This morning I was watching Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (see, readers, I do know movies before 1990), and it made me wonder if Coca-Cola is the most cinematic commercial product in the history of film. Not the most prominent in film, necessarily (in terms of either direct product placement or more casual indirect appearance,) but at least the most significant to film. After all, Coca-Cola did own a movie studio (Columbia Pictures) for the greater part of a decade (the 1980s).

In addition to One, Two, Three, which is about a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin, the soft drink figures specifically in and fundamentally to the plots of The Gods Must Be Crazy, Good Bye Lenin! and, obviously, The Coca-Cola Kid. But primarily, such direct incorporations of the brand are more about their connection to the U.S. and capitalism than they are to the actual product of soda. Even when Superman throws a bad guy at a giant Coca-Cola billboard in Superman II, the brand comes with a connotation of Americanism that overshadows any intent to market a beverage. And certainly the title in Godard’s Masculin, Feminin that says “The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola” means Coca-Cola in its non-product definition of being a metaphor for capitalist America. And is the joke in Dr. Strangelove (in the video above) that the head of Coca-Cola is analogous to the President of the United States?

Interestingly enough, as far as product placement as actual product placement goes, then Coca-Cola-owned Columbia Pictures dealt with criticism for its blatant advertising of the soda in its box office flop, Leonard, Part 6. Also, a few years ago, I was rather underwhelmed by a novel by Maxx Barry titled Syrup, which was a satire on marketing in which the protagonist is in charge of making a $140 million Coca-Cola commercial disguised as a blockbuster movie. Looking back now, I realize that it just wasn’t that fresh an idea. Wilder’s film is hardly a commercial in movie’s clothing, and it’s ironic that the most iconic image from the film is from the last shot, of James Cagney holding a Pepsi bottle (changed for the video cover), but it’s almost because of these facts that such a satire on Coca-Cola is impossible.

Anyway, this is just another of my contemplations, and I don’t mean to make any profound or definite statements regarding Coca-Cola’s significance to cinema. If anything, I mean to ask for suggestions for an alternative. Is there another product that is able to be used in cinema in such a way, as representative of something more than its material self? Or is Coke it?

I’ll even settle for mentions of other films that use Coca-Cola in an important way.