THE LONE DRIVER RIDES AGAIN

...Television's spectacles have roots in centuries-old myths, just as they recycle and transform them...

...Chrysler's tale, as retold in mythic proportions by Lee Iacocca and assimilated to the romance of his own career, thus becomes a double story of modern bootstrap success—a "revolution" for independence against monarchs (Iacocca versus Henry Ford, Chrysler versus the Japanese) rather than a tale of Government bailout...

...For as Dodge's deserted city inadvertently (or brilliantly...

...The corporate savior as folk hero—this man is so imposing, we're meant to think, it's as if he'll have the whole plane to himLooking Through the Screen Entertainer, painkiller, vast wasteland, companion to the lonely, white noise, thief of time...

...surrender to the surroundings, indeed become them, as the Lone Driver becomes his car and its synthesized music...

...The car then accelerates at Star Wars-like warp velocity and takes off into ethereal hyperspace...

...Miami Vice and the high-tech car commercials share yet another feature to be found high and low throughout contemporary culture: their studied blankness of expression...

...The two of them are alone in this vacated kingdom...

...Not for him the viscosity of everyday life...

...rather, it was eerily dislocated, brashly declaring its otherness...

...So another appeal of the commercial is: Buy the car and you can have a piece of the comeback action...

...Commercial culture now helps him imagine a freedom he has forfeited in fact...

...Crockett, Tubbs, & Co...

...the low-slung camera multiplies the sense of vertigo and transcendence—again, the car-commercial look—as pursuer and pursued slide their way scenically through the city...

...Wherever this car went was the fast lane, the driver unaccompanied, sleek, young, white, and usually male...

...In Vice's Miami, the players are regularly composed into fashion tableaux, sequences of disconnected stills, as in the music videos which inspired the series, but in Vice more artfully arranged—strictly for their pastel colors, the spaces between them, the way they stand framed in an alleyway or deployed against a wall...

...He lugs private sorrow like a great dog behind him...

...Growling his few words with supreme reluctance, he also expresses his disdain for the alternatively wimpy, whimsical, and unfathomable law-enforcement bureaucracy by straining to discipline his facial muscles...

...Stylistically, it was not one of a kind...

...Sociologists of the 1940s and 1950s, more impressed with the bloodstream's powers of resistance, began to stress the ways in which readers, listeners, and viewers play an active part in deflecting or distorting messages from the press, radio, and later television, in effect "rewriting" the "texts" passed down to them...

...The sight fills him with awe...

...It is just television...

...Like some primordial swamp, the image-making appliance and its attendant industries spawn new forms—cable, VCRs, big screens, stereo sound...

...Copywriters write storyboards, directors direct, and company executives approve the results to a particular end: aligning their product with a going ideological trend...

...We traffic with a world society that is more than an empty place into which we plunge, American Express cards in hand...

...vacuous themselves, like manikins, they "wear" the show's self-consciously created look and sound...

...Accepting the challenge of hypernew technology, the driver has earned his place in the proverbial new fast lane...

...He follows it down a narrow street, but it's gone...

...Television may fall into traditions and accumulate markets, but neither traditions nor markets automatically crank out the shows...

...Implicitly, then, one appeal of the new-style car commercial may be this: During the day, manage your way through the organization...

...Always on the go, they owe no loyalty to merely local, even terrestrial, connections...

...And yet there is pathos on top of irony in all these commercials' implicit claims that the Real Man gets to be Real only when he slides into the right driver's seat...

...Typically, there are thirty or more splices, thirty or more distinct images, in a single thirty-second spot, succeeding each other like fragments glimpsed from an urban freeway, or indeed like shreds of programs that spin past today's television viewers as they "zap" across the spectrum of channels with the help of remote-control devices...

...But the surfer of surfaces is a committed innocent, and his innocence makes him dangerous...

...They don't have much to say to each other...

...The word, at roots, refers to seeing far...

...Overhead looms a billboard depicting—what posthistoric icon of the age...

...Today, says the airline, every seat is potentially the driver's...

...T.G...

...In special cases, it traveled in packs over the desert: Mercedes-Benz widens the gap...

...As new channels and new gadgets spin variations on old themes, the newspapers and trade journals fill with booster talk about "revolutions...

...The commercial hopes to piggyback the product's image onto the image of this transformation, and to leave a trace of the two yoked together within those folds of memory where it may eventually trigger a purchase...

