What would Jesus do? The answer is more debatable than you might expect, at least according to the highly polarized reactions to a controversial Super Bowl ad.
The “He Gets Us” ad campaign, in its second year running ads for the big game, has a simple goal, on the surface: It’s about getting Christians and non-Christians alike to think about how to love our neighbors, in the form of a quizzical message about washing feet. But how we should go about that — and whether it involves a $100 million marketing blitz — seems to be an incendiary topic, regardless of your position on the religious spectrum.
The ad, simply titled “Foot Washing,” depicts a variety of modern contexts, from immigrants exiting a bus to clashing protest groups, in which one person washes the feet of another. Why foot washing? Per the ad, it’s because “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.” While this is technically biblically true, as depicted in the commercial, this is a far weirder ethos even than it sounds on paper.
The group’s website explains that all the photos for the shoot were staged by photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten, whose work shares an affinity with the bizarre surrealism of AI-generated art. This ranges from the unnatural expressions on the faces of some of the subjects to the uncanny nature of the settings themselves.
For example, there’s “post-punk Riot Grrl having her feet washed in a crowded high school hallway by an anachronistic 1950s-era cheerleader.” There’s “confused pregnant woman getting her feet washed outside of a family planning clinic by a pissed-off looking anti-abortion protester.”
It ends with what I can only describe as “limp-wristed androgynous roller skater having their feet washed by a burly ex-con priest, against a thrilling beachside sunset.” All of this is set to an equally puzzling soundtrack, a cover of INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart”; at one point, the words “I was standing, you were…
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