Apple’s HomePod, the digital assistant set to arrive rather late to a market dominated by Amazon Echo and Google Assistant, has been given a much-needed publicity boost by a surreal advertisement with a somewhat sinister undertone (watch it here).
Apple has always liked to distinguish itself as the “cool” tech giant - their iPhones aren’t simply grey, they’re “space grey.” Sometimes this approach works, and sometimes it feels as misplaced as an unwanted U2 album forcefully inserted into your iTunes library.
Thankfully, the HomePod ad is really good, entertaining enough to be a short film, or a music video - though I’m not sure that it sells the concept of a digital assistant particularly well. Spike Jonze, visionary director of Her, which tells the sci-fi story of love between a man and his digital assistant, seems the perfect choice to sell us on the idea of placing an ever-listening AI in our homes.
Jonze’s commercial is engaging and beautifully shot, featuring the talented singer-songwriter FKA Twigs. We see the unhappy Twigs navigating her rain-soaked, overcrowded city, finally finding refuge at home, where she asks Siri to play her something she’d like.
Once the music begins to play, Twigs begins to mess with the fabric of reality, pushing and stretching segments of her apartment at will, expanding her little living space into a vividly-colored dance studio. It’s a nice visual representation of the freedom that a digital assistant will supposedly bring to you.
But things get a bit creepy when she carves a corridor into her wall and discovers a tiny mirror. She tries pushing the mirror away, but it stubbornly retracts - she can’t ignore it. It’s as annoyingly persistent as an iPhone, insisting that you install the latest software update.
So she dances in front of her reflection, and is then tempted to enter the world inside the mirror. But through the looking glass is a small, shadowy room, and her reflection, rather unsettlingly, has a will of her own. They dance together, before Twigs saunters off toward a sofa to wake from her dream - she looks back at her reflection, who remains standing in the shadows, unable to follow her, her facial expression unreadable.
Is this a physical representation of Siri? A warped reflection of the HomePod user, forever imprisoned inside a dark metal box, enviously observing us? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Or watching too many episodes of Black Mirror.
But there’s an undeniably sinister tone to the fantasy, and when Twigs wakes up, back in her bland reality, her HomePod is sitting there, waiting for her. There’s something oddly depressing about that.
It’s as if the advert is highlighting how alone poor Twigs is, the cold, metal HomePod her only companion. And with a lingering close-up of the steel cylinder, the advert ends, leaving us unsure of what to think.
Should we buy one of those things, and succumb to a crushingly lonely life, devoid of human companionship, where the only one who truly understands you is your Apple speaker, who can play you the perfect song on a rainy day, carefully calculated by an algorithm?
Hmmm. That’s what happens when you hire Spike Jonze to direct your ad - things get a little too deep for comfort.
