I’m trying to change my thinking about advertising to become more open to the possibility that there may be something redeeming about marketing. But then I come across another Hummer ad which convinces me that advertising can also be so utterly evil. This is typical of Hummer, and I think a good example of the ideological environment that cars operate in. Hummer (and most car ads for that matter) consistantly portray themselves in relationship to nature. There are two reasons for this. First, because we live in an auto world, cars have become the environment, so it is impossoble for them to offest themselves. Secondly, cars are our spaceships. To paraphrase JG Ballard, humans are the real aliens.
I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape. We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.