How to Get Ahead in Advertising: Monstrous Carbuncle

Robinson, inspired by the poetic language of Shakespeare and Dickens, has a natural loathing for language that conceals truth rather than revealing it. Advertising was bound to erupt from him sooner or later.

In his introduction to the published screenplay, Robinson wrote of perusing with horror a set of airplane safety instructions: “Drawings of people getting into life jackets with smiles on their faces. Thirty-nine thousand feet, the starboard engine’s on fire, and they’re getting into their jackets grinning!” Naturally hypersensitive, occasionally to the point of paranoia, Robinson really feels this stuff, the insidious background texture of modern lives: the cant and bullshit, and the more sinister manipulation of words, facts, and images.

Thatcher’s Britain—a grimy little subset of Reagan’s America—is the real subject of the film. It’s universally understood that politics is based on lies. Unspoken lies, though. Implied lies, gently guiding the listener to the wrong conclusion. On the surface, political discourse must, like ads, be “honest, decent, and true.” Under the sparkling veneer of doublespeak is the sordid reality, just as beneath Britain’s “economic miracle” lurked poverty and disenfranchisement. As Robinson told author Alistair Owen for the interview collection Smoking in Bed, “It was all bollocks. It was all spin.”

When we first meet Bagley, he’s delivering a disquisition on the philosophy of his trade that is loaded with barely concealed self-loathing. Bagley’s mind will snap like an overstrained elastic band and ping off into anti-advertising evangelism. The malevolent talking boil that eventually erupts from him—growing into a new, more aggressive Bagley, a parasitic pod person—is a kind of Thatcherite id, grossly embodying the aspects of Bagley he finds unacceptable. Since Robinson’s cinema is words first, image after—­just as he was a writer before a director—the stage is beautifully set for Bagley’s two halves to frenziedly debate, in torrents of manic verbiage.

Withnail and I had been a charmed shoot, despite the director’s inexperience and the limited resources. But on Advertising, Robinson had to cope with a budget slashed by one million pounds and a shortened schedule, which tended to hamper the quest for a sufficiently slick Ridley Scott look that he felt the story needed. Where Withnail and I had gained from its wholly appropriate poverty, this film missed the production values necessary to embody the advertising aesthetic and evoke the environment of a top agency office. But if it lacks the desired glossy wide shots—at least until the magnificent final monologue—the film comes to life in its big close-ups. Grant’s eyeballs deserve their own screen credit, whether they are rising up over the fragmenting edge of a mirror to eyeball themselves, or staring horrified between enswathing bandages, or rolling about in a rather good prosthetic boil (fans of practical effects will delight in the animatronic pustule).

The production of Withnail had been such a felicitous experience that Robinson brought back the same crew, including composers David Dundas and Rick Wentworth. Though the music occasionally seems to be trying too hard to shore up a fantastically demented star turn that needs no such support, it is exhilarating when the big moments come: expertly judged quotations from Camille Saint-Saëns and, at the climax, a thrilling use of Gustav Holst’s Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. Robinson has said that he was thinking of Ken Russell, crazed master of classical-music use in his visionary British TV and cinema (and a man who directed one commercial before fleeing that industry forever, horrified by its visual charlatanism).

Advertising’s budgetary truncation also meant the casting was done in a hurry, but the film offers several impressive supporting performances, particularly Richard Wilson as Bagley’s insidious boss, Bristol, purse-lipped and oozing self-satisfaction. When Bristol offers his own war story of nervous breakdown and ulcer, the intriguing possibility arises that he, too, has been through Bagley’s hideous transmogrification: Did his ulcer take him over from the inside? Is this a thing, a thing that always happens?

Of course, really, this is a film of and for Richard E. Grant. Born to play a man warring with his own epidermis, Grant raves, simpers, sneers, cringes, punches himself in the neck, and all but disintegrates before our astonished pans, running the emotional gamut from Genesis to Revelation and nearly tearing the film free from its sprocket holes in a swashbuckling display of utter mental collapse. “Bruce claimed I was the actor who spoke with his ‘voice,’ ” Grant recounted in Very Naughty Boys: The Amazing True Story of Handmade Films, by Robert Sellers. “Playing that part was eight weeks of high-pitched mania that was physically exhausting to maintain,” perhaps the only understatement ever associated with this performance.

The cause of all this fervor is Bagley’s desperation to convince others of the evil of his former trade. Despite his change of heart, he’s still, ironically, running a campaign. This allows Robinson to make his hero a Cassandra figure, the lone character who perceives the truth but is not believed—a recurring theme in the director’s work. Bagley seizes on the toxic nature of his profession but can’t get anyone to accept he’s right: his vision is so radical, and his messianic dedication to it so intense, that he comes off as insane. So when he develops a talking boil, that’s just one more sign of his madness. Granted, a reading of the movie is perfectly possible where the boil’s just a boil and Bagley is voicing its lines, which is what everyone else in the story thinks. We see the boil’s face, but nobody else other than Bagley can. We hear it talk, but everyone else assumes it’s Bagley. If this is a delusion, then it’s a delusion filmed from the inside, as in those David Cronenberg films, like Naked Lunch (1991), where the protagonist departs from reality but takes the whole film with him.

(In Robinson’s 2000 children’s book The Obvious Elephant, created with his wife, illustrator Sophie Windham, an amnesiac elephant materializes in a town where nobody’s ever heard of elephants. The only one who recognizes the elephant in the room is a small boy, but nobody will listen to him. The elephant and the boy are both Robinson—who never knew his father and grew up wondering who he was and where he came from—as are Withnail and “I,” and all of his characters, really.)

“I grew up with a sense of injustice,” Robinson said in a 2024 interview. “I can be vociferous about what I perceive as unfairness in society, and evil fuckers laughing in our face. Anger is a motivation for me as a writer.”