James Dean Lives

THANK GOD!

For a while I was beginning to worry that resurrecting dead celebrities for use in whoring goods and services was a dead art. Thank you Allan Gray for reminding us that this particular brand of creepiness still thrives in the ad game.



Actually, this is not so creepy. There are excellent production values, and it's easy to see the team has really tried to be true to the construct of "if James Dean had lived, what might he have accomplished?"

I know we love to romanticize James Dean, but I just find it hard to believe that had Dean lived to be an older man, he would have looked exactly the same as he looked as a 24 year old, except with white hair. A skinny dude with an unlined face and a big shock of white hair.

Who's to say that an aging James Dean wouldn't have been paunchy and balding? Maybe he would have taken a page from the Sean Connery book...



Sean's thickened a bit and the hair is gone, but I think the consensus is that he's still an attractive man. No reason Dean might not have aged the same way, right?

In Giant, Dean ages about 40 years or so, from a youthful ranch hand to an alcoholic playboy who's done his share of hard living



No Stan Winston or Rick Baker prosthetic miracles here. He looks like a kid made up for Halloween, but then so do Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in the same film. I guess back in the day you didn't want to make the star talent look too aged. The studios deified these stars, and the public came to worship at that altar. And who wants to worship a broken down old god?

But at least he looks somewhat older, there are some years on his face, some bags under the eyes. Then again that may simply be Dean, the actor, living the part.

Regardless, it's 2009, a different era. We're savvy enough to understand the commercial , even if they'd chosen to put some mileage on Mr. Dean. Perhaps given us a little more to think about.

By the way, if you're going to flat out steal a shot from a film, I guess you might as well steal it from a good film, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, right?



But, at the end of the day, the Allan Gray spot is still pretty good. I think that's because the team chose to cast an actor rather than create a digital Frankenstein of movie outtakes and bits of newsreel footage, held together by hours of digital manipulation.

And they resisted the urge to go for the big music. Instead, a lone piano picks out a melody, sweet and sad at the same time.

This, however, is frickin' creepy.