Drive (4 page)

As usual, American literature reflected the social change that followed this boom. In
Babbit
, Sinclair Lewis's classic 1922 satire of conformity and social climbing, the striving protagonist buys an automobile: “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.” Lewis goes on to describe the daily challenge of
starting the thing and later writes: “It took but little more time to start his car and edge it into traffic than it would have taken to walk the three and a half blocks to the club.” But of course, Babbitt—who desires all the latest technology—feels powerful and important in his shiny ride.

Cars play a central role in what is arguably the greatest American novel ever written,
The Great Gatsby
. The setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece is the Long Island suburbs of West Egg and East Egg, and Jay Gatsby's Rolls-Royce is a symbol of his nouveau riche wealth. “At nine o'clock, one morning in July, Gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn,” recounts narrator Nick Carraway. At a time when most cars were black, Gatsby drove one that was “a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.” Bad driving is rampant in the book. After Carraway tells Jordan Baker, the dishonest golfer, “You're a rotten driver,” she claims it doesn't matter because other people are careful. “‘They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an accident.'” (Both Jordan and Baker Electric were early automakers, and in 1923 the Jordan Motor Car Company ran ads that featured an independent, convention-breaking woman.)

The roadside billboard for oculist Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, complete with giant blue eyes behind massive yellow glasses, watches over the gas station about halfway between West Egg and Manhattan. That's where Daisy Buchanan, driving Gatsby's car back from the city, runs down Myrtle Wilson, the wife of the gas station owner (and her husband's mistress). At the end of the book, Carraway decides, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was
that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …”

The nation's great novelists may have seen cars as symbols of the dangers of conformity, materialism and industrial society, but the general public sure didn't. Even as the Roaring Twenties ended and the Great Depression began, Americans didn't give up their wheels. New-car sales did plummet, but gasoline consumption dipped only slightly. And many real people did exactly what the fictional Joad family did in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
: drove to California in search of a better life. The Soviets, hoping to discredit American free enterprise and make the peasants feel better about life, showed newsreels about those fleeing the dust bowl. The plan backfired; when the Russians saw the films, their reaction was, “‘They have cars!'”

After the Second World War, military men returned home looking for a job, a wife and a car—not necessarily in that order. At the same time, older people had more money because of the upswing in the economy, women who'd worked while the men had fought were feeling increasingly independent and even teenagers with part-time jobs could afford used models. Freed to once again produce cars instead of military vehicles, the automakers were initially unable to meet the demand.

Advances in technology and the economic benefits of war soon catapulted America into the future predicted by the 1939 World's Fair with its “The World of Tomorrow” theme. The promotion of science and technology as the path to prosperity and personal happiness was as naive as it was optimistic, but influential nonetheless. One of the fair's highlights was Futurama. Designed by Norman Bel Geddes and sponsored by General Motors, the exhibit took people on a ride through what the world would be like in 1960—a future dominated by cars and highways. Cities would separate their residential, commercial and industrial areas for the sake of efficiency and the suburbs would sprawl. (Alas, this all came to pass.) Futurama's “express motorways,” engineered to
improve safety while increasing speed, helped to sell Americans on the idea of superhighways, though the interstate system the government started building twenty years later did not include the automated radio control system to keep cars a safe distance from each other.

By the mid-1950s, American culture and car culture were becoming almost synonymous. And the automobile was taking on greater meaning, according to cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken. In “When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick,” an essay collected in
Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management
, McCracken focuses on the style known as the “Forward Look,” the distinctive appearance of mid-century cars. “The Forward Look was not very streamlined, forsaking the ‘least possible resistance' for the greatest possible show,” writes McCracken, who describes it as imposing, dramatic and heavy with chrome. “Consumers might be embracing modernist simplicity in their homes, offices, clothing, and appliance designs. But when it came to cars, they wanted something else.”

Many experts—including industrial designer Loewy and economist Galbraith—hated the style, deriding it as vulgar and gaudy and a triumph of marketing over engineering and common sense. But everybody else loved the tail fins, the grinning grilles, the oversized bodies, the wraparound windshields, the hood ornaments, all that chrome—even the obvious references to air and space travel in the names. To the buyers, according to McCracken, these cars represented the future: “The 1954 Buick was science and technology ‘come down to earth,' proof of what the cascade of progress could do for the consumer.”

The Forward Look may have lasted for only a few short, but wildly successful, years, but it helped change the relationship people had with their cars. “To take the wheel in 1954 was to control three and a half tons of metal and glass and gain dramatically
in the speed, grace, and power with which one moved,” argues McCracken. “Unable (or unwilling) to see exactly where driver leaves off and car begins, drivers were inclined to take credit for properties that belonged to the car. They were now large, gleaming, and formidable. The speed, grace, and power of the car now belonged to them.”

More than that, in the 1950s, people talked about “getting ahead,” “travelling in the fast lane” and “heading straight for the top.” And there was no better way to show off social status than with a car. As the post-war baby boom peaked, parents wanted a house in the sprawling suburbs, a television (ideally a colour one) and maybe a mahogany dining room set. And they wanted to be able to trade in their automobile every couple of years. There was so much homogeneity in society—practically everyone watched
The Ed Sullivan Show
on Sunday night—that a great new set of wheels was one of the few ways to stand out in the crowd. A car, right down to its age and even the trim level, defined social status, and people were jealous of what their neighbours drove. “The automobile was a consumer good that didn't merely claim or show or seek to prove mobility,” McCracken contends in his essay, “it was mobility.”

