In-film advertising is a common thing these days. Much too common. (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display.) But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film — however fleeting — can add layers to the narrative? I speak of Coca-colonisation, a term that has been used to link the world’s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism, and sometimes, with other supposedly American qualities such as enterprise, vitality and crassness.
Coca-Cola and cinema are roughly the same age (the drink was first bottled in 1894, a year that also saw what was arguably the first “narrative” film Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and the two came together in many pleasing ways in the past century. Occasionally the beverage has been central to a film’s plot — Billy Wilder’s One Two Three has a senior executive trying to get Coke into the Russian market during the Cold War years — but more often it has made humourous cameos, as in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin where a bed-ridden German woman, unaware of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is startled by an enormous Coca-Cola banner outside her window.
In movies by directors as varied as Jean-Luc Godard and Frank Capra, Coke has been used to denounce or celebrate aspects of Americana. Sometimes both things have even been done in the same sequence: in the propaganda film I am Cuba, a distraught old farmer sets fire to his sugarcane crop when he learns that his land is to be sold to capitalists; but simultaneously, in a joyous, life-affirming scene set at a nearby bar, we see his young children drinking Coca-Cola and dancing at a jukebox playing rock music.
I confess to not having seen the 1950s Hindi film Miss Coca Cola, but the oldest instance I know of the use of Coke imagery in a non-English-language movie is in the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 classic Late Spring. It’s just a two-second shot — as the heroine Noriko cycles with a male friend, we briefly see a Coke banner in the foreground — but a significant one in a movie made just a few years after the war (and by a director who was known for calmly observing the gradual shifts in Japanese society, including the move towards a more westernised way of life).
However, my favourite cinematic Coke moments are the ones that align comedy to subtle social commentary. The uproarious 1980 film The Gods Must be Crazy begins with Kalahari bushmen discovering an empty Coca-Cola bottle that soon ferments feelings of envy and possessiveness; eventually one of them decides that this evil object must be chucked off the edge of the world. But an equally funny — and more caustic — reference to Coke as a symbol of capitalism came in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.
With the nuclear destruction of the world looming, a British group captain named Mandrake must get a crucial code across to the United States president. But he needs loose change for the phone booth, so he asks an American colonel, Guano, to destroy a nearby Coca-Cola machine and get a few coins out. “That’s private property,” Guano bristles, “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!” The words are said with such reverence that you can’t miss the point: even at a time like this, corporate profit gets right of way. And when the Coke machine is shot open, it’s almost like an apocalyptic prefiguring — not long after this, the film ends with the planet blowing up. What we thought was just a fizzy drink turned out to be a cornerstone of our civilisation.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer