"Be like Walker" – Bruce Lee, whisky, and a giant yellow duck

Johnnie and Bruce. Possibly the world's two most destructive forces.

You’ve probably seen it or at least heard about it: Johnnie Walker’s latest TVC for China was the talk of the interwebs a few weeks back. “They’ve resurrected Bruce Lee; it’s [insert opinion here]!” The commercial features a rather plastic-looking CGI Lee wandering around a darkened room giving a speech in Mandarin cobbled together from bits and pieces of his “walk on” philosophy. Johnnie Walker’s progressive tagline “keep walking” is its not-so-subtle analogue. A lot of Bruce’s fans are up in arms about their hero advertising something he never drank in a language he never spoke. His daughter, on the other hand, having consulted on the ad, doesn’t see the problem. To me, however, both sides of this discussion are missing the main point, which far precedes debates over language or drinking habits. The conversation we need to be having is the one that starts with the question: Why did Bruce Lee have to be brought back to life at all?

The answer, according to Johnnie Walker’s brand director for China, Siew Ting Foo, is that it was out of a desire to “trigger the ‘keep walking’ spirit in Chinese consumers.” Executive Creative Director of BBH China, Johnnie Tan, explains it in less pretentious language: “What we want to do is inspire people to … follow their heart. If you don’t follow your heart and aim to change something, you would always be doing something that has already been done.” The irony of deploying this kind of message in the Chinese market is so thick you almost need a towel. "[Instinct] tells us never to follow the rules," says the Lee marrionette, "but to make them." But hey, this is high-end whisky advertising, and when you're pitching to the gilded tip of the ivory tower you can disregard subversive messages, as well as the importance of real-life facts. For example, you can ignore the fundamental inappropriateness of a forward-looking brand heading to the cemetery to find an ambassador. And you can quietly step around the deep ignorance involved in having said ambassador peddle a slogan that began as a boast of longevity: "Born 1820—Still going Strong!" It's really no wonder that Bruce Lee's estate and Johnnie Walker's spin team keep patronising us with that it's-not-an-ad-it's-a-tribute line like the two heads of an aggressively didactic Muppet. Tri-bute. Tri-bute.

But whatever you choose to call this ill-conceived work of nonsense, it looks fucking terrible. It is a stupendously clunky, creepy, dead-eyed indictment of our ability to reproduce the human face realistically in the virtual world. Forget Bruce Lee; we need to stop releasing CGI versions of anyone into the consumer media until we’re sufficiently adept at creating likenesses that don’t look like animated Madame Tussauds dummies with Bell’s palsy. That means you, Disney!

Why would a company risk everything by wheeling out something that effectively mocks its market's favourite hero?

A few months ago, a giant rubber duck arrived in Hong Kong harbour as part of an art exhibition by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. An acre-sized piece of feces appeared in a park as part of the same project. Like the Bruce Lee whateveritis, what was most interesting about the duck was the mania it created. You would have thought people had been waiting for this thing their entire lives. Millions turned out to see it, restaurants served rubber duck–shaped dishes, photos of Hong Kong's new yellow idol flooded Facebook. It was like a drug; people couldn't get enough. And oh, the drama when it was deflated for maintenance! Tears were shed, tantrums were thrown, complaints were lodged, teeth were gna— it's a fucking inflatable nylon duck, you morons!

I'm your god now!

What's scary about both endeavours is the implication that literally anything can be amazing now. We just have to hear about it on social media or the news (if there's still any meaningful distinction between those two things). It's a kind of urban blindness that makes even the most mundane things worthy of hysterical praise. There's no discernment, no gauge of quality; just rapacious excitement for absolute crap. Far from causing people to withdraw, info-stress and commercial supersaturation appear to be causing people to embrace everything they see.

What kind of lives are we living when a sixteen-metre-high bath toy is able to command such control over our emotions; when a CGI nightmare mumbling bullshit to itself in a dark room can convince us to buy whisky? For many of us, our lives are so mired in excess now that we can't see the Gucci carpet for all the tiger-skin handbags. We've already got our fifth car, had as many $80,000 facials as we can stand, and bought the international wine market out of every last bottle of 1951 Grange Hermitage. We've run out of things to splurge on and now we're outsourcing our excess, living vicariously through larger, group exploits. We expect excess in our art, excess in our advertising, excess wherever possible. Even music is about excess now: just plug the speakers directly into the mains, et voila – dubstep!

It doesn't matter if it's meaningful or not, it doesn't matter if it looks or sounds or tastes or feels good, just give us more of it. Eventually Pepsi will send a piece of Muhammad Ali's brain to every planet in the Solar System and we'll all just sort of shrug and say, "Yeah, but remember when the government cloned Jesus to drive all the buses? Now that was awesome!"