...For the most part, television lets us see only close-up, shows us only what the nation already presumes, focuses on what the culture already knows—or, more precisely, enables us to gaze upon something the appointed seers think we need or want to know...

...The fantasy of innocent power contributed to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese as well as 57,000 Americans in Vietnam—all mutely bearing witness to the impossibility of innocence and the intractable weight of the real world...

...The blank expression he has displayed up to this point could be read as self-protective response to the anguish of his uprooted-ness...

...Some scholars, bothered by the refusal of English departments to take television seriously, have tried to equip television with genre pedigrees...

...But the potentials of new technology don't by themselves dictate the uses to which they are put...

...By contrast, Crockett and Tubbs seem devoid of biography...

...self...

...But from the viewpoint of post-World War II social science, such suspicions amounted to primitive paranoia...

...The idea of self-sufficiency as such carries a certain nobility...

...The free-striding hero transfers his imprimatur to— what other airline?—American...

...But these are singular moments...

...Glinting like gun barrels, they looked unapologetically metallic...

...The fantasy of the technological fix, of unbridled power wrapped in a revamped innocence, represents a nation's lingering childhood...

...Driving is the perfect representation for their way of life...

...The high-tech image of the streamlined car finesses the discrepancy: It embodies the actual training our business and academic institutions are set up to reward, as well as the actual life of the professional-managerial class...

...the purchase of the car is an emblem of promotion...

...Color-coded like the walls, they exist for the sake of spatial arrangement...

...Instantly, dystopia segues into Utopia...

...What is this thing, this network of social relations, called television...

...Their bodies form part of an arrangement, like models and Japanese flowers...

...Two-and-a-half decades after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission called American television a "vast wasteland," one hesitates to resurrect a metaphor that instantly—deservedly—became a cliche...

...Meanwhile, the ever-lengthening miles of everyday television criticism—this show is bad, that one better—do not begin to address the relentless quality of television's presence in the nation's living rooms, or the ways in which it embodies the stratagems of broadcasting's proprietors...

...Feel lucky to have the chance...

...Place is backdrop for free-hanging sound and velocity, as in the high-tech car commercials...

...the car is the active agent...

...Alexis de Tocqueville, that most observant Frenchman, would have found television familiar in many ways: American culture, he observed in the 1830s, already was given to comfortable, sensational, mass-produced amusements, "vehement and bold," "untutored and rude," aiming "to stir the passions more than to charm the taste...

...black Americans unearth their Roots...

...they play on muted strings...

...Pressed too far, this impulse slips into pure apologia, as if once a program is located within a tradition, it is automatically sanctified and even seen as the repository of "emancipatory" yearnings...

...Ingenious copywriters have discovered how to frame that most collectivized form of transport, the commercial airliner, as a carrier for the contemporary range rider—in particular, for the business traveler who accounts for the bulk of air travel...

...Our high-tech car ad of the mid-1980s reveals something about the new-style man who has been pronounced fit to drive into the future...

...The car slides off the billboard and out into the world...

...Overcorrecting a hitherto oversimple thesis, these analysts ended up underplaying the unifying styles and ideological homogeneities of the contemporary media—the ways in which they have agreed, for instance, on the pieties of the consumer society and the good/ bad polarities of the Cold War...

...Like good fashion models, indeed like the high-tech cars in the commercials, Detectives Crockett and Tubbs seem to embody their surroundings...

...To insist on the obvious, Americans are not loners...

...This sort of image helps reconcile the manager to his actual dependency on the big institutions and the real movers and shakers...

...Computer-generated graphics and the electronic synthesizer make possible some of the commercials' state-of-the-art moves...

...The city is deserted...

...Television may do private service as a time-killer or babysitter, but for the society as a whole it is the principal circulator of the cultural mainstream...

...And, indeed, scholars and critics have been inspecting the electronic media for half a century now...

...Those whose identities are elusive can rise to power on the strength of their blank adaptability...

...The electronic pulse continues...

...Obligatory car chases have a special look on Miami Vice, one of the most popular prime-time shoot-'em-ups of recent years...

...The man stalks through evacuated streets, seeking a sign of life...

...The rat-a-tat pacing, as in MTV and the pulsating car commercials, draws attention away from the narrative, such as it is, diverting it to the "look," which slides by as if on the other side of a tour-bus picture window...

