How The New Nike Ad Reflects (And Creates) Ourselves

Photo by: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx 2020 7/17/20 Businesses in Manhattan continue to reopen in phase 3 of … [+] the city’s plan to restart the economy during the coronavirus pandemic in New York City.

STRF/STAR MAX/IPx

Though I’ve never played half the sports in the new Nike ad, and can’t recognize but a handful of the cameo appearances of famous athletes, there’s something undeniably alluring about watching people pass seamlessly from split screen to split screen, again and again, as I’ve done. Perhaps it’s just that the illusion of these being separate frames gets threatened, if not ever entirely broken, and there’s a magic show quality to flitting between the suspension of disbelief and its reassertion—that can’t possibly be, but wait, maybe—that’s pleasurable. Perhaps it’s just an idle pleasure, in other words, like most viral videos (as this one approaches twenty million views on YouTube, in about as many hours) that hold our attention despite, or even because of, knowing better. That I’m an unthinking participant in the corporatization of hope during this pandemic, happy to oblige brands in selling my spirit on their product, can’t be ruled out. Maybe I’m just doing it.

Then again, maybe not: this particular ad, a 90s spot by Wieden + Kennedy, arguably deserves the attention it’s getting (and it’s getting a lot, with headlines like “Amazing” and “Marvel” and other rarely ad-applied superlatives), though less for the technical wizardry in the editing room than for what it stirs up inside of you. Because it’s one thing to pluck the proverbial heartstrings, get me to feel something that has me suddenly reaching for my wallet; it’s quite another to get me to feel something viscerally, like when the skateboarder whooshes by the upper rim of the bowl in a carving motion that sends ocean water spuming like surf, as surf. Suddenly I’m not so sure of the ground beneath my feet, as if fluid dynamics applied just as much on land as they do at sea, and I wonder if solids and liquids aren’t more interchangeable than I realize. I’m under the spell, in a word, of metaphor.

How I explain the concept of metaphor to my students is by way of Venn diagrams. I draw one: two circles overlapping, one with “Juliet” written inside and the other with “sun” (referencing the famous and ready-at-hand line from Romeo’s monologue). It’d be a mere simile, and thus a smaller area of overlap, if he used “like” or “as” to compare the two, but he used the verb to be. That’s pretty definitive: Juliet is, in almost every sense, the sun. I ask students what this means, what the implications are of sharing so many qualities with our nearest star. They arrive quickly at Juliet’s “warmth,” a somewhat obvious trait to map onto personhood from the celestial realm. It takes them a little while longer to find “life-sustaining,” and longer still, if ever, to reach “life-threatening.” Indeed, the sun—like Juliet, like any person—isn’t just one thing, and its many facets (not just the obvious ones, or the ones we like) all get superimposed in the direct comparison. That—and I’m about to make another one, comparing the above to the following, equating them—is metaphor.

The point I’m trying to make is that as the golfer in the ad snaps his club over his knee, snapping a baseball bat instead; as the rooftop tennis player launches a backhand over the gap between the apartments, only to land the shot in a kid’s living room, where he’s strung a little net wall-to-wall to play with a sponge ball; as LeBron James, star of the previous iteration in the “You Can’t Stop Us” series, passes the mic and his six-foot-nine-two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk into Megan Rapinoe’s slighter frame, at the end of their jinxed word, “responsibility”; as basketball mesh dissolves into clouds, and empty stands (hosed down by hazmat suits) into empty stands (hosed down by hazmat suits); as these and other pairings, comparisons, equations (thirty-six, all told) culled from some 4,000 clips interpermeate Black and white, able-bodied and not, burka-wearing and pride-coloring; as all this magically happens before our eyes, we begin to see not just the world as one, but the many worlds within ourselves as originating from, and returning to, the same place. And we don’t just see it, but feel it in our bones.

I wouldn’t be the first to observe this kind of identification with powerful imagery, where we don’t just see but actually enter into—as if in a dream—the image. Poets (Tenney Nathanson, a former teacher of mine, first among them) speak of so-called “kinetic identification,” where after having read Whitman, say, you can’t quite remember if you didn’t actually live the things he tends to rattle (that word again) off in lists:

Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock…

Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou…

…where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail…

Etc. (He’s prone to listing, like a book-length Nike ad.) The idea being that a Whitmanian project such as this slip-slides between images so much you feel parts each in the other, and in yourself, you never thought to be coextensive. We’re to take quite seriously, then, Nike’s asterisk over the word “athlete” in the YouTube description. “(*If you have a body, you are an athlete.)”