Brow Beat

Virgin America Made a Bizarre, Boring, Six-Hour-Long Ad About One Horrible Flight

Blah Airlines in action.

Still from YouTube

Have you been flying BLAH Airlines? That’s the conceit of one of the more absurd advertisements in recent memory—Virgin America’s six-hour-long, mind-numbingly boring look at what airline travel shouldn’t be.

The advertisement depicts a horrible, hypothetical flight from Newark to San Francisco in real time and aggravatingly minute detail. Creepy, dead-eyed mannequins populate the plane, wielding one-note expressions that put into hilarious relief whatever trial of boredom (reading Air Junk magazine, listening to an obnoxious aisle-mate, staring off into space) they’re enduring. The commercial is somewhere between pop art and insomnia aid: it’s Enter the Void on an airplane, a soporific but well-crafted condemnation of banal conversation and quotidian annoyances. If you’re committed to viewing, I recommend the trippy dream sequence that starts around an hour and a half in.