Chipotle’s now decade old The Scarecrow short film is an example of a broken spirit that receives enlightenment and is ready to do his part to change the world for the better.
The team who created this ad, in my opinion, were true geniuses and special people. The message is so beautifully crafted with such an image-based message, that if one pays close attention and watches the ad repeatedly, one will catch something new each time. It is ultimately a message of enlightenment, but so well and uniquely crafted.
When The Scarecrow picks up the red pepper from his garden after witnessing the dark reality that is the world he lives in, it is as if God reveals himself to him and he suddenly now knows what he must do. He must go tell everyone else, evangelize them, bring the message and take everyone to paradise.
“Want to change the world? there´s nothing to it,” the beautiful female voice of Fiona Apple sings, teaching the audience that with just little acts of kindness every day, they can fulfill their mission and purpose down here on Earth to save the world and their souls.
It is an attempt to create Heaven on Earth even if the odds are stacked against Mr. Scarecrow.
The Scarecrow can try and bring back the green to the artificial world devoid of natural life that now exists, repeatedly sprayed with poison by giant mechanized crows that poison the land, killing everything green.
His quest is to restore the depleted planet, but above all try and restores man´s soul and humanity with natural food and respect for Nature and the animals who have now become numbers robed of their inherent value. He is to try and remind them with his acts that that is their responsibility as custodians of this world.
The humans are the higher beings who lost their way and need to be guided back by something else than human because as the image of Crow Foods Incorporated shows, it is now a complete contradiction of what the world was truly supposed to be. Everything became mechanized, a lie of a world, where the humans no longer see what is truly real anymore. They do not see the evil that occurs behind the scenes, they just accept it and eat the lie, blind to its presence. No one thinks independently anymore, everyone is the same, asleep and willfully ignorant, they do not see what is right before their eyes. The Scarecrow sees things for what they really are because he is not inhibited by being human or the poison in the air, and so he sets off on a quest to free his creators, free mankind, bring them back to reality.
Luckily one boy, a child, the most innocent form of life notices Mr. Scarecrow’s food stand and recognizes true Nature. He is freed from the binds of blind slavery before all others. With his mind freed, he can now help Mr. Scarecrow cover more ground and save the others before everything is lost forever.
The humans eat symbols of what is supposed to be food, not the food itself, almost as if the animals don´t truly exist anymore, but they do, they have just been forgotten, turned over to evil; The Scarecrow sees them, he sees how the chicken is filled with toxins and the cows are transformed into something 100% Beef-ish, something unnatural and disrespected. The animals have been deprived and robed of their nature, cruelly abused to feed a dying world by automated madness. A regress, masked as progress that survives on lies made to be truth.
I don’t know why he harvests the red pepper first before the rest of the vegetables, perhaps because it is the first one he sees.
Regardless, the food he prepares is actually made by hand and cooked in a real kitchen; it does not come out of a conveyor belt pre-packaged; it is in its natural state, as it was intended.
The crows from the all-powerful company, whose slogan is “Feeding the World”, are always watching, and they are not even real crows, they are mechanized, and each scarecrow worker has one looking over his shoulder, monitoring them all the time. The scarecrows are the only ones that work, and they all live outside of the city and commute by train. The humans seem to do nothing but shop and eat. They gave away their independence and automized everything. They became slaves without even realizing it and in wanting to feed the world, instead created something to kill it. A form of slow suicide.
Mr. Scarecrow may have also been funnily trying to save on gas because he has an old rusty pick-up truck that he could have used to commute to work with, but instead took the train. Guess he didn’t want to cause any more unnecessary pollution to an almost dead planet, or he couldn’t fathom driving his truck if he wasn’t on his way to fulfill a good purpose. A true gentleman.
Mr. Scarecrow is overcome by God’s energy. He becomes in tune with the ultimate thing we and everything in the Universe is made of. The Scarecrow is the hero of the story because apart from all he does, in the end he fulfills the job maybe some human originally had created him for many years before: be a kill switch, a failsafe, the one last measure before, what thinks to be progress and above reason, destroys them all. He scares the crows away who gather on his stand. Away from the boy and the food. Away from what is good and natural.
Soundly, someone thought to put a countermeasure in place just in case everything went wrong. Maybe he was some guy who was ostracized for going against the crowd and he created the scarecrows for a last-ditch effort at survival and salvation. He might be out there somewhere in the desert.