‘‘For the Rest of Us”:

A Reader-Oriented Interpretation of
Apple’s “1984” Commercial

Linda M. Scott

It was a bright cold day in January, and the clocks were showing third
quarter. Fifty million Americans nuzzled in the breasts of their telescreens,
staring down into the Super Bowl stadium. They slipped through the
afternoon glassily, with their beer and their Winstons and their friends.
Suddenly the predictable drone of sportscasters was interrupted by a gritty
sixty-second metaphor. A young woman athlete being chased by faceless
storm-troopers raced past hundreds of vacant eyed workers and hurled a
sledgehammer into the image of a menacing voice. A transcendent blast.
Then a calm, cultivated speaker assured the astonished multitudes that 1984
would not be like 1984. Macintosh had entered the arena.
A sports announcer lost composure: “Wow, what was that?”’ Then the
buzzing began. “It’s the only commercial that has ever appeared on the
Super Bowl that got people in bar rooms talking about the commercial
instead of the game,” said an adman later.2 All three networks covered the
spot on the evening news, as did 50 local news shows. That week, countless
newspapers and magazines ran stories with titles like “What were you doing
when the ‘1984’ commercial ran?”3 The now
famous sixty seconds were furiously debated in workplaces around the
country for days.4
Although it aired nationally only once,5 the commercial called “1984”
was, within weeks, considered an advertising legend-but one that inspired as
much ire as awe.6 “Sheer wretched excess,” hooted the advertising trade
press.7 “Sophomoric” and “indulgent” sniffed one creative director;
“courageous” countered another.8 The Apple executives who had authorized
the $1.6 million spot were deluged with mail from irate shareholders,
charging them with a breach of fiduciary responsibility.9 Yet the spot had
gotten more free air play than a public relations man would dare to pray for.

