This Fall 2010 television commercial, Kung Shoe DSW (also archived on their corporate site), uses a clever pastiche of contemporary action and martial arts cinema to advertise Designer Shoe Warehouse‘s “Killer Boots.” It’s cute and funny and obviously an effective, eye-grabbing advertisement for the company, as artfully made as any Jan Svankmajer film. It is also a great example of the domestication of the popular uncanny in commercial culture.
[pullquote]It doesn’t matter that DSW is a shoe warehouse, and that they surely don’t want one type or brand to be a “killer” of everything else they offer for sale. They probably also don’t want you to associate every shoe box with a coffin, either. [/pullquote]
First, the ad does what all stop motion animation does: it gives “life” to inanimate objects through an artistic application of cinematic technology. This method is so familiar to us now in the 21st century that we take for granted the strangeness of it all: the boot can literally “kick bootie” as if it were not only a living character with motives and a life to protect, but also high skill in self-defense. No small matter, too, that this object is a boot — obviously the best fashion accessory to show a “kick” — but more importantly, it functions in the orthodox sense of the Freudian uncanny: it operates like a dismembered limb acting on its own accord, since all these acrobatics are imitations of human appendages. [Indeed, this suggestion is obliquely made when our protagonist -- a "single" amputee, separated from its other partner foot -- first meets up with a pair of villainous boots which are shot from "boot level" when they step casually in front of the character, spaced apart like two human legs between our position and the "killer boot's" -- implying a human body standing above, off frame.]

The Foe Steps In

On another level, the uncanniness of this humorous advertisement floats invisibly in the context of its consumption. This ad, while clever, wouldn’t make any sense in a world without genre films. Immediately, the whole scene feels strangely familiar in that it not only uses the generic “trope” of a parking garage ambush to explain the scenario, but it also references any number of post-Matrix action films that use “bullet time” techniques which essentially freeze a moment and spin the camera around in a 360 degree effect to fetishize the moment of impact in a spectacular way: a filmmaker’s attempt to make the fight all the more real because we’re invited to visualize the actual force of the violence, despite the entire artifice of the enterprise. This is the “magic” of camerawork applied to very real physical acting, generating spectator awe because the cinema technology (ergo the spectator’s experience) has power that supercedes the “physics” of the time and space in the universe we are ostensibly being shown. It is a supernaturalized “special effect.”

In the broad scheme of things, to imagine a single boot taking on an army of ninja shoes in a dark parking garage is simply ludicrous — but it is hilarious precisely because it is so fantastically imaginary yet hauntingly familiar. The shoes all are given squeaky voices — delivering high pitched “hi-yahs!” as they “attack” the protagonist, who — after dealing the final death blow to a foe who ultimately knocks over a crate of shoe horns — emits a deep and somewhat smug little chuckle.

It is at this moment — when the video takes a moment to laugh at itself before delivering its advertorial message — that the emotional effect is felt as particularly uncanny. For it is not simply that the boot/limb is “possessed” with a soul but the visual medium itself presumes a sort of hyper-self-awareness that up to that point is not really acknowledged within the text proper. This sort of slippage into meta-commentary is a peculiar element of popular culture, which frequently relies on intertextual nods and winks to appeal to the viewer’s sense of media savvy…and reflecting it back with a knowingness that implies that the medium itself is what has this magical power to give life to lifeless objects. There is always a sense of death underpinning such phenomena when we experience it, which we acknowledge with laughter — just like we do with a yelp of terror or even that swimming sensation of dislocation we feel — when we experience the uncanny.

Indeed, the humorous tag line (“Boots Kick Bootie”) and the anonymous female voiceover that subsequently kicks in provides a reassuring sense of comfort that this was “only” an ad, and communicates a sense of relief that the weirdness of it all is fully explainable in the context of the mass market (since there is no context given for what is shown until the very end). The uncanniness is domesticated in the framework of advertising culture. When the rapidly edited images of shoes being placed into the shipping crate in the very final moment appears, one might miss the fact that what is being dramatized is a sort of coffining of the victims of the battle. It is subtly disturbing that the ad ends on that final “ting” as a shuriken flies from off screen space (our space?) and thunks into the coffin-like shoe box, an empty space infinitely replaceable with any sort of body/shoe.

Death sells.

It doesn’t matter that DSW is a shoe warehouse, and that they surely don’t want one type or brand to be a “killer” of everything else they offer for sale. They probably also don’t want you to associate every shoe box with a coffin, either. While this all could suggest a sublimated guilt over the dead animal skins that sometimes go into the shoes on our feet, or even some anxiety about imports and labor, these deeper feelings are really not as important as the fetishism of the commodity that TV commercials like these seek to promulgate. The emotional appeal that underpins the silly humor in this ad overrides all reason: if you want power (and desire survival) then you want one of these “magical” boots.