Over the past 18 years, the launch of the John Lewis Christmas advert has established itself as a key point in the UK’s festive calendar, said Ed Davies in the FT. The ads are, of course, designed to be miniature weepies – to create a warm fuzzy feeling towards Britain’s favourite department store; but for many fathers of teenage boys (and some mothers too), this year’s has hit especially hard.
Shameless tearjerker
So yes, it’s a shameless tearjerker, but it also taps into an urgent national conversation about the crisis in boyhood, sparked in part by the TV drama “Adolescence”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
No one wants to see dad gurning
The masculinity crisis is not a very festive theme, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. And the whole ad is weirdly disturbing, said Simon Mills in The Times. When I went to acid house raves, the very last thing I’d have wanted to see, looming out of the darkness, is any kind of relation, from the present or the future.
Then there is the unspoken “recreational drugs connection”. For anyone who was part of that scene, “Where Love Lives” will bring back memories of being “absolutely wasted on E” during nights of woozy, loved-up hedonism – and of the agonising comedowns that followed them. This is not touching family fare: no one wants to see dad gurning. It’s very un-Christmassy.
I suppose the boy’s gift is a sign that he realises that his dad is a person, who has had a life of his own and has tastes equivalent to his, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. That is “a profound moment for a child”. And there is something reassuring in the obsolescent traditions the ad celebrates: going into a bricks and mortar shop, buying an actual object. But for Gen Z, this ad must look mind-bendingly anachronistic. What will John Lewis show us next year? A “farmer trading a goat for a sack of stubble turnips”?
-
Minnesota's legal system buckles under Trump's ICE surgeIN THE SPOTLIGHT Mass arrests and chaotic administration have pushed Twin Cities courts to the brink as lawyers and judges alike struggle to keep pace with ICE’s activity
-
Big-time money squabbles: the conflict over California’s proposed billionaire taxTalking Points Californians worth more than $1.1 billion would pay a one-time 5% tax
-
‘The West needs people’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – an ‘engrossing’ exhibitionThe Week Recommends All 126 images from the American photographer’s ‘influential’ photobook have come to the UK for the first time
-
American Psycho: a ‘hypnotic’ adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis classicThe Week Recommends Rupert Goold’s musical has ‘demonic razzle dazzle’ in spades
-
Properties of the week: houses near spectacular coastal walksThe Week Recommends Featuring homes in Cornwall, Devon and Northumberland
-
Melania: an ‘ice-cold’ documentaryTalking Point The film has played to largely empty cinemas, but it does have one fan
-
Nouvelle Vague: ‘a film of great passion’The Week Recommends Richard Linklater’s homage to the French New Wave
-
Wonder Man: a ‘rare morsel of actual substance’ in the Marvel UniverseThe Week Recommends A Marvel series that hasn’t much to do with superheroes
-
Is This Thing On? – Bradley Cooper’s ‘likeable and spirited’ romcomThe Week Recommends ‘Refreshingly informal’ film based on the life of British comedian John Bishop
-
A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars – history at its most ‘human’The Week Recommends Alwyn Turner’s ‘witty and wide-ranging’ account of the interwar years
