Keeper Is the Redemption Arc for Spike Jonze’s IKEA Lamp Commercial

By Maddy Myers | October 28, 2025 | 1:00pm

Video Games Features keeper

Keeper Is the Redemption Arc for Spike Jonze’s IKEA Lamp Commercial

Note: Keeper is published by Xbox Game Studios, which is owned by Microsoft, whose complicity in the Palestine occupation and genocide has made it a priority boycott target for the BDS movement.

If you were regularly watching commercials back in 2002, you probably remember this IKEA commercial featuring a lamp being thrown away and replaced by a new IKEA lamp. Spike Jonze (Her, Being John Malkovich) directed it, and his skills are on full display here. The commercial invites the viewer to sympathize with the lamp that’s being thrown out by using a sad piano score and close-ups that frame the lamp in the same way that a human face would normally be framed in a shot. After the lamp gets dumped on the curb, we watch it appearing to tremble as a brisk wind hits it—and then, a pounding rainstorm. As the downpour rages, the commercial alternates between shots of a brand-new lamp, now warm and dry in the original lamp’s spot, and the old lamp, on the curbside in the rain.

Suddenly, a man walks into the frame and addresses the viewer directly: “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you’re crazy. It has no feelings. And the new one is much better.” The ad resulted in huge commercial returns for IKEA, but it was also controversial among some people who thought it encouraged wastefulness; that’s likely why IKEA made a follow-up to the commercial in 2018, in which a girl finds the abandoned lamp and takes it home.

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I have a different reason as to why this commercial has pissed me off for the past 23 years, which is this: it is not “crazy” to feel sad for this lamp. The commercial is extraordinarily well-crafted, on purpose, with the intent to evoke that very response in the viewer, and then it concludes by mocking and scolding the viewer for having an emotional response to a well-told story. Now, this bait and switch is intended to be funny; it’s just not a joke that lands for me. Instead, the ending of this commercial makes me recoil in disgust every time I see it. I don’t like being mocked for being invested in a piece of fiction, and the fact that it’s about an inanimate object makes it more powerful and fascinating to me—not less. Good stories can achieve a lot with very little, and the bulk of this commercial proves that, even if the very end does immediately undercut its power (although I’m not sure what more I could expect of an ad for cheap furniture that was, at the time, marketed as disposable).

I haven’t thought about the IKEA lamp commercial in a long time. But I started thinking about it a lot again this past week as I played Keeper, a new game from Double Fine in which you play as a lighthouse. Unlike the lamp in the commercial, the lighthouse is animate; it exists in a strange, psychedelic world that has been overrun by dark, spiny thorns and invasive mites. Using the light on the lighthouse to cut through this darkness is the theme and the goal. Getting through Keeper involves a lot of walking around (yeah, the lighthouse has legs, for some reason, although they are not fast), rotating the light on top of the lighthouse, and focusing that light’s intensity on various things in order to dispel darkness. The lighthouse also gets a little bird friend that accompanies it for much of the game, which is cute, and allows for more environmental puzzle design opportunities (the bird can fly off and flip a switch, for example).

Keeper has a lot to recommend; I love a vibes-based walking simulator anyway, and environmental puzzles—even simple ones, which Keeper has—are a favorite of mine. The mega-colorful environments make traversal feel a lot more exciting, which is good, because traversal is the bulk of what you’re doing. But what really struck me about Keeper was that I ended up sympathizing with a lighthouse that never speaks. There’s actually no dialogue or text in Keeper at all.

Obviously, Keeper does not end with a person walking on screen, staring into the camera, and telling me I am “crazy” for sympathizing with a lighthouse. Instead, Keeper embraces its central trick and does as much as possible with it. The game leans into the idea of making this old, creaky building—a lighthouse that has managed to spawn some spindly little legs—into something relatable, even sweet.

Keeper achieves this in a lot of the same ways as the lamp commercial, just on a grander scale. For example, at one climactic point in the game, the lighthouse falls off of a cliff. Unmoving, it lays dormant for days, then months. Seasons pass. The player watches as dark, thorny plants grow over it. Beautiful but haunting music plays throughout this sequence. There’s even a fade to black—is this the end of the lighthouse’s story? But then, the light fades back up. The little light at the top of the lighthouse pokes itself upward out of the grime, almost like the head of a small animal poking out of the ground. The light even has a little hat on top of it—well, really, it’s a small roof, but it looks like a hat. This “hat,” and the head-like nature of the light, adds to the sense that the lighthouse is not just alive but cute, relatable, even human-like.

I would argue the lamp commercial is trading on a similar impulse by emphasizing the physical similarities between the lamp and a human body. There’s a reason why it’s a lamp and not, say, a table. The specific lamp was chosen, according to Jonze, because it “stood out as the most pathetic of the bunch,” but I would also argue that it was probably chosen because it has a humanlike frame. The top of the lamp in the commercial is round, like a human face, and its neck can be bent to make it look downcast, or like it’s frail and hunched over. Even though I don’t think you could achieve this effect with a table, I do think it could work with a chair, because chairs can have arms and legs; the right shape of chair could be framed to look human-like, or at least animal-like.

Keeper director Lee Petty had a similar thought process when it came to choosing a lighthouse, telling Polygon, “In the case of the lighthouse, in the context of our post-human game, it’s this leftover artifact of the old world that no longer has a function; there are no ships coming in, so it’s remained inert for a long time. For me, that was a really cool metaphor.” So it’s not necessarily that the lighthouse is “pathetic,” as Jonze described the lamp in the commercial, but the lighthouse is definitely abandoned and tragic, particularly when we first see it.

At the start of Keeper, we don’t see the lighthouse first. Instead, we see a bird fleeing an encroaching storm cloud of dark little mites chasing it. The bird eventually lands on the lighthouse, which shines its light and protects the bird. This immediately cements their companionship; the lighthouse is a protector from the strange darkness that is taking over this world. Yet it’s also immediately clear from the appearance of the lighthouse that it is in a state of extreme disrepair. Its stones are worn and missing in places; when it first tries to walk, it falls down repeatedly. The lighthouse seems old and decrepit, but ultimately determined. All of this is conveyed without words, purely through sights and sounds (any time the lighthouse crashes to the ground, it just sounds rough).

As Lee Petty put it in the chat with Polygon, “besides some obvious metaphors about bringing light to darkness, it’s also an unusual choice to try and make people care about a lighthouse.” It may seem unusual, but that’s what makes the game so impressive. You could be playing as an old lady with a flashlight, and it just wouldn’t be as special of a game. Okay, maybe that would be cool—but it wouldn’t be the unique experience that Keeper is, because the challenge of Keeper is in inviting the player to inhabit this big, bumbling building.

With the power of music, editing, and putting a cute little “hat” on top of the light in the lighthouse, it’s pretty easy to sympathize with something inanimate. And there is no shame in it. We all do it. After all, a crew member took the lamp home at the end of filming the IKEA lamp commercial. And doesn’t it make you feel weirdly better, knowing that?

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.