MCCRACKEN REMEMBERS
seeing the way young men identified with their cars in 1962. As an eleven-year-old boy in suburban Vancouver, he and his buddies liked to stand on a street corner in the Saturday evening dusk and wait for big Chevys and Fords to stop. Once the boys caught the eye of the driver, one of them would hork on the hood. And then, as soon as the enraged owner had stepped out of his beloved machine—often leaving it unattended on the street— the little imps would run like hell. Since they called the drivers greasers, the boys dubbed their game “calling grease.” It was just a mischievous bit of fun, but it taught McCracken something about the relationship between people and their cars (even if it took him years to really understand it). After one getaway, the boys smoked
their victory cigarettes and pondered the reaction of the drivers. That's when the sagest of the spitters explained to his co-conspirators, “They don't see any difference between themselves and the car. You spit on their car, you spit on them.”

Eight years after those carefree days of “calling grease,” McCracken got a job as actress Julie Christie's chauffeur while she filmed Robert Altman's
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
in Vancouver, though he drove her around in a Volkswagen instead of a limo. Later, he became a contemporary cultural anthropologist who studied the value of objects in our consumer society and now works around the world as a consultant to companies such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Kraft. His services, which he describes as ethnographic and anthropological research, help these clients understand the “head and heart of the consumer.” He now lives in Connecticut, where “the signature car is a tiny, stick-thin blonde in a gigantic black SUV.” McCracken still believes there is a lot of meaning to be found in our cars, though there's much more diversity today, both in what we drive and how other people react to it.

One reason the car is such a powerful communicator is that it sends out its intended and unintended messages even when we aren't using it. “The weird thing about cars is—and that's why every brand has to say something—people put them in their driveway,” said Dave Kelso. Now a consultant, he was a creative director with MacLaren McCann, a Toronto ad agency, where he spent a decade working on the GM account. A carpenter before he was a creative director, he has been driving Chevy trucks for twenty-five years. Currently, he has a Silverado that he still uses to haul lumber and tools. He pointed out that people never put, say, a box of soap on display in the same way they do a car. “What you put in your driveway says something about you. Now it may say that you've got a deal, it may say that you're cheap, it may say that you make more than everybody thinks or that you think you make more than anybody thinks.” Even cars that don't appear to make a statement often say something about the driver: the rich man who
drives a battered old jalopy may want to appear frugal or he may simply not care about cars, preferring to spend his dough on his watch or his sailboat.

The car we own can express who we are—or, at least, who we think we are—but the image we think we're projecting may not be the same as the one other people are getting when they look at us. When I was a teenager, my friends and I all thought the Dodge Dart was a car for senior citizens, but surely the people who bought them didn't want to advertise their advanced age. The same goes for those who traditionally bought Buicks, which many people consider the current equivalent of the Dart. One friend of mine, while stuck behind a slow-moving Buick, vehemently insisted, “Every Buick driver is a ninety-year-old man who hasn't checked his mirror in decades and has a wife who has never been behind the wheel of a car.”

Such snap judgments are, of course, often wrong. Buick's image is changing, for example. And while the minivan driver could be a soccer mom, minivans are also popular with seniors because they're easy to get in and out of. And the same vehicle can mean two completely different things to two different people. Luxury cars are no longer universally admired the way they once were. For decades, the Cadillac was the symbol of success; then, in the 1980s, a German sedan meant power and wealth; and lately, celebrity athletes and actors have made the Escalade, Cadillac's SUV, the ride to be seen in. Regardless of the most-desired make and model of the moment, some cynics will dismiss them as symbols of crass consumerism and their drivers as people with more money than brains or taste.

Environmental awareness also affects the way we see vehicles and their drivers. To some people (including the owners, presumably) an SUV is stylish, powerful and practical, but others think anyone who drives one is a selfish jerk who doesn't care about the planet. At the same time, drivers of hybrids such as the Toyota Prius can be perceived as either virtuous or obnoxiously smug.
“Hummers are now deeply antagonizing and will remain so,” McCracken argued, “even as the Prius can seem a little pious.”

Even a car's colour may have meaning. According to Leatrice Eiseman, a colour consultant and author of several books on the subject, a black car suggests the owner is not easily manipulated, loves elegance and appreciates classics; white conveys fastidiousness; dark blue indicates credibility, confidence and dependability while light blue denotes someone who is calm, faithful and quiet; orange implies the driver is fun-loving and talkative, but also fickle and trendy. According to Dupont Automotive, silver (which projects an image of cool elegance) remains the most popular colour for car buyers, and urban legend has long held that drivers of red cars—who are sexy, high-energy and like speed—get more than their fair share of speeding tickets.

The way we drive says even more about us than the cars we own. Aside from the relentless speeders, some aggressive drivers go too fast while recklessly switching lanes in an attempt to shave a few seconds off their travel time, while others tailgate in the hope the vehicle in front will get out of the way. Good luck to them when they get behind those drivers who pick a lane, travel at or just above the speed limit and go on autopilot as if expecting everyone else on the road to drive the way they do.

Some people keep their vehicles immaculately clean and meticulously maintained while others let the junk-food wrappers, newspapers and other debris pile up as they run their cars into the ground. Some people spend hours a day in their car while for others it is simply a utilitarian device to make doing errands easier.