67
68 Journal of Popular Culture
In the debate over “1984,” there was only one point of consensus: this
spot had broken every rule of the advertising genre. There were no product
shots, no on-camera demonstrations, no litanies of product specs, and only
minimal corporate identification. Around the conference tables of the
advertising world, conventional wisdom held that “1984” was brilliant
theatre, but it was not advertising.10
The consumer response must have stumped the keepers of conventions.
Three days after “1984” aired, when the Macintosh became available in
retail stores, more than 200,000 people stood in line waiting for the doors to
open. Within six hours, $3.5 million in computers had been sold and
deposits on orders taken for $1 million more. Apple Computer, which was
geared up to make a Macintosh every 27 seconds, was faced with a back
order problem.11
The purpose here is to explain the persuasive power of this unorthodox
advertisement, using a reader-oriented, or rhetorical, approach adapted from
literary criticism. Because the commercial operates in a concentrated,
metaphorical fashion through a quick series of images and sounds, it remains
rather cryptic to more traditional ways of understanding advertising, which
tend to focus on the arrangement of logical arguments, positioned for a
particular target audience and supported by a network of verbal, visual, and
dramatic “proofs.” Practical approaches to the art of advertising have much
in common with classic rhetoric. Although advertising practitioners are
seldom schooled in the subtleties of ethos or the importance of dispositio,
their approaches are often analogous to those of Plato or Aristotle, whether
they are researching audience appeals or creating brand personalities.
Persuasion is always central; yet the widely-held notion that advertising
works through the clever arrangement of statements, dressed for effective
delivery, can be illusory. Much advertising is instead an imaginative kind of
rhetoric that gains assent through affect, fantasy, or even the appreciation of
form, rather than through an architectonic of arguments.lZ
“1984” is one of those advertisements. Its theme is one of radical,
individual action to prevent homogenizing tyranny: a singular, individuated
logic destroying an externally-imposed, collective one. And its form is a
mirror of that theme. While consistently counterpointing conventional
commercial appeals and forms, this spot communicates through an artful
arrangement of images that has its own internal logic. The spot keeps the
audience unbalanced and curious throughout the viewing-and thus open to
the affective experience through which it persuades. The viewer becomes
enveloped in a series of dense, dreamlike, and seemingly disjointed pictures
and sounds. Yet this is a complex, carefully orchestrated battery of stimuli
designed to hold the viewer open by repeatedly frustrating expectations
about commercial persuasion in order to insinuate a powerful identification.
AS viewers of television
For the Rest of Us 69
commercials, we have all iearned to respond to a certain set of video cues by
“closing up,” rejecting, and refusing.13 “1984” prevents this from
happening by itself refusing to be what we expect it to be. The rich symbolic
imagery it offers instead creates a dynamic, participatory experience, closer
to reading fiction or poetry than to absorbing expository, information-
centered rhetoric.14 In this way, the commercial is experienced somewhat
like a dream-it is neither vision nor memory, yet it is both. Its implicit call to
action, which works through the identification in that experience, is both
reactive and anticipatory. Thus, it is very unlike the deliberative nature of
other advertising rhetoric.
Like any other kind of text, advertising has its genres and conventional
forms. And, like any novel, drama, or lyric poem, no one advertisement
conforms exactly to convention, but contains elements of the unexpected
order to intrigue, inflame, and seduce. Even so, a typical underlying
structure-one that most of us would recognize-can be outlined. This format
is the “corrigible schema”l5 against which “1984” is working.
Most television commercials seek first to command attention (to keep
us from leaving the room or looking at something else, as is our habit during
commercial breaks) and secondly to clearly identify the brand being
advertised (in order to provide a memory link to the message that follows).
Market researchers and advertising practitioners generally believe that this
must happen within the first ten seconds in order for the commercial to be
effective.’6 Often, the first ten seconds also set the stage for the product by
dramatizing some consumer problem. In a thirty
second commercial, the second ten seconds will usually introduce the
product as a solution to this problem.l7 Next, at about 20 to 25 seconds into
the spot, there will be a product demonstration or simply a dramatic
visualization of the product, known as a “hero shot” or “beauty shot,”
accompanied by an off-camera announcer’s explanation and, ideally, a
mnemonic device. The mnemonic device may be an animation, a jingle, or a
verbal “tagline” that is intended to summarize the rhetorical strategy of the
spot. The commercial will usually close with a “button,” or dramatic
denouement, that includes a brief reprise of the mnemonic device.
Clearly, this format has not been the rule for some products; soft drink
ads, for example, never use this approach. However, for products that are
thought to be chosen based on a rational evaluation of anticipated
performance, this kind of advertisement is the accepted way to present
