Waiting for Commercials

In the beginning was the word, and at the end the advertisement, which has the last word. The modernist anxiety of all existentialisms and absurd dramas, namely the anxiety of the breakdown of mutual communication and thereby the loss of human meaning, finds resolution (it becomes the content of the media that comes after it as the viewer learns) in advertisements: in a total senseless cluster of sounds and screams, which once perhaps were language and music, the viewer can dissolve peacefully and can let themselves be consumed because they no longer need to know anything other than that Word, which gives everything, and thus also them, meaning. Pepsi Cola, Nescafé Gold Blend - the last and only words left to humans, which they understand. The authors of the film succeeded in combining undeniable irony and self-serving entertainment, which the Japanese advertisements of that time undoubtedly had and still have for the white viewer, with the meaning-making level because it is only thanks to the impenetrable Japanese language that the message of the film can be heard so clearly. Another matter is the counterpoint of the intellectual interpretation of the advertising phenomenon, which falls into the visual whirlwind of rectangular media and becomes its helpless sustenance. (2016.09.24)