My personal favourite advertisement of all time, CK’s “Altered States” is at once elegant and frightening. A male model and a female model, each androgynous even before the ad men’s Frankensteinian combination of their faces, merge in order to recite the famously recursive poem that appears in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: “My name is Yon Yonson/I come from Wisconsin/I work in a lumber mill there/When I walk down the street/The people I meet/Say: ‘Hey, what’s your name?’/And I say/My name is Yon Yonson/I come from Wisconsin/I work in a lumber mill there.”
In Twin Peaks, the woodsmen, who we can assume are meant to look like men who work in lumber mills, have their own incantation. While not technically recursive, it’s repeated: "This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” Gnomic slogans are a Lynchian classic; so are feedback loops. The use of the Yon Yonson poem here implies that the ad itself — much like the genders of its models, or perhaps I should say “model” — exists on a looped continuum.