arguments and lay the groundwork for their “recall” at the point of
purchase.’* And, even commercials that depart from the problem-solution
format usually share other rhetorical and formal conventions: attention
getting ploys, brand identification, mnemonic devices, positive imagery,
explanatory voice-overs, and clearly-articulated appeals.
70 Journal of Popular Culture
As will be shown, the “1984” spot works against these conventions in
many ways. It commands attention, but with a strange, other-worldly
imagery instead of the frenetic, brightly-colored patterns common to
television advertising. It raises questions and problems without introducing
the product as hero and without a friendly announcer voice
over to tell us what is happening. It bends a sixty-second time-frame into a
much shorter virtual time-space, while using our inner clocks to create
tension, as second after second passes without fulfilling our need for some
explanatory jingle or exhortation. Then it stair-steps this tension to a
dramatic climax, only to present a paradox in the form of a cryptic promise
and that friendly, brightly-colored apple. The connection between the
imagery and the product, in fact, is never overtly made. The realization
comes only afterward, and with a quandary.
It is a radical strategy. Kenneth Burke has proposed we view all texts as
strategies for dealing with situations.lg Burke writes that, from the point of
view of both author and audience, texts are “strategies for selecting enemies
and allies, for. . .consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation,
implicit commands of one sort or another.”20 Since most advertisements
result from sophisticated articulations of situations and strategies, it is
especially justifiable when analyzing an advertisement to look first at the
situation, or scene, against which the communication is foregrounded.2l The
unconventional rhetorical strategy of “1984” was particularly appropriate to
the task at hand: unmasking the ideology of a very conventional, entrenched
competitor through the formulation of a counter-myth.22 Thus, in the case
of “1984,” an understanding of the situation is indispensable.
By every informed reckoning, the year 1984 was a pivotal point in the
history of computer te~hnology.~~ International Business Machines, the
“Darth Vader of the digital world,”2’ had captured one-third of the personal
computer market within three years of its entry and was proceeding to force
standardization on an industry that was still developing. Although the IBM
PC was clearly no standard-bearer for innovative technology, corporate
purchasing agents and timid middle managers were drawn in droves to the
safety of buying from “Big Blue.” Consequently, an epidemic of
bankruptcies and failures had broken out among personal computer
producers, small and large. The remaining competitors were frantically
shifting to produce IBM “clones.” Inevitably, industry watchers began to
speculate about the future of the upstart company that had “invented” the
personal computer-Apple, a corporation that was in every way seen as the
antithesis of International Business Ma~hines.2~
Apple’s response seemed at first as small and poignant as a candle in
darkness. The Macintosh was in every way incompatible with the IBM PC:
it used a different operating system and a different medium.
For the Rest of Us 71
Its 32-bit configuration, although clearly the next future step for the
technology, was hopelessly out of the currently prescribed lock-step. Other
machines staked their claims on statistical manipulation; Mac’s early
applications were for writers and artists. But its most winsome features, the
iconic user interface, was what made it seem the most vulnerable. In the
macho world of computing, where the measure of a manager’s manhood
was the size of his spreadsheet, Macintosh looked like a toy.
In sum, the strengths of this brilliant, but whimsical piece of machinery
were not memory, power, or manipulative ability, but friendliness,
flexibility, and adaptability to creative work. As such, the Macintosh held
the moment’s possibility that computer technology would evolve beyond the
mindless crunching of numbers for legions of corporate bean-counters. It
was, as the print campaign claimed, the computer “for the rest of us.”26 In
the eyes of those who designed it, the introduction of the Macintosh, with all
its apparent vulnerability, was a revolutionary act infused with altruism, a
technological bomb-throwing. When the machine was introduced to the
public on that cold, bright day in January, it was, as Apple Chairman Steve
Jobs described it, “kind of like watching the gladiator going into the arena
and saying, ‘Here it is,’ ”27
Jobs’ invocation of the gladiator image is not incidental here.
Throughout the development of the Macintosh, he had fanned the fervor of
the design team by characterizing them as brilliant, committed marginals.
He repeatedly clothed both public and private statements about the machine
in revolutionary, sometimes violent imagery, first encouraging his
compatriots to see themselves as outlaws, and then the target audience to
imagine themselves as revolutionaries. It is important to understand this,
since Steve Jobs is the closest thing to an authorial consciousness for
“1984,” having personally managed both the design of the machine and all
communications about it. Furthermore, the public perception of Apple
Computer was largely the manifestation of Jobs’ own public persona and the
advertising ethos he led the agency, Chiat/ Day, to create.28 As such, Jobs
was both author and AgentZ9-and was perceived to be so by the audience,
thus coloring their perception of the commercial.

