Drew Barrymore, who began her edge-killing partnership with Crocs roughly a year ago, around the same time as Santa Clarita Diet was released, has taken the murder of all her cool to a new height with the release of the latest commercial in promotion of the cringeworthy tagline “Come As You Are,” as though America needed any further encouragement to be utterly styleless and graceless. And yet, this is exactly what Barrymore seems to relish advocating in her stead as spokeswoman for the banal–adding to the grimness of it all by agreeing to a musical theme. That’s right, one minute and forty seconds of Barrymore citing all the ways in which you can embrace your basicness. And she does so with such conviction that it makes you wonder just how much, exactly, the company is paying her to be this quintessentially “Drew Barrymore”–all quirky charm and pluckiness. Zooey Deschanel ain’t got shit on this Crocs commercial. Which does seem rife for an SNL parody.
As the anthem for mediocrity commences, Barrymore asks in her most philosophical tone, “What if we were all comfortable in our own shoes?–just the way we are!” And with a building drum beat behind her as she sits on a park bench against the backdrop of a seascape, Barrymore suddenly leaps to her feet after a quick attempt at playing the piano before heading to set number two, where paparazzi take photos of her while she chirps, “‘Cause when you’re being you and you don’t care what people think, you’ll find happiness in good or bad weather!” There’s multiple fallacies in this scene, as the only reason any paparazzo would be taking Barrymore’s picture in Crocs would be to mock her for the sake of a tabloid editorial about how her life has gone completely downhill and that she’s lost all self-control in a way that would make Karl Lagerfeld want to vomit. The other issue is that being oneself most definitely does not guarantee happiness in good or bad weather. In fact, it almost assures one of frequently being miserable for alienating themselves from most of the riffraff available for socialization.
Barrymore and Crocs take their support of sheer below averageness (via, in part, the laziness of wearing Crocs) with the lyric, “You don’t have to be a model and look a certain way. You don’t have to have the perfect bod or nail the perfect take! Just come as you are and do the things that you will do. Just get comfortable in your own shoes.” It’s around this time that one can easily start to picture a potential school shooter playing this song in his head as he loads his rifle. Or maybe I’ve just seen Gummo and Elephant one too many times. But Barrymore doesn’t just stop at insisting upon settling into the stasis of what it means to be “you” and “come as you are”–she also wants the cliche of Type A mothers to know, “You don’t have to be a supermom and always save the day!”–shit girl, just make a daiquiri and sit down while your eight-year-old son watches porn and your husband cheats on you.
With a lackadaisical dance sequence to round out the conclusion, Barrymore very literally settles into averageness atop a white couch with the tagline COME AS YOU ARE rolled down on a white sheet behind her. Strangely, there would be more honesty to the commercial’s whorishness if Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” was playing in the background (which you can see rendered below–it syncs up rather nicely). But one imagines Courtney Love wouldn’t have that. Especially since she used to know Drew during the peak of her rebellious days on the Sunset Strip. Alas, at this point, all we can hope for with Barrymore now is that she’ll never co-star in another Adam Sandler movie.
