Hermes2.0002_Garfinkel

ogcma@byu

ClCv241

Mastery

MythMatters

YouTube
Homer, Od. 5.28ff.
Homeric Hymn to Hermes
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 334-84
Ov. Met. 1.699ff.
Apollodorus Libr.1.6.2-3

Lee Garfinkel, director, "Mercury," television commercial for Mercedes-Benz, 2009

click the image to play from YouTube

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A person dressed as Mercury with winged helmet, looking intensely at a floating dark sphere against a sepia-toned sky and ocean

No spoken narrative occurs. Two words only, "Mercedes-Benz" and "Performance", play in the film.
Hermes/Mercury races a speeding cannonball; he even handicaps his race by giving his opponent a head-start. He is really fast, the fastest thing on earth. Yet, the swiftest of the Olympians is outrun by a nifty, new Mercedes-Benz drop-top and its amazed, (and of course) attractive occupants.

Standard iconography — talaria, winged hat (petasus) — is enhanced here by winged armbands as well. The artist is clearly working with a classical mythos.

Narrative gain?
How about(?): Mercedes-Benz' new standard in performance surpasses classical definitions.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.