Andy Warhol’s Meta and Morbid Message Haunted the Super Bowl Ads

A man walks to an old farmhouse, his hands grazing stalks of grass, in a primal American image: something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting, or Days of Heaven. He’s greeted by his grandpa, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. Inside the house sits a beautiful car. Is this real life? No, it is the hallucination of an office worker with a cashew blocking his airway. A colleague Heimlichs him back to reality, and he appears bummed to discover that he is not, in fact, dead.

This was of announcing that it would electrify its cars by 2025, part of a Super Bowl ad class that—seemed somewhat on pause, perhaps with the blowback to too fresh. What instead emerged was a lurid, almost putrid sensibility, culminating in the eerie resurrection of Andy Warhol smearing ketchup on a soggy hamburger bun. , murderous nuts, flying reptiles barbecuing a barbecue: The end will be nasty, and it will not be in your control.