They're creepy and disturbing.
For people of a certain age, that song is permanently identified with Doris Day, who sang it in the film The Man Who Knew Too Much.
At that time, it wasn't uncommon for films to include movies, if they featured an actor or actress who could sing, which were nearly complete unrelated to the film in any other fashion. The Man Who Knew Too Much was a Hitchcock thriller, and although the protagonist is a family man, there's really nothing else much that relates Que Sera Sera to the film. That may be why we don't really associate the song with the film much. Indeed, in Hitchcock films, it isn't even one of the first films of his that come to mind.
Maybe that's why Samsung felt free to use the song. It's not associated with visual images, but it is associated with a certain mood and feel.
And that mood and feel is basically one of innocence combined with fatalism. It has a tomorrow is much like today, sort of feeling to it, but one that accepts that "what will be will be".
I'm not sure what feeling Samsung is going for, but it's incredibly creepy and more than a little perverse. In one version, a large adult man sits on a corner, at night, while he lip sinks a young girl singing the song. He looks bombed out and disconnected.
In another, a group of young people use their phones to battle an artificial intelligence holographic monster, which they kill in some sort of a game.
In the most disturbing, however, a group of men playing basketball at night are confronted by a pre teen girl who is wearing skirt, thrusting her hands towards her pelvis, and jerking in an unnatural fashion. I don't know if anyone has called attention to it, but he commercial is not only suggestive, it's pedophilic, clearly sexualizing a young girl in a way that commercials have not since the 1970s, when it caused an outrage. Indeed, it goes beyond that, as its so sick in the way it portrays the girl its worse than the prostitution of young models that was briefly in vogue in the 1970s (and we wonder how depraved prediation on the young came in so strong in the 70s, and 80s, d'uh).
Samsung isn't dense. It knows what it's doing. Its so savvy it managed to overcome a product disaster of just a couple of years ago and reemerge as a major cell phone producer. This add campaign intentionally riffs off of more innocent and accepting age to present a disturbed, perverted and confused one, even celebrating it. Don't like your reality? Imagine a fake one on your phone. Have a weird fetish. . . indulge it on your phone.
Predictions that technology was becoming more than we could handle have been around since day one. It's never come true. But there's good reason to re ask that question now.
And the balance of the current evidence shouldn't leave a person feeling very comfortable.
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