The 4 Most Horrifying Recent Commercials

4 DirecTV: An Unseen God Physically Controls a Family

We know of only one family in the world of DirecTV's new ad campaign promoting their wireless receiver box -- a husband and a wife and their son. The husband is no different from the rest of us. He has that everyman quality commercials love. His wife and son are nightmares that jitter around on wires, oblivious to how uncoordinated they are.

Their wires trail up through the ceiling of their home, presumably phasing through solid matter and into the sky. They're marionettes, so the only logical conclusion in this hallucination of a world is this: The wife and son's every action, and possibly every word they speak, is being controlled by an unseen god.

It's hard to tell how far this implication reaches beyond the walls of the family's home, but I've got some ideas:

1) The husband is being toyed with by a childish god. His life is like The Truman Show meets Team America. If this is the case, if this unseen god is messing with this guy for its own amusement, it's doing a shitty job of it. The husband seems happy. He cares for his puppet wife and son. When doubt of his love creeps in after he complains about the "ugly wires" of the receiver box, he quells their fears as a loving father would. When his human friend seems put off by his puppet wife, he defends her:

He's a great guy who doesn't seem to be aware that he's ruining a petulant god's fun time.

2) We're seeing a world long after everyone has gotten over the fact that a huge segment of the population had been taken over and controlled by an unseen master. They don't even question it. It just is (although some are just as uncomfortable around people who are different in this world as they are in ours). The guy's friend is put off by the presence of the marionette wife. Some still aren't used to it, and maybe harbor some hatred toward wired folk.

I like the second option, because it implies that the wired folk can potentially have their strings cut, revert back to their human form, and regain their free will. But it also implies that when the puppet wife dances to sexually entice her husband ...

... she's being forced to do that, just as she's been forced to have sex with him for years and bear his child.

Christ. If the fact that people were turned into marionettes by an unseen force is common knowledge, what does that say about the husband?

3 State Farm: All Insurance Companies Are Run by Genies

Whenever someone has damage to be claimed, they summon a State Farm agent to their exact location by singing the famous State Farm jingle: "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." Poof!

Speak the words and they shall appear, like the Candy Man or Beetlejuice, if those guys assessed damage instead of causing it. Clearly, in this commercial universe, State Farm representatives are magical. But it's their more impressive second power that lets us know exactly what they are. This one's the best example:

One of the guys in the apartment summons a sandwich. The friends then test the limits of the agent's powers by summoning a pretty girl from a nearby apartment, and then a hot tub. There's absolutely nothing State Farm agents can be other than genies, or jinn, if you want to be specific. Simply by being a State Farm customer, you are allowed to make what seems like unlimited wishes as long as you need to make an insurance claim. That's an incentive so good, you'd think State Farm would be a monopoly. They've got an army of genies in Brooks Brothers suits who will give you anything you want, on top of making sure you get money to cover damages. Yet there are other insurance companies out there:

When the guy without State Farm tries to summon his insurance agent, he gets his elderly mother instead. The other companies are magic-based like State Farm, but their genies are pathetic. They're the underachieving genies who couldn't get out of a lamp even if it was rubbed.

The best genies in the world -- the ones who will be by your side in a flash and give you exactly what you need/want -- banded together for some ridiculous, very dull reason to start an insurance company. All other insurance companies struggling to retain market share had to scramble to find genies of their own to compete. All they found were a bunch of genie college dropouts who don't give half a fuck about their jobs. The pay probably sucks, the hours are pathetic, and the genies will never be able to summon sandwiches, hot chicks, or hot tubs. When their brains pick up on a customer requesting to find them ways to save money, they respond: "Oh, you want me to find you more money? Here's an old guy teasing you with a dollar!"

Before picking up their bong, they shout into the receiver of their brain phone, "Get a job, bitch. What am I, a fucking genie? Well, I am, but ... whatever."

2 Miracle Whip: The Preferred White Sandwich Goop of Dangerous People

In the parallel Earth presented in Miracle Whip commercials, eating some of their white sandwich goop is like being the guy on the motorcycle on Meat Loaf album covers.

