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.