Even if you haven’t seen The Matrix you’ve read the reviews and by now you know 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 really interesting artificial world 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 ...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 wants to bust loose, like rebels in a commercial for Macintosh computers!” -- Entertainment Weekly.

Okay, so I added the exclamation points. And, sure, this probably testifies to the relative ease with which critics can free-associate to a 30-second soft-drink opera as opposed to, say, a Joseph Campbell analysis. More than that, though, 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 ad references in The Matrix, which is basically a vast junkyard robot built from spare parts of great advertising campaigns.

It’s set in a dystopian Urban Gothic straight out of a financial-services spot; the running theme of cell phones as deus ex machinas and telephones as literal lifelines to safety is a phone company’s wet dream; and Laurence Fishburne, as Reeves’s supercool rebel mentor, spouts the kind of insta-Zen platitudes we’ve received via countless mutual-fund, airline and insurance ads. The techno-visionary jargon of the expository scenes recalls AT&T at its early-nineties 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 commercials-esque cinema -- an ad without a product, except its own highspeed 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 were actually multimillion-dollar ideas -- just as you thought at the time.) And this comparison to ads is not an incongruity or an insult to the film.

Like the 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 Bob Dylan or Blur songs, or copping visual riffs from movies) or else invades them, as 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.

There probably was no commercial as influential this year as Khakis Swing, given it’s praise in the trade press, its excoriation by cultural handwringers and imitation by other advertisers. And how many movies were as culturally influential in the past 12 months as Swing?

Maybe Saving Private Ryan, though arguably it was in part running with the very Forties revivalism Swing had rekindled. Shakespeare in Love? Please. While the Best-Picture winner managed only to momentarily resuscitate the eternal “Shakespeare’s hot!” canard, Swing performed the nigh-unprecedented feat of not only reviving a pop trend that had died a year or two before (the swing craze), but actually bringing it back stronger. For that matter, which did the bigger favour 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 ubersingle The Rockafeller Skank. Except, of course, that’s largely because we’ve heard it a million times in commercials (for sodas and for Mike Judge’s movie Office Space).

Of course, ads are not really art in the same sense that Ulysses is. Not yet, although the 20th century’s premier protagonist, Leopold Bloom, is in fact an ad man. But they 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 ads work so well (even drawing visitors to a prominent online archive) is no single effects 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 it’s ulterior motives. Likewise, commercials, with far greater per-second budgets than movies or TV programming, are a perfect place to conduct visual research and development -- and so The Matrix turns mutual-fund imagery to its own advantage.

To say that The Matrix draws fluently on this mercantile language is no putdown. It’s the reason the movie is as good as it is. That’s good, not great: The Matrix is intense rather than deep. 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 Nineties culture than all 10 Best Pictures and the collected works of Douglas Coupland combined.

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.

Retyped by Heather on April 29th, 1999. Printed exactly as previously printed by the Globe and Mail.