Steve Jobs had just turned thirty when the Macintosh was introduced. A
college dropout who experimented with drugs and Eastern religions before
turning to computer design, he was an unlikely candidate to have become
“the prototype of a new American hero-the irreverent and charismatic young
entreprene~r”~~ and the popular press had made much of this. Between
gushings about how Jobs epitomized Silicon Valley capitalism, however, the
business and popular press also liked to take jabs at his abrasive, messianic
style and poke fun at his counterculture values. By January of 1984, the
press had long since hurled Jobs in
72 Journal of Popular Culture
that category of too-bright bad boys that already contained Holden Caulfield
and The Strawberry Therefore, as the Agent behind this idealistic, but
iconoclastic commercial, Jobs would have been eminently present and
believable in the minds of the viewers.
Jobs, like all those who worked on the project, saw the Macintosh as
something that would change the world.32 The design team, in fact, had
operated sub rosa for nearly two years before Jobs took over the project,
even rationalizing the theft of parts from other projects in their conviction.33
Jobs described these blue-jeaned young computer “whizzes,” as souls who
were “well grounded in the philosophical traditions of the last 100 years and
the sociological traditions of the ~OS,” claiming that in another time they
would have been poets.34 The Macintosh team pursued their project through
grueling hours and against formidable odds. Thus, one reporter who
interviewed them in early 1984 wrote: “The machine’s development was, in
turn, traumatic, joyful, grueling, lunatic, rewarding and ultimately the major
event in the lives of almost everyone involved.”s5 All of them saw IBM as a
real and present, fundamental threat-the embodiment of everything they both
feared and disdained.
Eventually, this same vision inspired the people who produced the
advertising to work similar kinds of hours and think in comparably
heightened language.36 In the three years prior to the airing of “1984,”
ChiatIDay had contrived to present the public with an image of their client
that was at once a reflection of the young, creative, organic culture of Apple
and an antithesis of their entrenched, hierarchical competitor, IBM. Soft-
focus, soft-sell commercials had characterized Apple products as being
designed for creative people whose life and work were integrated, not
compartmentalized like the organization man of the IBM image. The public
saw Apple users, both male and female, who were casually dressed, played
basketball at lunch, and brought their dogs in with them to work over the
weekend.37
Through this advertising, supplemented by a consistent image in news
coverage of Jobs’ personality and the Apple corporate culture, a clear
perception of Apple had been built in the public mind. All of these elements,
then, constitute an important grounding for the formulation of the “1984”
ethos and, therefore, for the “mock reader” of this commercial.s*
In the classical tradition of rhetoric, as well as in good advertising
practice, we would expect the ethos to be formulated in anticipation of the
desires of the audience.39 Commercial rhetoric is, after all, a “you and me”
communication40-the message is addressed to a target audience that has
been “carved from demographic and psychographic data and then
consciously imagined as an “artifact, controlled, simplified, abstracted out
of the chaos of day-to-day ~ensation”~2-the commercial
For the Rest of Us 73
equivalent of a mock reader. The advertising ethos-known in that business
as the “brand personality”-is the implied author that intermediates between
the actual author and the target audience.
Based on our understanding of Jobs, the Macintosh design team, and
the advertising agency-and the culmination of these in the public image of
Apple-we can, at this poinr-, draw a fairly focused picture of the Macintosh
ethos. Macintosh is young, wears blue jeans, and lives in an 80s version of
the 60s counterculture. He/she is both creative and committed, believing
strongly that hidher work ultimately matters. But Macintosh is impatient,
uncomfortable, and contemptuous of everything that is conventional or
hierarchical. Macintosh is naive and engaging, but has a fervent belief in
hidher own vision that can translate into violent single-mindedness.
Macintosh feels the kind of invulnerability that only the innocently
vulnerable feel. In short, Macintosh is a peculiarly seductive, albeit unlikely,
combination of Huck Finn and Robespierre.
The Macintosh ethos sees the rest of us in the mirror. We are young,
creative, committed. Even if we cmnt beans for a living, we secretly see
ourselves as Romantic poets.43 We don’t believe the “movement” of the
1960s is really over yet. We do not admire standardization, power, or size.
The thought of working in an IBM environment makes us want to throw
bombs. Or at least sledgehammers. Or at least send money to those who do.
We are vicarious gladiators.
Thus it was significant that the spot aired in the Super Bowl broadcast.
Visually, we were in a stadium. Unlike most television transmissions in the
1980s, the Super Bowl is broadcast live to all parts of the country
simultaneously. The event has, therefore, the feeling of national
amphitheatre. It is a guably the closest thing we have to a Coliseum
experience. Furthermore, the commercials are interspersed within the play
of the game in a way that is less predictable than that of other programming.
Thus, the breaking away to a commercial can sneak up on viewers a little
more easily, perhaps catching them a little off-balance.
So, we sat staring down into the stadium, waiting for the lions and
Christians of our times. Then, without warning, we found ourselves
plunging headfirst into the gullet of a beastlike structure. The sound is so
cold and empty, we can almost feel the air blowing past our faces as we veer
toward a glowing white tube pulsing with marching workers. The
environment is at once mechanistic and organic-the first of many seemingly
contradictory images. Dimly, we hear a voice: “first glo-o
orr-rious anniversary.” Suddenly, we are inside the tube. Before we can
posit the meaning of the line of marchers, we find ourselves nose-to nose
with a procession of empty young faces with shaved heads. Just as abruptly,
we are staring at their marching feet pummeling the metal crosswalk. Right
about now, we shouId be hearing a glib announcer’s
74 Journal of Popular Culture
voice, cluing us in to the joke. Instead, we hear, “garden of pure ideology.”
