Six years ago my wife and I traded in two cars for two new-used ones. Twice in a few weeks, one of us drove an old car up a ramp to the cavernous second floor of the dealership and just left it there. Well, not quite, for later we reported to each other the same experience. Each of us walked away, but then looked back, realizing that this familiar friend would be gone from our lives forever and, more poignantly, that we were abandoning a faithful, if increasingly troublesome, retainer.
These feelings were of course irrational. Inanimate objects do not have emotions (Stephen King’s Christine and Arthur Clarke’s HAL are cautionary exceptions), and it makes no sense to experience guilt at having mistreated them (can you in fact mistreat, except in a technical sense, a machine?), but I am sure that we were not unique in our self-reproaches and misgivings.
Avis Rent-a-Car certainly agrees with me, for that company is now running a series of commercials featuring older cars that are being neglected and fear being discarded in favor of the shiny new and with-it high-tech vehicles available, on demand, for around 45 dollars a day. The genius of the commercials is that they foreground the sexuality that informs the relationship between the car owner and the object of his/her affection.
It is of course a commonplace to note that sex is a staple of automobile advertising, but in most ads the idea is that a car with the right curves will attract the girl with the right curves; the piece of machinery is instrumental to the effort to attain the object of desire. But in the Avis ads, the piece of machinery is the object of desire (there is a hint of the human-cyborg union promised at the end of the first “Star Trek” movie), and the very act of desiring it constitutes infidelity.
In three of these ads, infidelity is not a metaphor; it is literally what is going on; and the parallels between car-adultery and husband/wife adultery are delineated with such precision, point for point, that the experience of watching is uncomfortable for anyone who has been on either the giving or receiving end in this age-old scenario.
My favorite (and a favorite on the blogosphere) is entitled “Look Back.” It features, in the starring and tragic role, a battered red Saab 900 (I own a black one). The scene opens on a sparsely populated airport parking lot. A well-dressed man is getting himself together in preparation for boarding. He puts some trash on the dashboard, gets out of the car, kicks the door shut (wince!) and puts a coffee cup on the roof.
While all this is happening, the car is speaking in a mournful male voice. It/he says, “So, he’s going away with Avis, again. He’ll get something with the GPS so that he can find his lattes and his driving range. If that’s the way he wants it, fine.” But this moment of bravado-dignity doesn’t last. As the philandering driver walks away, he pauses and rummages in his pocket, concerned that he may have left something in the old clunker. Hope revives, and the SAAB says, “Did he just look back? I think he looked back.”
The last shot is of the parking lot, empty except for the forlorn automobile sitting there with an abandoned coffee cup, which it cannot see, on its abandoned “head.” Another voice — here’s where the traditional commercial kicks in — chimes in cheerfully, “One more reason why Avis should be your other car.”
One viewer who rates the ad on the internet likes it, but complains that “the gender of the voice of the vehicle should be the opposite gender of the owner.” No, these ads are indifferent to gender. Lust is lust and betrayal is betrayal, whether the relationship is gay or straight.
In another ad (“Three Days”), the straying partner is a woman who has just returned from a three-day vacation. As she settles into the front seat, the car, a tired-looking, sickly green thing, spots the Avis receipt in her handbag, just as a wife or husband might spy a tell-tale matchbook from a restaurant in a town neither of them has ever visited. The car voice-over comes on, and it is sarcastic: “Who does she think she’s kidding. You know what she’s been doing in Miami. You sit here staring at a cement wall, alone. and she has the gall to just show up three days later and pretend that she doesn’t smell like ‘new car.’” (Another gender reversal: it’s usually the woman who smells perfume on the man.) The ad ends with more sarcasm: “She was with a Prius hybrid. Oh. suddenly, she’s an environmentalist?”
In the third ad, “Conference,” the cuckolded vehicle is a Buick, sitting, iced-over, in a parking lot. A flier for a New Mexico resort is on the seat. The Buick speaks: “He said he had to go to Sante Fe for work. Big Conference. Right! You know what’s happening. He’s driving around with another car. He’ll say he was with a client. He was probably with that red Cadillac CTS from Avis, again.” Just before the word “again” (the equivalent in this series of Poe’s “nevermore”) is intoned, a piece of ice, obviously a tear, falls from the Buick’s tail light.
When the hucksterish voice of the company spokesperson chirps, “With dozens of the hottest cars to choose from, there’s a reason Avis is your other car,” the effect is jarring because the dramatization has been so affecting. We care about these people — I mean cars — and the intrusion of the profit motive is unwelcome.
Strange to say, these are not good ads precisely because they are so good. The point of a commercial is to make the viewer fall in love with the product, in this case the hot cars Avis is pimping. But the viewers of these commercials are more likely to give their affections to the product’s victims, for it is from their point of view that the narrative has been presented.
While Avis’s intention is, no doubt, to advance its corporate fortunes through these commercials, the image the ads project is less than flattering. Avis comes across as the supplier of temptation, the enabler of seduction, a corporate madame. Its stable of “hot cars” lure men and women to default on their responsibilities, to throw away the tried and true, to surrender to the meretricious glitter of the new. But these wiles are defeated by the sympathy we are made to feel for those who have been harmed by them.
Who would have thought that in the early years of the 21st century, advertising would give us a morality tale of such power?
Copyright : times.com
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