The John Lewis ad: touching, or just weird?

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

Set in a middle-class home, the ad is about a man who finds under the tree a last unopened gift, from his silent, headphone-wearing son. It is a vinyl copy of Alison Limerick’s 1990 club hit “Where Love Lives”, and it transports dad back to a 1990s rave, said The Guardian; the pace then changes and dad, now alone in a dark space, sees his son as a toddler and a baby. We then return to their home for a hug – and the tagline “If you can’t find the words, find the gift”.

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”.

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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”?