The ambiguity is overwhelming.
Where are these people going? To the gas chamber? Over the marching
sound, we are becoming more conscious of words the menacing voice is
forming, but we can’t make sense of them-we can only feel the dread the
few particular words we grasp elicit from us. For the rest, we try to fill in the
gaps. But before we can figure the answer-we catch a glimpse of a young
girl, full of vitality, who is running somewhere very fast and carrying a huge
hammer. We ask ourselves, “Who is this girl and why is she running?” More
marching. There are little telescreens and the ugly voice is coming from an
image there. Then we see a nearly subliminal patch of visored police running
toward us. Are these people chasing the marchers? Are they chasing us?
We wonder. We see the girl again. We hypothesize: they are chasing that
girl. We are afraid for her.
The marchers begin filling into an auditorium in the presence of a large
telescreen from which a tight-lipped, angry old man is talking. We realize
that he is the voice. We can now hear him making vague threats about
weapons. Cut to the woman being pursued by the police. Now we know.
We can feel the coming confrontation through the dramatic impetus, the
change in the sounds’ salience, the gathered crowd, the larger-than life
presence of Big Brother, and the absence of any expected commercial cues.
(We feel, rather than know, that it’s 45 seconds in-where is the product
demo, the jingle, the announcer voice-over that is supposed to defuse all this
and let us laugh at its transparency?) She stops, she winds up. The sound of
the hammer cutting through the air punctuates the tension, now at its highest
pitch. The screen speaker intones, “bury them in their own confusion.” She
shouts. The hammer flies through the air. Because we know the hammer is
hurling toward its mark, the screen’s declaration “WE SHALL PREVAILI”
is rendered an impotent assertion. The hammer smashes the screen. We stare
at the empty workers, who in turn stare open-mouthed at the blue blaze of a
broken screen we can’t see. In the pale, transcendent air is the sound of some
vaguely discordant plainchant. We don’t see the girl, nor the man with the
voice, nor the police. We are in a sort of mental sweat, like someone who
has just narrowly escaped danger. “Where is the explanation for this?” we
want to demand.
Up the screen rolls the text, like something from an epic movie. The
typeface, in retrospect, would be recognizable: it is the tightly-set Garamond
with kissing serifs that is used in all Apple advertising. A calm, cultivated,
but slightly tongue-in-cheek voice reads the copy, “On January 24th, Apple
Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like
‘1984’.” Fade to black. A multicolored apple missing a bite. ‘‘What? That
was a computer commercial?” we shout
For the Rest of Us 75
in mental confusion. But the work has been done: we kept watching
precisely because it was nothing like a computer commercial. As mentioned
previously, the “1984” spot is particularly condensed and metaphorical. In
order to be able to explain how the advertisement works on the mind of the
viewer, it is necessary to pick apart the images a bit. The overriding
metaphor, of course, is an allusion to George Orwell’s Z984. In January,
1984, the mass communications audience was being deluged with speeches
and essays comparing the current political, economic, and ideological
environment with Orwell’s book. Thus, even those who had not read it
would have understood this commercial to a limited degree as an allusion.
The setting for this “1984” is a huge, grey, self-enclosed structure that
is rather shabby. The look here, in fact, shows the stamp of the
producer/director, Ridley Scott, who had used shabby-looking futuristic sets
in his previous feature films, Alien and Bladerunner. As both past and
future, both architecture and beast, this set is an important element in the
logic of the commercial: it is symptomatic of the apparently illogical,
“neither-b~th”~‘ pattern of the imagery and the argument. The
communication here is of an insular society in decay. The society’s real or
imagined notion of its past grandeur is exemplified in the heroic proportions
of the set, the “marble” columns, the chiseled text inscribing the walls of the
auditorium reminiscent of a war memorial. As in Orwell’s 1984, the
telescreens are everpresent-and they are not television sets, though they
broadcast video images and sound. These are also like computer screens
with digits and character-generated messages on the screen with the
transmission. Neither television nor computer-yet both.
The environment of the place is unfriendly to humans: the air is dusty,
the metal walkways and gasmasks suggest the use of chemicals, the seats in
the auditorium are backless benches. This is the world run by IBM, as seen
by the Macintosh ethos: a self-aggrandizing, inhospitable, ossified,
computer-driven society.
The inhospitable feeling about the environment is reinforced by the
sound. It is the sound of being in a large, empty space punctuated by two
high-pitched tones that alternate in some incomprehensible signal. This
noise gets louder throughout the spot and is further overlaid until the
moment of crisis by the interminable sound of rhythmic marching and the
strident, menacing voice. Throughout, the sounds are perceived, but
unintelligible-further underpinning the meaningful illogic of the narrative.
The marchers are dressed in identical grey uniforms-one size fits all.
Their heads are shaved. All evidence of gender is absent from their clothing
or their grooming. The only thing that distinguishes them from penal colony
or concentration camp prisoners is the occasional gas mask. They march in
unison. Every individual difference among them has been,
76 Journal of Popular Culture
as nearly as possible, eliminated. They never show any response to the voice
except mindless obedience. Yet we can still feel the vulnerability of their
humanity-they are all young. Somehow, that makes the vacantness of their
eyes and the trancelike way they hold their hands slightly forward when
they walk all the more horrifying. Their arms, furthermore, do not move as
they walk, giving them the appearance of automatons that is in
heartbreaking contrast to their youthful faces. Their impotent, limp arms and
empty hands, further, provide a gestural counterpoint to the girl and the
police, who are armed and ready.
The voice belongs to a figure that can only be Big Brother. The speaker
here is strident, dogmatic, and self-important. The text of his speech is as
follows:

