ABSTRACT
On October 21, 1996, the Packard Bell computer company unveiled its sixty-second television ad that shows real/retouched—hyperreal—people waiting in line at a forbidding big city bank. They wait and wait and wait, hardly moving in this impossible queue. The weather is dark, moody, awful, postnuclear. We see a young woman age suddenly. No one talks to anyone. Storm troopers march and intimidate. A bureaucrat inside the bank lets out an evil laugh. A little girl peeks, frightened, out from behind a copy of Paradise Lost The scene is a postapocalyptic vision of modernity gone terribly wrong. Then, after exactly three-quarters of the ad has elapsed, it cuts to a cartoon house, inside of which is a bright (real) study with a shiny new Packard Bell computer sitting alone on a table. “Wouldn't you rather be at home?” a suave male voice asks. Indeed (fig. 7.1 shows eight still photos from this ad). 1
