Denaka, 1989

There's a vodka advert from 1989 I can't look at without smelling Christmas, and I've never been able to explain why. A woman in a white blouse, big lacquered hair, leaning on a rail with a half-amused glance. "When I said vodka I meant Denaka." A bottle, two tumblers of ice, the flat confidence of the line at the bottom about a world of absolutes. Nothing about it says December. It just does.

Part of it is obvious once you say it out loud. Spirits advertised hardest in the winter issues, so this is exactly the kind of glossy page that arrived stuffed inside a magazine in the week before Christmas, the thick December number you read on the floor with the heating on. The paper had a particular smell. The light in the photo is warm and indoor and slightly too perfect, the light of a party that has either just ended or is about to, and you can't tell which.

What I can't get to the bottom of is why it sits uneasily rather than warmly. It isn't a happy memory exactly. It's closer to standing in a room you used to live in.

The critic Mark Fisher had a word for this that isn't nostalgia. In his book Ghosts of My Life he called it hauntology: you're haunted less by the past than by a future that got promised and then cancelled. He put the cancellation in the 1980s, the decade when a whole expectation of where things were heading was simply switched off. The advert is a relic of the confidence that came just before. It believed in absolutes, in clean lines and certain outcomes, in a drink that could be more definite than its rivals. That belief is the part that hasn't survived.

There's a smaller ghost inside the big one. The whole advert is a pun on Absolut, right down to "a world of absolutes," a brand defining itself entirely by the rival it was needling. Absolut went on to become the vodka everyone pictures. Denaka faded off the shelves. The woman is still leaning on the rail, still half-smiling at someone, perfectly preserved in a moment that has outlived the magazine, the season, and very nearly the product itself.

The picture is warm and the warmth has nowhere to go. It doesn't leave me nostalgic so much as homesick for a winter I'm not sure I actually had, sold to me on glossy paper by a company that wanted me to believe the future would arrive as clear and cold as a shot of vodka.

Sources:

Mark Fisher: Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures — Blackout