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification

directives.
We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each
worker may bloom secure from the pests purveying contradictory boards. Omnification of
the boards is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one
people. With one whim, one resolve, one cause.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own
confusion.
We shall prevail!

It is a wonderful example of Newspeak-full of doubletalk, jargon,

fabricated words, and poor grammar. However, the text of the speech is not
heard by the viewer in its entirety. Only the words that appear in boldface
come through clearly in the commercial. The rest are all but drowned in the
surrounding noise.45 The “heard” words together do not form an intelligible
speech, but would present a recognizable impression of socialism to an
American audience. Words like “ideology” carry purely negative
connotations in common American usage. Even “glorious anniversary”
sounds like some overblown communist landmark. The monolithic assertion
of power and militaristic threats have Cold War associations. The “bury
them” phraseology would be associated with Krushchev’s “we will bury
you” speech for many viewers. The speech, therefore, contributes to the
overall ominous aura specifically through its limited intelligibility and the
breaks in its syntax.
When we see the speaker, his glasses glint opaquely, obscuring his
eyes, like the sophistic political orators described by Orwell in his famous
essay on language and politics,‘6 who control our thoughts, and therefore
our actions, by the way they phrase their exhortations. This notion is
central to the Macintosh argument: that what we are dealing with here is the
control of thought-through control of the language in which it is carried.
Consider that computers answer to the same description of books given by
Poulet-they are special as objects because of their
For the Rest of Us 77
existence as mental life.47 Thus, control of computer language is control of
mental life.
If the threat here is thought control, then the faceless stormtroopers that
look like every sci-fi police force that ever appeared in the movies are to be
read as the Thought Police. They are there to enforce the pervading
sameness. But the person they are chasing is markedly different. First of all,
she is vibrantly, observably female. Save the apple at the end, she is the only
color in the commercial. Her health, strength, and physical development are
rea1.48 Yet in this context, she looks alarmingly unprotected. It would be
easy to write this scantily-dressed woman off as a typical advertising ploy to
sell products with sex, particularly considering the media environment in
which the commercial ran. But consider the alternative: this role could not
have been played as effectively by a man. Not only does the woman provide
a vulnerable contrast to the rest of the characters, she is reminiscent of a
long line of revolutionary allegories, like Columbia or LibertC, who are
nearly always depicted in the visual arts with one or both breasts exposed.
Like Chantal who sings to inspire the revolutionaries in Jean Genet’s The
Balcony, this woman is a requisite member of the dramatis personae of
revolution. She is here to provide the inspiration to act. Put another way, she
is our Julia.
Her own act is strictly symbolic, yet poignantly heroic. With an effort
that comes with a shout, and the Thought Police right behind her, she
destroys not Big Brother, but his image. Yet the ensuing destruction is a
“transcendent, blazing chaos.”49 We watch her with the same identified
detachment that we feel in a dream. It is real, and yet not real. We
experience, and yet we watch. As with a dream, we suspend logical
narrative questions like: Why a hammer? Why a screen? Was she arrested?
Was she killed? What happened to Big Brother? We surrender to the
image’s own internal logic and take the meaning from there.
The packing of this symbolic detail into sound, light, and movement
results in a viewing experience that is like a sixty-second rush of sheer
urgency: a visitation by the Macintosh ethos. The dense detail and quick
cuts create a virtual time that seems much shorter than sixty-seconds
an especially good trick in a thirty-second world where longer commercials
are clearly felt. In this virtual time and space, we sympathize with the ethos,
we experience the urgency of hidher situation, we feel hidher vulnerability.
The identification is completed through a highly
charged emotional experience, then slightly defused with a paradox,
delivered with a smile. A brightly-colored familiar icon, the sign of a most
amiable trickster,50 who built a ground for our mutual experience and then
took it back, as if to say “just kidding.” “1984 won’t be like ‘1984’ ” because
our affectionate complicity is assumed. Inspired by this heroic act in a
hostile environment we have ourselves experienced, we
78 Journal of Popular Culture
are to change it all by going out and buying a computer that will free us.
The equation of buying a computer with a revolutionary act is a deft
ideological maneuver. In both form and idea, it worked against the myth of
IBM, turning the “big” in “Big Blue” into a negative instead of a reassuring
positive. Apple offered its culture and its machine as the antidote. The
breaking of conventions in the form of this commercial is synedochal of the
message. Those who created the advertising for IBM were outraged,
charging Apple with intellectual dishonesty: “What they have managed to do
in the advertising is to somehow frame this conflict as a battle for the human
soul-which it clearly is not.. .it’s a battle for shelf space.”5l Yet, as Barthes
explains, one myth can only be unmasked by another, counter-myth.52 This
was, arguably, the only avenue. Certainly, no one who tried more
conventional alternatives survived 1984 the way Apple Computer did.
A radical strategy for a radical situation. A controversial commercial
with a legendary effect on viewers. “1984” may, perhaps, be said to
epitomize the ability of affective imagery to persuade in a commercial
environment, despite the conventional wisdom about selling propositions
and product information. It uses an image-oriented kind of rhetoric to
persuade through imaginative experience, in the way so well applied to
literature by Kenneth Burke.53 This is a technique that seems surprisingly
well-suited to the television medium, as the ability to invoke an imaginative
experience is facilitated by the array of sensory stimuli
sight, sound, motion. Since the early 198Os, there has‘been a noticeable
growth in the number of commercial spots that persuade in this way. The
movement toward more effective advertising-and more metaphorical forms-
is probably not a direct outgrowth of the effect of this commercial. Yet it is
nevertheless a clear trend that begins with “1984” and others. Critical
methods, such as reader-oriented criticism, that can address the
persuasiveness of image-oriented commercial rhetoric as an experienced
communication may offer important insights into the workings of these
symbolic actions.

