Caroline Weber

During the Christmas holidays, an Internet company called Send.com ran an humorous series of television advertisements featuring an unseen gentleman - the ads filmed entirely from his viewpoint - who identifies himself simply as The Giver.¹ Each segment depicts a different scenario in which The Giver hawks Send.com's principal service (sending high-end gifts ordered on the Web), while looking on with excited anticipations as his own presents are delivered to his nearest and dearest. But bizarrely, these happy vignettes - The Giver's friends opening a case of fine wine, his colleague dining by candlelight with a man she loves, his clients enjoying a day on the golf course - always end in disaster for The Giver himself. A stray golf ball smacks him in the crotch while he watches his clients, from a distance, on the fairway. His arm catches fire as he prepares to bring "cherries flambées, extra liqueur," to his colleague's table. An unsmiling bunch of policemen apprehend and handcuff him as he crouches outside his friends' living room window, gleefully observing their reaction to his gift of wine. As a promotional gambit, this ad campaign is a strange one: "use Send.com," it appears to say, "and bad things will happen to you!" But as an exposition of some crucial Lacanian insights - about giving and receiving, fantasy and lack, failure and success - the collective trials of The Giver merit a second look.