Don't Blame This Sleeping Satellite

Plenty of times I've complained about ads, particularly car ads, but this Audi "choose the moon" ad has me emotionally perplexed. The aging of the astronauts who walked on the moon is quite sad. There were twelve, and only seven are still alive. So it's nice to acknowledge that, even if it's being used to sell a $180,000 car.

On the one hand, it's a lazy "association" ad, where the message is that our cars are cool because - look, spaceships! It's not the first time I've even seen a decline-of-the-space-program connection in a car commercial. A few years ago, there was a Corvette ad built around the idea that America still builds rockets. But that just came out as depressing evidence of American decline. Oh, a Corvette, that's much better than going to the moon. (And just so you know, astronauts actually got special deals on Corvettes.)

But on the other hand, this ad does a good job of emotionally drawing you in with this sad story of the aging astronaut. It actually expresses the melancholic decline of the space program better that just about anything else I've seen. Perhaps it took a German company to pull it off, since they didn't need to wave the flag, and could just concentrate on telling one person's story, even if that person seemed to personify the country's fading away.

Even the use of David Bowie's "Starman" is unsettling. Is that a nice tribute to a recently departed hero, or an attempt to cash in before he's cold in his grave.

And the catch phrase, "Mr. President, thank you for choosing the moon" is an interesting way to tie the ad together. Though it's also rewriting history. The moon landings were famously triggered by JFK's challenge in 1961, but of course, he didn't live to see them happen. In fact, the president during all the moon landings - the one with his signature on the Apollo 11 plaque on the moon that will outlive our civilization - was his rival, Richard Nixon. So he was the one making the phone call to the moon depicted at the start of the ad. Many think it was quite a shame that during the real-life phone call, Kennedy's name never even came up. Really, he was the one who "chose the moon."

But now that I think about it, here's why the commercial seems particularly touching: The idea of an old man feeling sadly disconnected from his past glories shouldn't be a surprising concept. But for people my age, when we're trying to imagine the young man behind today's senior, it's to picture a man marching off to war.  So you might feel some sadness comparing his elderly self to his more active youthful self, but that is tempered by the fact that he's probably better off in his dull present day life than in the horrors of war. But this man has positive, proud exploits that he'd want to revisit. That's not how we're used to seeing it, just as we're not used to seeing an older person who has experienced technological marvels we'll never experience.