Monday, June 17, 2002

Rob Walker has a piece in Slate discussing the various future advertisements for presently companies and products that exist in Spielberg's Minority Report

Other creative voices, from filmmaker Paul Verhoeven to writer George Saunders, have wickedly satirized advertising and where its voracious ambitions might lead. But here, in a weird way, the familiar product names may in fact be intended to serve almost as reassuring guideposts: Minority Report is set in a version of the future that is disturbing in some ways and entrancing in others, but it seems that whatever wild twists the future may hold, the one thing we can all be sure of is that it will turn out to be a brand-friendly place.

I haven't seen the film yet - it doesn't open in the UK for a couple of weeks - but what is interesting about this is that this isn't new. Another film that was famously set in a future world that contained enormous numbers of advertisements for mainly current day products was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , the other famous movie to be based on the works of Philip K Dick. It is certainly true that in that movie too the advertisements featured as anchors of familiarity in a fairly alien and hostile environment. Of course, soon after that movie was released, companies that were featured in it started going bankrupt, to such an extent that a Blade Runner curse. has been much discussed since. As to whether this will now happen to The Gap I suppose we will wait and see.

No comments:

Blog Archive