Notes

‘John Sculley, Odyssey (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 178. 2Nancy Millman,
“Apple ‘1984’ Spot: A Love/Hate story,” Advertising Age (January 30, 1984), pp. 1t.
3Sculley, p. 178.
‘William McGowan, “Macintosh: Looking Beyond 1984,” Madison Avenue (March
1984), pp. 94t.
5“1984” had its one national airing on the Super Bowl, but had previously been
shown 18 times over eight days in 11 spot markets.
For the Rest of Us 79
6Paul Farhi, “‘Hey Mac, Big Blue is Watching You’: Apple’s Precampaign Spot
Aims for the Soul of the Prole,” Adweek (January 30, 1984), p. 52. See also McGowan,
Milliman, and Scully. This commercial eventually won the Grand Prix at Cannes the first
American commercial to so in years-as well as 34 other national and international
advertising awards.
‘Farhi, p. 52.
EMillman, p. 84.
gSculley, p. 178.
“JMaking 1984, videotape, prod. by Edwin Lynch, Advideo Journal, Reeves
Communication Corp., 1984.
11Making 1984, videotape. Note, however, that it would be impossible to separate
the effects of this commercial from the effects of other communications, such as press
coverage.
 12Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969). I am basing this distinction on Kenneth Burke’s notion of the role of
imagination in rhetoric, see especially pp. 86-88. I am further taking the liberty that
Burke permits of pushing these two related approaches to the extremes at which they
may be treated as opposites (see bottom of page 88 in Rhetoric).
’)This is analogous to our reaction to predictable, didactic texts. See Wolfgang
Iser,“The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Reader-Response Criticism:
From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. by Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 53.
“Ibid, pp. 58-59, and p. 64. Iser considers the lack of illusory fulfillment of
conventional expectations to be a distinguishing mark of literary texts. It is through this
technique that such texts unfold as “living events.” See also, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of
Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978). p. 185.
’5E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), p. 32. Hirsch attributes the notion of the corrigible schema to Piaget and, of
course, E.H. Gombrich. Note that this concept is also closely related to Iser’s theory of
reading.
‘GThe basis for these beliefs is the accumulated wisdom from decades of day after
recall testing that is periodically summarized for practitioners by copy testing vendors,
such as Burke Marketing Research and ARS.
17These time-frames would be proportional for a sixty-second spot, after the first
ten seconds.
18See, for example, Richard Vaughn, “How Advertising Works: A Planned Model
Revisted,” Journal of Advertising Research, 25 (February/March 1986), pp. 57-65. Also,
Richard Vaughn, “How Advertising Works: A Planned Model.. .Putting It All
Together,” Journal of Advertising Research, 20 (October 1980), pp. 27-33. And, H.E.
Krugman, “Memory Without Recall, Exposure without Perception,” Journal of
Advertising Research, 17 (August 1977).
1gKenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973), pp. 296-297.
ZOBurke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 304.
21Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969), p. xvi. I am introducing the industrial background here as the scene (or
situation) in which this commercial was created and aired-as the “ultimate ground or
scene” of the action.
22Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 135.
80 Journal of Popular Culture
23See all of the following for the technological and industrial background of the
commercial:
Phillip Elmer-DeWitt, “The Peanut Meets the Mac: New Entries from IBM and
