“When last call calls, don’t answer. ” When the last call call, don’t answer.
The narrator said this sentence over images of young adults, all beautiful, who could be seen playing bowling, billiards, ping-pong, darts, singing karaoke, then lining up for a late-night shawarma in an overflowing canteen, chasing a taxi in the street, kissing while drinking one last beer, while the street lights go out and the sun rises. In the background, strings, luminous, epic, full of promise.
It was an ad for Puma, the clothing company, the result of a collaboration with the advertising agency Droga5, with which it created the Puma Social campaign in 2010, which attempted to broaden the appeal of the brand, to bring it out of gyms and stadiums, and bring it into what we call the lifestyle. The campaign’s premise: night is also a time for sport, and these night athletes are our champions.
Just an ad, and I still think about it a dozen years later, when books and films haven’t had the luxury of occupying my thoughts for more than three seconds.
I was 23 or 24 when I saw her. I was right in the brand’s target audience, and as advertising can sometimes do, it made me buy something bigger than a pair of shoes. In this case, the idea that partying can be an extreme sport, that we can find, in chasing the morning that comes after the night before, the same compendium of emotions that we find in a stadium crowded at a World Cup final.
I didn’t need an ad campaign to inspire me to party: it was something I already excelled at. A text as mundane as what’s happening tonight was a jokera spin of roulette that can lead anywhere: to walk the entire length of Avenue du Mont-Royal by taking a shooter in each bar, looking for the address of a rave semi-secret about my fixie in an ideal neighborhood to be kidnapped, to a trip to Berlin a few days’ notice to try (and miraculously succeed) to enter the legendary Berghain. The party is a space of freedom: we shake up the hierarchy, the conventions, we slalom around the rules. The party is an opportunity to say fuck allto put the rest of the world aside to celebrate the spectacular here and now.
I didn’t need an ad campaign to inspire me to party, but it had given a veneer of nobility to my nightlife: excess is the luxury of those who don’t have to get up at 6 a.m. to go to work, or who still have the leisure to be able to pull off sleepless nights without too many consequences. These privileges are lost over time.
The director of the ad, Ringan Ledwidge, died of cancer in 2021, at the age of 50. Today I am almost the age he was when he made it. That weird age where I know I can still reach a lot of my friends at 4 a.m.: half of them because they haven’t gone to bed yet, and the other half because they’re on their way trying to put the little one back to sleep for the eighth time that night.
My sample is probably not representative, of course: I am in the business of the party, where everything is a pretext for celebration: we pop the champagne at the launch, at the first, at the last, at the wrap party, at the festival, at the award ceremony. However, it allows me to see that partying, like all high-level sports, is hard on the body.
The more time passes, the more teammates we lose: those who hang up their skates voluntarily, and those who are forced to. There was the one, promised a great career as an actor, who managed to work because he was of all the partiesuntil being of all parties prevents him from working. The one who had managed to combine excess and work because cocaine can serve, and often serves, as a crutch for someone who doesn’t sleep enough, until it ends up serving as his legs altogether. The one who had a toxic psychosis the night she took something too much and ended up in the emergency room.
The Puma ad, even if we saw a bottle or two, failed to mention that partying is inseparable from excess.
No matter your poison of choice, there is the risk of taking too much one night and vomiting your guts out loudly the next, or taking too much every night and then spending your thirties going back and forth in therapy and rehab. The risk of becoming, as in Spirited awaya hungry ghost, whose appetite only grows when he eats.
I have never seen this inherent risk as a problem: the pleasure I get from parachuting, from snowboarding, is closely linked to the danger inherent in their practice. (I tried to do it party during the year I was sober, but after 2 a.m. everyone became unbearable.) And maybe I’m lucky enough to not be too sensitive to addictions (except the one to Guru Water Energy apple grenade).
But when the Puma ad invited people not to respond to the call of last call, she was speaking to the Jean-Philippe of 2010, not to the one of today, who can sometimes mope until noon because he drank three glasses of wine the day before. When, then, should we respond to the call of last call ?
That’s the main problem: you do that when you’re old. I’m not ready for that yet. So I’m going to do as Fanny Bloom sings, and “fill myself with what makes me die” while watching the sun rise, while a narrator with a gravelly voice adds a luster of majesty to my end of the evening. In moderation, as much as possible.