A table is not an idea

Ramadan scripts are in production this month, for a month expected to begin around the start of March, and most of them are the same film.

A long table. A grandmother. A door opening on somebody who was not expected to make it home. The light goes warm, the music arrives under the last ten seconds, and the logo lands on a full table.

I am not going to pretend the feeling is fake. It is the most reliable feeling this region has, and a category that found it years ago has been renting it ever since.

But look at the exchange. Somebody lent a film sixty seconds of a night that has very little spare time in it. What came back was a feeling they already owned, at full strength, before the first frame. The film borrowed it, held it up, and handed it back with a logo on the end.

Which is why the recall comes back with the emotion intact and the brand missing. Nobody has misremembered anything. There was nothing in the minute that only this brand could have put there, so it gets filed under the month rather than the name.

The films that survive have one thing in them a competitor could not have run. Usually that is not the family. It is the product, doing the specific thing this product does on this specific night, in a way that would break if you swapped the logo over.

Everyone has the table. The table is the setting, and a setting is free.

What the brand owns is whatever is still in the viewer's head once the borrowed feeling has been handed back, and in most of these scripts nothing is.