Most commentary has focused on the successful evocation of the essence of Ireland and the bittersweet poignancy of the reveal of the bride, but both of these miss the primary appeal of the ad, which rests in its portrayal of unironic and affectionate male friendship.
Like all advertisements, this spot presents us with the world as we would like it to be, not as it is. In the wake of the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, four Irishmen are more likely to encounter a foreclosed McMansion than a stone church. Of course Ireland, especially to American imaginations, has always been more an idea—often a mystical, fantastical one—than a tangible reality.
The appeal, then, is not that of Ireland per se, but of what it represents. It’s the type of place where it’s normal for men to sing and sip whiskey in the rain on a friend’s wedding day, and for that reason it is a viscerally attractive place. But it’s also a place that’s distant from our own, both as a matter of time and space.
The filmmakers capture this combination of nostalgia and timelessness by dressing the young men in such a manner that they at once seem old fashioned and thoroughly modern. They are simultaneously anachronisms and hipsters, and so they assert that the values they represent are not confined to the past.
This is essential, because what these four young men represent is a challenge to the common portrayal of male friendship in our popular culture. It is difficult to find, especially on television, an example of male friendship (outside of the military or law enforcement) that is neither transactional nor idiotic. For cheap beer, it’s the wingman trope. In sitcoms, it’s stupid men doing stupid things in stupid attempts at liberation from wives or girlfriends. Male friendships, we’re taught, are about finding or fleeing women; they are not valuable in themselves.
In the Tullamore Dew spot, the bride, though beautiful, is an afterthought. The ad has already achieved its effect before she arrives on the scene. The implicit promise that is so appealing is not that this whiskey will bring you a beautiful wife, but that it will bring you worthy friends to see you off on that marital journey.
And most men desire this friendship—this tender, warm, (dare we say it?) loving friendship—but that desire receives no affirmation in our culture. Men’s desires are circumscribed within a perverse Venn diagram, with one circle labeled “sex,” the other “mammon.” Such friendship seems as foreign as the virgin Irish countryside, unattainable in the normal course of life in the 21st century.
And so, lacking the vocabulary even to describe this desire, we call the ad “poignant” and “melancholy.” But our melancholy does not derive from identification with the bittersweetness of the passage of time or a friend’s life transition. Rather, it is the melancholy of knowing, or at least suspecting, that we will never experience that bittersweetness quite as intensely, quite as tenderly, ourselves.
