The John Lewis Christmas ad is machine-tooled schmaltz – yet it gets me every time

Dad places the record on the turntable, and the opening piano keys of Alison Limerick’s Where Love Lives stab their way out of the living room speakers. He is transported – emotionally but also physically – to a dancefloor in his mind, and thence to an image of his son as a toddler, and then an infant. This reminds him that even though one of them hides his sadness by buying a new shacket every month, and the other is always on that bloody phone, they love each other. In a sense, this family, this living room, this Christmas ad –creating department store, is where love lives.

And so we meet another entry in the John Lewis Christmas Ad Industrial Complex, a baffling cultural lodestar that has been forcibly present in the discourse for what seems like our whole lives, despite only just pre-dating David Cameron’s government. All the oeuvre’s hallmarks are there: the domestic scene, the push-button mawkishness, the retooling – one might say weaponising – of a classic hit, rendered sentimental in a new, lower-BPM context. I do, however, have notes.

I speak not of the premise of the short, which I’ve seen criticised elsewhere – namely that a teenager would have the nous or ken to select the right record for his father, or even recognise what a vinyl record is at all. I can buy this: the only 15-year-old I know particularly well is my niece, Aoife, and she has bought more vinyl records this year (three) than every adult I’ve met in the past week combined (zero).

It’s more the sentimental narrative that rankles with me. It posits that the gift of this record takes Dad back to the songs of his own youth, but the throughline from that to seeing his teenager as a little toddler is unclear. Listening to Alison Limerick’s house classic in a packed, thumping club reminds him that his son was once a child, in what way,exactly? I presume we’re supposed to intuit, through some primordial, gut-level calculus, that this gift is so thoughtful, so true to his spirit, that it functions as an exact simulacrum of the kind of unconditional love said son exhibited as a child, before he had a phone and thus still liked his father.

This is both quite a long walk, thematically, and also a desperately mercenary, one-for-one, “love=an absent-mindedly shop-bought gift” message, even for a department store that slows down pop songs to sell lampshades.

The short is capably acted and beautifully filmed, produced by creative talents who have given us notable things in the past, specifically Jonathan Alric (the music and exquisite video treatments for his band the Blaze) and Saatchi & Saatchi (the Thatcher government’s annihilation of British society). But the slightly indifferent tone and thrust of Where Love Lives speaks to the curiosity of the form at its heart, which now greets us in a deathly rote procession.

Like Bond themes or April Fools’ hoaxes, the John Lewis Christmas ad is one of those recurring objects that may once have made sense as a fun little regular thing, but has now collapsed under its own cultural weight, amid a sense that everyone involved in writing, directing, sharing and watching them is performing jury duty.

And yet. Perhaps nothing about this ad fascinates me more than the fact that, for all my cynicism and urbane wit, that single shot of a toddler running into his father’s arms got me. Like a marionette, conscious of his strings but powerless to command them, I watched, if only for a second, as that unearned schmaltz dart hit my quivering eyelid and wobbly lip, dead on.

This is what John Lewis ads are: objects that now function – that are built to function – less like coherent short films and more like bunker-buster munitions: deceptive hardware designed to penetrate our battlements and provoke an almost pneumatic sentimental response. Where once their psychological weaponry was charmingly ornate, disguised by craft and care, they now sail toward us in full view, fuselage stripped to the wiring, their inner workings laid bare. We can, and should, lament this reduction to crass formula, this derogation of the maker’s art. But it’s nearly Christmas. And there are gifts to buy. And you have a son. And he is always on his phone.