April 12, 1999 | Even if you haven't seen "The Matrix," if you've read the reviews you know by now what it's about: an artificial world created by hyperintelligent superbeings seeking to dominate a docile, oblivious human race. Of course, it's also about a giant virtual-reality program created by amoral computers, but that's not what I mean. The artificial world of real interest in the Keanu Reeves vehicle becomes clear when you sample these critics' raves:

"A toast to nonconformism, a glitzy $60-million 7-Up 'Un' commercial"! -- Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Looks like 'Men in Black' doing a Gap commercial"! -- Ottawa Citizen

"Makes good use of the 3-D freeze-frame effect that has become so tedious in recent commercials"! -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Directed in ... 'edgy'-TV-commercial style by Larry and Andy Wachowski"! -- Houston Chronicle

"A group of freedom fighters want to bust loose, like rebels in a commercial for Macintosh computers"! -- Entertainment Weekly

(OK, so I added the exclamation points.) Now, this may say something about the relative critical ease of free-associating to a 30-second soft-drink opera as opposed to, say, a Joseph Campbell study. But more than that, they show vividly how advertising is busting loose from the bathroom-break ghetto to influence culture at large, rather than the other way around.

The similarity between the 360-degree freeze-frame effects liberally used by the Wachowskis and the groundbreaking ones in the Gap's smash "Khakis Swing" commercial received far and away the most attention, but that and the quotes above barely scratch the advertising refs in "The Matrix," which is basically a vast junkyard robot built from spare parts of great advertising themes of the 1990s. It's set in a dystopic Urban Gothic straight out of a First Union spot; the running theme of cell phones as deus ex machinas and telephones as literal lifelines to safety is a Baby Bell's wet dream; Laurence Fishburne, as Reeves' supercool rebel mentor, spouts the kind of insta-Zen platitudes we've received via countless mutual-fund, airline and insurance ads; and the techno-visionary jargon of the expository scenes recalls AT&T at its early-'90s dottiest. ("Ever enslave a species by tapping their brains in underground breeding tanks? You will!")

In the spirit of cinematic commercials like Apple's "1984" extravaganza, "The Matrix" is commercial-esque cinema -- an ad without a product, except for its own high-speed stoner paranoia. (Between "The Matrix," "The Truman Show" and "EdTV," we now know that all those dude-what-if-like-the-whole-world-was-a-y'know-
computer-program theories you puffed up on cheap weed actually were multimillion-dollar ideas, just like you thought at the time.) And that isn't as much of an incongruity, or an insult to the film, as you might think.

Like traditional arts, advertising aims to voice our emotions, express fears and wishes we didn't know we had, and -- like sci-fi in particular -- envision the future. Culture watchers have tended to focus on how advertising appropriates other art forms (buying Beatles and Blur songs, copping visual riffs from movies) or invades them, say, through product placements. But in an increasingly ad-saturated culture, when commercial budgets have lured auteurs like Kevin Smith, it's not surprising that the cross-pollination is running the other way.

Consider: Was there another commercial in the past year as influential as "Khakis Swing"? Probably not, given its praise in the trade press, its excoriation by cultural hand-wringers and imitation by other advertisers.

But why stop there? How many movies were as culturally influential in the past 12 months as "Swing"? "Saving Private Ryan"? Maybe (though arguably it was, in part, running with the same '40s revivalism "Swing" rekindled). "Shakespeare in Love"? Please. Whereas the Best Picture winner simply managed to momentarily revive the eternal "Shakespeare's hot!" canard, "Swing" performed the nigh-unprecedented feat of not only reviving a pop trend that had risen and died in the mid-'90s, but actually bringing it back stronger. (For that matter, which did the bigger favor for Louis Prima, "Big Night" or the Gap?) If one pop artifact was more ubiquitous than the Gap's commercials, it might have been Fatboy Slim's übersingle "The Rockafeller Skank." Except, of course, that's largely because we've heard it a million times in commercials, for Mike Judge's "Office Space" and Surge soda.

Ads are not really art, not yet, in the same sense that "Ulysses" is (though the 20th century's premier protagonist, Leopold Bloom, is an ad-man). But good ads are art in a simple, pure sense. A commercial doesn't have the capacity or the ambition to attack grand themes or involved questions. But what a good commercial does well is to communicate one brief thing vividly. Emotion, for instance: Sniff all you want, but the reason Gap's ads work so well (even drawing visitors to a prominent online archive) is no single SFX trick or music clip; it's the fact that they deliver concentrated joy in 30 seconds.

And -- guess what! -- people like joy. In fact, a commercial like "Swing," if it's no "Chinatown," at least expresses purer emotion than a benighted so-called social commentary like "Pleasantville," regardless of its ulterior motives. Likewise, commercials, with far greater per-second budgets than movies or TV programming, are a perfect place to conduct R&D for visual images -- hence the number of scenes in "The Matrix" quoted from "Swing" or from financial-services ads.

To say that "The Matrix" draws fluently on this mercantile language is no put-down; it's the reason the movie is as good as it is. That's "good," not "great"; "The Matrix" is not deep, just intense -- in other words, it's just like an effective commercial. You can argue that Gap ads, say, are contrived, manufactured -- even that they seem to have some sort of suspicious agenda of promoting beige slacks and dungarees. But like it or not, next decade, they'll likely have more influence on how we remember '90s culture than a decade's worth of Best Pictures or the collected works of Douglas Coupland. And as the Art of the Deal becomes increasingly sophisticated, well-funded and auteur-blessed, count on it to affect the officially sanctioned arts more than ever. Ever see a 30-second spot return in the form of a two-hour blockbuster? You will!
salon.com | April 12, 1999

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