NatWest’s “The House That Built Jack” hits a high watermark for inane, title-first marketing drivel, especially for an ad about the heady thrill of mortgage appraisals. It’s appropriate, then – given the hollow sentiments and forehead-crumpling narrative – that its title is also a bastardisation of a phrase meaning “shoddy workmanship”.
The Jack in question is a jocular, gittish child with a taste for EDM lab-wear, snail-stroking (no euphemism), and – with his flamboyant feather headdress and tepee – flagrant misappropriation of Native American culture. He lives, seemingly alone, in a faceless commuter-belt pile with a huge kitchen. Jack’s mum and dad, you see, used to live a life of bleak celibacy with his grandparents, in a house trussed up as an all-beige Magic Eye. Sick with lust, they convinced a bank teller to sign off an unmanageable loan, with which they purchase a building to bone in. And bone they did! Cue pregnant bliss, floral dresses and all those other signifiers of dignified domesticity.
But look closer: there’s something macabre afoot. Precocious child rattling around an empty house? Check. Pictorial tokens of happier times? Got it. Zero actual engagement when mother floats into view? You bet. If M Night Shyamalan taught us anything about kids, it’s how to spot a dead one. “I like it here,” Jack insists, coldly shattering the fourth wall, as if suburban purgatory was all he ever wanted from life (or, perhaps, death?). Given the state of the housing market, it’s a smart allegory on NatWest’s part. The sick bastards.
