Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine in 1987, the same year that Full Metal Jacket was released, director Stanley Kubrick enthused about the artistry of television commercials:

Whether the storyline Kubrick alludes to is historical, fantastic, nonlinear, realistic, or documentary, narrative may be conceived and contextualized as, for example, a short story, novel, or feature-film release, and as an intertextually reified critical concept, as part of an unfolding whole of intergeneric potentialities.

In particular, television commercials may be categorized as short-film narratives as one examines comparative industrial practices and artistic accomplishments with feature-length film. Essentially, how do commerical narratives generate a reactive desire to consume, whether cereal flakes or sports cars, in the space and time afforded by the thirty-, sixty-, or 120-second format on the television screen? One notes the presence of familiar generic forms and recurring thematic and visual tropes, including stylizations and practices associated with horror, comedy, musical, documentary, and other forms of exposition, that are endemic to both fulllength and short-film narratives. The TV commercial strategizes, informs, affects, and directs our overall range of perception in order to identify with objects, making them into subjects, and to stimulate a nascent desire to consume. We watch—we want.

In Pleasure of the Text and S/Z, Roland Barthes distinguished between two forms of narrative experience that we, as readers and viewers, encounter per text and among texts: the readerly and the writerly. Overall, a readerly text, such as Charles Dickens's nineteenth-century prose and filmmaker John Ford's Fort Apache (1948), does not challenge its audience's ideological preconceptions; the struggle for meaning and narrative clarity is passively resolved, in a familiar, settled world.