ABSTRACT
The bulk of the major, nationally shown commercials are profoundly dramatic and exhibit, in their own peculiar way, in minimal length and maximum compression, the basic characteristics of the dramatic mode of expression in a state of particular purity—precisely because here it approaches the point of zero extension, as though the TV commercial were a kind of differential calculus of the aesthetics of drama. The creation of authority figures—in a world where they are conspicuously absent in reality—can thus be seen as one of the essential features, endeavors of the TV commercial. The talking and dancing animals who appear in the commercials for dog and cat foods are clearly denizens of a realm of the miraculous and thus also ingredients of myth; so, in a sense, are the objects that merely lure us by their lusciousness, magnetic beauty: the car lit up by flashes of lightning which symbolize its great power, the steaks, pizzas that visibly melt in the mouth.