Apple Battle for Attention,” Time (April 2, 1984), p. 65.
Stephen Kindel, “Applesauce,” Forbes (February 1984), pp. 39-40. William D.
Marbach and Jennet Conant, “Reviewing the Mac,” Newsweek (January 30, 1984), p. 56.
Bob Marich, “The Real Blitz Begins,” Advertising Age (January 30, 1984), p. 1+
M. Moritz, “Apple Launches the Mac Attack: The Macintosh Rolls Out in a Din of
Publicity and Showmanship,” Time (January 30, 1984), pp. 68-69. “Personal Computers:
And the Winner is IBM,” Businessweek (October 3, 1983), pp. 76+.
Michael Rogers and Jennet Conant, “It’s the Apple of His Eye,” Newsweek (January
30, 1984), pp. 54-56.
Deborah Wise and Catherine Harris, “Apple’s New Crusade,” Businessweek
(November 26, 1984), pp. 146+.
Z4“The Whiz Kids Meet Darth Vader,” Rolling Stone (March 1, 1984), pp. 37+
Z5Making 1984, videotape.
26“Of the 235 million people in America, only a fraction can use a computer
(advertisement)” Forbes (March 12, 1984), pp. 107-120.
Z7Rolling Stone, p. 39.
Z8Making 1984, videotape.
Z9Burke, Grammar, pp. xv-xvii.
SoBarbara Rudolph, “Shaken to the Very Core,” Time (September 30, 1985), pp.
64+.
”For reports on Steven Jobs’ public and private personality, see the following: Eric
Gelman, “Showdown in Silicon Valley,” Newsweek (September 30, 1985), pp. 46-50.
Gerald Lubenow and Michael Rogers, “Jobs Talks About His Rise and Fall,
Newsweek (September 30, 1985), pp. 51+.
Michael Rogers, “Steve Jobs’s Silent Summer,” Newsweek (September 23, 1985), p.
50.
Robert J. Samuelson, “Steve Jobs and Apple Pie,” Newsweek (October 7, 1985), p.
59.
%*Steven Jobs, “Steven Jobs: What 1 Did for Love,” Advertising Age (September 3,
1984), pp. 18+.
SJRolling Stone, p. 39.
34 Jobs, p. 20.

55Rolling Stone, p. 37.

’SMillman, p. 84.
87Making 1984, videotape.
38Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” Reader
Res@onse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. by Jane P. Tompkins
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
SgAristotle, Rhetoric, W. Rhys Roberts, trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1954),
p. 25 and pp. 90-92. And Burke, Rhetoric, pp. 24-26 and pp. 55-56. ‘OBurke, Grammar,
p. xvi.
4’Burke, Rhetoric, p. 64.
‘ZGibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” p. 2.
For the Rest of Us 81
‘SMaking 1984, videotape.
“Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 19.
45The transcription given here was achieved through repeated playing of the video tape
at high volume. No other script was found, except John Sculley’s, as cited in Odyssey, which
is clearly not the script in the final production of the commercial and must be an earlier
version. Most advertisements go through multiple script revisions in the course of production.
46George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” A Collection of Essays (Garden
City: Doubleday and Company, 1954).
‘?Georges Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” Reader-Resfionse
Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. by Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 43.
’*Per Ridley Scott, as interviewed in Making 1984, the woman cast was actually a
hammer-thrower and not an actress.
49Rolling Stone, p. 37.
5oWadlington, p. 6 and pp. 15-16.
31Making 1984, videotape.
S2This point of view is not only attributable to Barthes, but is also the recommendation
of one of the most widely-read and closely-followed advertising handbooks, A1 Ries and Jack
Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981).
5SKenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950: Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969), pp. 86-88.

Linda M. Scott is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass

Communication, University of Colorado at Boulder.