MIKE

Directed by Michael Smith

Here, "another regular day" in the life of Mike reveals a world completely envisioned and experienced through the images and slogans of the media. Mike enacts his daily routine — waking, shaving, dressing — as if he were in one advertisement after another. His language is the empty jargon of ad copy, his possessions are visualized as consumer products, his environment has the aestheticized, air-brushed look of a lifestyle commercial. In a collapse of image and self, of simulation and reality, Mike's mundane everyday life becomes a seductive TV ad, devoid of content, in which the viewer is exhorted to "make the ordinary extraordinary."