Squandrous

Remember that advert for Gears of War that was everywhere on television a few years ago? The one that featured Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World” as the score for the ad?

I do. It was my favorite advert on television for some time — and I don’t even play video games. Something about the juxtaposition of Jules’ melancholic sounds and the images of death and destruction in front of me made the ad disturbingly enthralling.

A few days ago, I found an article in Frieze Magazine that looks at why the creative team decided to pursue this approach in its marketing of the game, and whether or not it worked. From the article:

We learn from Sigmund Freud that the melancholic disposition is defined by severe self-reproachment. Significantly, however, the melancholic’s feelings of worthlessness originate not from within, but from the feeling that the object of their deepest love or reverence has fallen from grace. For Freud, the self-abandonment characteristic of the melancholic is really the ego’s identification with a formerly revered but now debased love object. For the soldier, then, melancholy is not the result of a heightened sensitivity to violence or a rejection of war as a concept, but is, rather, a reaction to the loss of the ideal of war as a righteous and purposeful activity bolstered by patriotic rhetoric and moral rectitude.

The piece is a little academic, but it’s also really short and does a good job of explaining why the dissonance between sound and images works well for this advertising campaign.