early on that Godard occupies a hugely important place in film history but that it may not be possible to learn much of practical value from him. In an astute piece written in 1968, Pauline Kael compared the stature of the then 37-year-old director to a stature that James Joyce had reached in literature at a much later age:

He has paralysed other filmmakers by shaking their confidence (as Joyce did to writers), without ever reaching a large public...it’s possible to hate half or two-thirds of what Godard does – or find it incomprehensible – and still be shattered by his brilliance...

...Again, like Joyce, he seems to be a great but terminal figure. The most gifted younger directors and student filmmakers all over the world recognize his liberation of the movies; they know he has opened up a new kind of movie-making, that he has brought a new sensibility into film. But when they try to follow him they can’t beat him at his own game, and they can’t take what he has done into something else...he has already made the best use of his innovations, which come out of his need for them and may be integral only to his own material.

It’s common to find people having strong “opinions” about Godard without having seen much of his work. (“He’s too gimmicky and pretentious,” someone told me once. Later I learnt that this person’s only firsthand knowledge of a Godard film was of the first 20 minutes of Alphaville.) Viewers who believe content should take precedence over form (or that form should be as invisible and functional as possible) don’t have much time for him. And even among those who are more open-minded about cinematic experimentation, there’s a perception that Godard is a director to be admired from a distance rather than to be enjoyed. After all, even the descriptions or short synopses of his films can be intimidating.

I was thinking about all this while watching my DVD of Weekend, Godard’s superb 1967 movie about an unpleasant Parisian couple on an increasingly bizarre road-trip. Certain words or phrases repeatedly crop up in descriptions of this film: “apocalyptic vision”, “the end of civilisation”, “bourgeoisie greed”, “consumerist society” among them. Its reputation as a very political, radical work can scare away potential viewers, which is a pity – because though Weekend IS self-conscious and self-referential (its protagonists remark that they are “just imaginary people” in a movie, and one of its many playful “inter-titles” describes it as “a film discovered in a garbage dump”), it’s also outrageously funny if you have a taste for dark, grisly, absurdist humour. I rate it among the most eye-poppingly entertaining movies I’ve seen.

For one thing, it’s full of surrealist setpieces that are reminiscent of Luis Bunuel’s late films (including a sequence that explicitly pays tribute to The Exterminating Angel). There are great moments involving a herd of sheep and an Alice in Wonderland figure (or is it Emily Bronte?) who cries as she is set afire. As the film progresses, its imagery (highways littered with destroyed cars, cannibalistic hippies who play drum solos and crack open eggs with giant saws) gets more and more outlandish, but on a poetic level it makes perfect sense. Besides, is it really so exaggerated? The scenes where rich people turn savage over the most minor car accidents, attacking each other with tennis balls(!), spray paint and then shotguns, won't seem particularly strange to anyone who's witnessed road rage in Delhi.

I have too many favourite scenes to mention here but one is the extraordinary early sequence where Corinne (Mirielle Darc) talks about a ménage-a-trois she participated in. It’s a long monologue and it has all the trappings of a really erotic scene (an attractive young woman lounging about in her underwear, detailing a sexual tryst in explicit language), but it’s made deliberately sterile, even off-putting, by the flatness of Corinne’s voice, the repugnance of some of the acts she describes, and Godard’s on-again, off-again use of Antoine Duhamel’s ominous music score makes it even more unsettling. It reminded me of a famous sequence in an earlier Godard film, the wonderful Contempt, where a nude Brigitte Bardot sprawled out on a bed effectively deconstructs herself by drawing her husband’s (and the viewer’s) attention to various parts of her body in turn. In both cases, there’s the director taking a scenario that should by rights be stimulating and instead turning it into something that discomfits the viewer.

Weekend is usually described as a “political film”, but I see it as a work of pure nihilism, not a vehicle for any sort of ideology. In one scene, a character flags down a passing car for a ride and a middle-aged woman rolls down the passenger-seat window. “Would you rather be screwed by Mao or [Lyndon] Johnson?” she asks. “Johnson, of course,” the hitch-hiker replies. “Drive on,” she tells her chauffeur, “he’s a fascist.” But the impression one gets is that if he’d answered Mao, she would have said the same thing and driven on anyway. Then there’s the magnificent, hyper-politicised exchange of words between a rich young woman and a tractor-driving peasant after a crash between their vehicles kills the woman’s boyfriend. “You can’t bear us having money while you don’t!” she screams at the lower-class man, “You can’t bear us screwing on the Riviera, screwing at ski-resorts.” If you miss the humour of this scene, you'll think it's wordy and didactic (hence "political") - but the very absurdity of the conversation and the way it's intercut with shots of people looking on vacuously makes it easier to see it as a cosmic joke. Besides, this “class struggle” (as the inter-title calls it) ends with the unlikeliest of reconciliations, which makes nonsense of what has gone before it, and suggests that human actions are determined not by long-lasting principles but purely by the convenience of any given moment.

“The power of text”

My Weekend DVD has a video introduction by director Mike Figgis. Wanted to share this bit – his view on Godard’s unconventional use of inter-titles:

People say of a Bob Dylan song “Well, the lyrics were amazing.” And I go “Oh, I never really thought about the lyrics – but it’s such a lovely song, and the lyrics seem appropriate for this song.” But many people seem to have this idea that you either listen to the music or you listen to the words. And one of the problems some viewers have with Godard is that he uses text in his films in a very deliberate way – he uses provocative statements that sometimes don’t seem to make much sense. But I see it differently: I think it’s almost as if, in the flow of the film, he suddenly thinks it would be a good idea to cut to black, with some red letters flashing on the screen. Then he asks himself “What would the red letters be? Oh, they could be this...” and he thinks of something very quickly that fits in organically with the flow of the film.


And as a viewer I’ve always agreed with his decisions: I’ve never had a problem with why those words are appearing at that particular time. And often the text is accompanied by a sound, which also makes sense. To me, he’s a complete filmmaker who’s thinking with all of his senses. He doesn’t bias himself towards the visual, which is something most filmmakers do. Godard is one of the few artists in cinema who has understood the power of text. Text engages a different part of the brain from sound – if someone says something and you listen to it, intellectually you’ll engage with it in a certain way; but if you repeat those words as written text on the screen, with music underneath it, a different part of the brain will engage in a different way, and you’ll end up with a different result.


So I think it can be a mistake to ask the question “What does that literally mean?” – the question should be “Does that feel correct to you?” Does it make sense that he went into that mode at that particular point in the scene, and for me the answer has always been yes. Godard has forced me to think about the way in which sound and text and camera movement can be used together to make a film.

It think it's interesting that Figgis makes the Dylan analogy, because the question "Does that feel correct to you?" (as opposed to "What does it mean exactly?") is the right one to ask of some of the great abstract Dylan songs from his "electric" phase in 1965-66 - songs like "Visions of Johanna", "Tombstone Blues", "I Want You", "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again".