Holy Schenectady are the new car ads grating. The attractive wife — dark-haired to connote seriousness and discernment, that dark hair trimmed responsibly a touch shy of her shoulders, possibly to communicate her connubial state — sits in the front passenger seat, of course, not actually driving the action. She is invariably caught just as she swivels her head to lovingly, approvingly gaze upon her husband at the wheel. Just as invariably, he sports a goodly amount of dark beard stubble, which some Bay Area ad bro decided years ago imparts competence.
Forget about selling any mechanical attributes or vehicle comforts, it’s all about styling — of sheet metal and molded plastic, sure, but also life-styling, and shoring up the unsteady and unexamined American male’s self-image, and why aren’t you this cool?
And then the idiot removes his hands from the wheel for self-driving.
Thus I stand corrected. There’s a rubber-meets-the-road automotive feature for you, it just so happens to be a patently silly one that no sane person would need or want, another example of our willfully embracing a shiny new technology that will fail us, replace us, or kill us.
The inanity puts me in mind of precisely two things. First, one of the great Robert Crumb strips of the early 1990s, when Premiere magazine sent him to the Academy Awards simply to record the experience. He walks the red carpet, noting how the movie execs, with their puffed-out chests and “hard faces,” resemble gangsters. He takes in the “predatory eyes” and “cruel lipsticked mouths” of their wives. He can’t comprehend what’s in it for the fans behind the barricades, why they care. He professes himself “embarrassed for all of humanity.”
It’s that last phrase that sticks.
Second, whatever happened to TiVo? Speaking of technology replacing something, this stillborn innovation, the so-called “digital video recorder,” was supposed to rid us of advertising. Remember the hand-wringing around the turn of the millennium? If viewers can zap ads, whole industries will disappear! Where on earth will the revenue come from?
A quarter of a century later, here’s another sucker, blowing a monthly outlay through automatic credit card deductions to subscribe to the Peacock, Paramount+, and Disney+ / ESPN+ / Hulu “triple play” streaming services, which at one point promised no or curtailed advertising, and yet it continues unabated. Doubled down, even.
The ad man’s too big. The ad man’s too strong.