Almost exactly a year ago, Bennett Miller picked up the best director prize at the Cannes film festival for Foxcatcher, his acclaimed drama starring Steve Carell as eccentric philanthropist John DuPont. The film went on to be nominated for five Oscars, and took the Independent Spirit Award for best ensemble cast.
And now Miller is back with his latest work: a series of three loo paper ads for upscale US bog roll brand Quilted Northern. The adverts operate within the same unsettling domestic territory as Foxcatcher, presenting an apparently banal everyday which is actually filled with fear and torture.
We’re introduced to three bathroom knick-knacks: Daddy Gator, Little Miss Puffytail and Great Grandpa Thaddeus, all of whom long for an end to the horrors they must witness, with an unrelieved view of the toilet. Their trauma is compared to the blissful ignorance of the loo-users, whose choice of paper guarantees they’ll forget the whole experience speedily.
The child’s-toy-bearing-silent-witness-to-mundane-human-depravity motif was used to impressive effect in the story Elf on the Shelf from Simon Rich’s 2014 collection, Spoiled Brats. In that, an elf must watch as the child Santa has sent him to assess for present-eligibility behaves in the most depraved ways imaginable.
Miller’s role in the adverts was first flagged up by the Hollywood Reporter.