Miracle Whip is the marginally different mayonnaise alternative of rebels -- rebels like the lady who made deviled eggs with Miracle Whip and had the balls to march them goop-filled brunch snacks right up to a preacher, turning heads and causing a scandal:

There's the woman who pulls Miracle Whip out of the back seat of her car and marches to a tailgate party, like she's toting a shotgun and seeking revenge:

In this world, Miracle Whip is more than a thing you accidentally buy when you're trying to buy mayo -- it's a symbol of the counterculture. People stare in terrified awe of someone holding a jar of Miracle Whip. They're dangerously unpredictable rebel/renegade loose cannons with a death wish and nothing to lose. Anyone in possession of Miracle Whip is the Punisher.

The trend had to have started somewhere. So in the history of this alternate America, there had to have been a counterculture icon that proudly, unabashedly ate Miracle Whip. It could have been Hunter S. Thompson bringing Miracle Whip along during his infamous trip to Las Vegas, or maybe Allen Ginsberg and the rest of the beat poets sipped Miracle Whip in New York beatnik coffeehouses. Whoever it was, someone converted a sandwich spread into something to fear, and not because of salmonella.

Miracle Whip can also be a kind of secret handshake among those in the know:

Here, Miracle Whip is saying their product is a challenge. The cook plops the goop into some coleslaw and stares down the bearded guy. Bearded guy accepts the challenge and ups the ante -- he puts that coleslaw inside the burger. The cook is impressed. Bearded guy isn't just a poseur -- he's one of us. It's like when two guys with cuts and bruises on their faces slightly nod, acknowledging each other as members of the fight club. It's not like he made him eat a ghost chili pepper or something truly challenging. I guess people in this world are so goddamn bland that, to them, Miracle Whip is fucking exhilarating.

1 M&M'S: A Candy Genocide

They speak, they walk, they think, they feel, they have sass -- the anthropomorphic M&M'S are everything just short of human. Maybe they're the next stage of human evolution? Maybe they're the product of a ghastly scientific experiment? The only thing I know is that Earth has candy-people walking on it, and humans can barely contain their insatiable lust for their chocolaty people-meat. They live among us. They walk our streets. We are friendly to them. But humanity is killing them off in large numbers. It's genocide. We kidnap M&M-persons, imprison them illegally, and then gorge on their flesh, as seen here:

Under the cloak of darkness, the shady global elite kidnaps them, chops them to pieces, and consumes their flesh at lavish gatherings:

All the M&M'S want is to be loved and cared for and appreciated and accepted like any other human. They want everything shown in the first 30 seconds of this ad ...

... but everything in the second half of the video is their disturbing reality. Imagine if some psycho tried to eat you every single day, and the only thing they'd feel guilty about afterward is how they cheated on their diet. It's no wonder that, at the 47-second mark of the video, the red M&M is shell-shocked and curled into the fetal position, repeating the words "Happy thoughts happy thoughts happy thoughts happy thoughts." The slogan at the end of that ad, "Chocolate's better with M," reveals that "M" stands for "murder."

There seems to be an undiscussed understanding that while M&M'S are basically humans with a candy-coated shell, they don't have the same rights as humans. In this commercial, the brown female M&M tries to get life insurance but is rejected by the Geico gecko:

That lizard son of a bitch reasons that she's "a delicious piece of chocolate," and that "Geico only insures humans." This means the Geico gecko isn't on the company health plan and has been brainwashed by his corporate overlords into thinking the only lives worth insuring are human lives. And since this commercial confirms that the M&M'S and Geico's 7,000 mascots exist in the same universe, the Geico talking pig, the Geico cavemen, and the Geico talking camel are also being discriminated against by the company that employs them. Just below humanity's candy-coated shell of tolerance of sentient non-humans is a sweet chocolate layer of disdain that surrounds a peanut of hate.

Luis is using a slave force of thousands of talking bubble gum people to film a bubble gum commercial. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.