Three M&M commercials in a row and you feel like you have been transported back in time into the European Middle Ages, and in place of the M&M buttons you are looking at the "ambassadors" in the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Hans Holbein the younger's famous work of memento mori, The Ambassadors.
Memento Mori is an artistic or symbolical reminder of the inevitability of death. "The Ambassadors", for instance, has two wealthy and well-placed-in-society diplomats standing in a room, surrounded by emblems of worldly success.
There is also a skull floating like a spectre between the men, barely noticeable, but singular in its presence.
The skull interrupts the narrative of worldly life by showing it as impermanent. To exult of life in the face of death is to be vain.
The memento mori would have fitted in perfectly with the medieval zeitgeist with its fear of disease, war, and high mortality.
But the appearance of a memento mori motif in the M&M zeitgeist surprises me.
Literally, the buttons of colorful and delicious chocolates speak of their own "deaths" as it were, in a shockingly nonchalant way.
I am particularly struck by the sexy Ms. Brown's emotional appeal for insurance. She says she knows she is a "high risk" for insurance companies, yet...
Is this the advertiser's attempt to sadden us into eating M&M's?
I fear for the fate of Mr. Yellow, as he sits innocently in the trunk of a mafia's car, unaware that he will soon be meat.
Should M&M be renamed Memento and Mori, would we still eat them?
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