Are Parents Too Close To Their Children?

A Question Inspired by the New John Lewis Christmas Ad

Catch-up service:
Postcard From Venice
5 AI Failure Modes Shared By Humans
Why Are LLMs fixated on the number 7?
The Emperor’s New Diplomacy
Podcast: Jemima Kelly on the radical right
Successful Politicians Are Pattern-Breakers

---

Three housekeeping points before we begin:

1. As previously mentioned, my choir is singing in this concert, coming up next week. It’s going to be a wonderful evening. Tickets available here.

   

2. On November 27th I will be talking John & Paul at one of the greatest bookshops in the world: Shakespeare and Company in Paris. It’s free to attend. Come and say hello. I’ll be spending most of that week in Paris if anyone would like to meet for coffee.

3. I’m in today’s Guardian, reviewing the new book about Wings.
   
   Oh and read this week’s newsletter online if you can, it’s ‘too long for email’. Click on title.

---

Are Parents Too Close To Their Children?

Every year in Britain we mark the beginning of the festive season by watching the John Lewis Christmas ad and giving it a thumbs up or down. Readers from overseas may be unaware of this ancient ritual, said to be rooted in pre-Roman times, but it’s an important part of our national identity. Having said that, the tradition is not as vital as it once was. Fewer people are attending services at John Lewis stores, or gathering around the TV to pray.

If you’d like to view this year’s offering, which came out this week, you can watch it here. I have mixed feelings about it, but it clears a bar that most ads fail: it’s interesting. It is as, as the semioticians say, a rich text, which communicates both less and more than it intends to, about both John Lewis, and Britain.

A quick précis. The story begins in a home on Christmas Day, just after the presents have been exchanged (a bold creative decision in itself, for a festive ad). As the family clears up the father discovers an unopened present addressed to him. It’s from his teenage son, who is wearing headphones and watching his dad, tensely, while pretending not to. The present turns out to be an LP of nineties house - the kind of music Dad danced to in his twenties. Cue flashbacks to the dad, as he is now, but back in a nightclub, having it large.

In this dream state, Dad catches the eye of his son across the dance floor, which now empties, in a nightmarish way. At which point the film delivers its emotional coup de grâce, showing the gangly teenager as the little boy and baby he once was, full of uncomplicated love for his daddy. Back in the house, father and son face each other, struggling to rediscover that connection. Dad reaches out, they hug, and all tension disappears amidst laughter at dad’s dad-dancing.

I mean, it’s a lot. Possibly too much. When Dad finds himself alone in darkness on the dancefloor, he’s contemplating his lost youth and mourning his son’s childhood and feeling anxious about their inability to communicate. Then suddenly everything’s OK. The pacing is awkward, verging on clumsy. I admire the ambition, but to my mind the ad’s makers do not successfully compress everything they are trying to say into its two minutes, and the result is a jerky, oddly mechanical narrative which left me feeling manipulated rather than moved.¹

I should say that I’m probably in a minority here. Viewers seem to have given this ad a thumbs up. It has reduced plenty of parents to tears; even my flinty heart melted a little at the sequence with the little boy. But for me, the ad is most interesting as an index of what middle-class parents are worrying about - that is, whether they’re close enough to their teenage children, sons in particular. The ad is full of anxiety about this, but its anxiety is misplaced. In fact, it gets things precisely the wrong way around.

After the jump, the rest of this piece, plus my thoughts what we can and can’t learn from Mamdani, plus a gloriously eclectic Rattle Bag of insights into Ukraine, Milei, Western parenting, AI creativity, job proposals, John Le Carrè, plus an absolute masterpiece of copywriting that will make you cry.

Honestly, if you haven’t yet taken out a paid sub this is the time to at least trial it. There’s so much great stuff to dive into here.