...The hard-edged look echoes the fashion-magazine layouts which preceded both MTV and the pulsating car commercial, all meant to "break through the clutter," as the advertisers say—the clutter being the profusion of images themselves, of billboards, commercials, and television shows, the unending cornucopia spilling its promises upon the national attention, the noise finally drowning out each of its poor components...

...It conveys what we are supposed to think is the magic of things—things which, if we buy them, will work miraculous transformations in our lives: telephones that wire us into community, eyeliners that make us alluring, beer that consolidates our desire to be sociable, even American...

...Like rocketing cars and sleek cops, Star Wars represents the triumph of absolute, abstract wishfulness...

...Each approach has its virtues...

...The ideal man of the commercials embodies, in short, the master fantasy of the Reagan era: the fantasy of thrusting, self-sufficient man, cutting loose, free of gravity, free of attachments...

...the earth and its well-trafficked roads are too mundane to hold them...

...RIDES AGAIN spectives...

...To be seen properly, it has to be seen as the place where force-fields intersect: economic imperatives, cultural traditions, political impositions...

...At least Castillo has a seething character to suppress...

...Sit still and the Force will come to you, all turboed and ultradriven...

...Here is the contemporary reworking of one of the oldest American archetypes—the hunter, the trapper, the frontiersman redux, that mythic solitary reincarnated in the Nineteenth Century as the cowboy who gallops across the wide-open spaces, fused with his horse, responsible to no one and nothing but virtue, to save the day for weaker and more domestic folk...

...Today's young, upwardly mobile aspirants are being trained not to take risks but to minimize them...

...yet the frontier is closed, his range is bounded, and he inhabits a transformed world of large corporations...

...But despite the I've-seen-it-all posture of Crockett, Tubbs, and the Lone Driver, there remains an enormous innocence in the all-American idea of the loner, the man with no name, the hard-bitten conqueror of feelings whose hard-won prowess costs him nothing...

...What we are seeing on the small screen is the corporate employee trying to insinuate himself into the role of the official culture hero of the Reagan period—the entrepreneur, that Promethean embodiment of progress who answers the call of the market and creates something from nothing, enriching himself to everyone's good and at no one's expense...

...The commercial image of the car cannot be understood, therefore, as simply an automatic reflex of the state of the technical art, or as an idiosyncratic sales stratagem...

...Blank expression and flat appearance come together in a common chord which resounds through contemporary culture like a great dead sound...

...Moreover, neither has subjected the institutions of mass culture—the networks, studios, news rooms, board rooms, advertising agencies—to enough critical scrutiny...

...The environment sings the songs and virtually speaks the lines...

...indeed, a thick web of implicit cross-references binds together the computer testing of cars, the computers in the cars, and computer graphics, as if to say that the dazzling displays in the commercials rub off on the excellence of the cars...

...Against the belief that anything people watch is thereby in the public good—a belief these seekers after easy emancipation share with Ronald Reagan's FCC chairman—there are censorship campaigns: against television treatment of sex (usually from the Right) and violence (usually from the Left...

...The point was even plainer in a slogan of a few years earlier: Ford Puts You in the Driver's Seat...

...Such cars were at home anywhere...

...It does happen, at times, that television allows us to see far, bringing images of the unknown into the household, jarring our settled worlds, lifting curtains, letting fresh truths into otherwise closed rooms...

...The sovereign I who stalks through the transcendental verse of Walt Whitman and the essays of Henry David Thoreau does not think he has the right to go anywhere and tell anyone where to get off...

...There must be a sliver of the child's mind which knows that childhood has to end...

...A wasteland that grows vaster and apparently more abundant by the year remains a wasteland...

...Most people who watch television are amateur television critics, but few devote much energy to thinking their way into and through the wasteland...

...But perhaps this time the cliche won't function to spare us the necessity of thought...

...sporting their high-gloss reflective paints, they unabashedly resembled surfaces as much as the rich tones of a generation ago simulated depths...

...Given Vice's portentous pulsations, in fact, private feeling is dwarfed and superfluous...

...The way cars are presented is an amalgam of the way advertising agencies and their clients think, the way they think we think, and the way they want us to think about what a car is...

...The scholarly literature on the mass media in America began in the 1930s by analyzing the content of radio programs, counting words and themes, aiming to flush out hidden messages, subtexts, and mythic meanings in a presumably scientific fashion...

...It needs criticism and understanding which cut beneath annoyance or apologia...

...The successful executive has become a culture hero of such proportions that he even stars in a commercial which stands as a sort of footnote to the type we have been discussing...

...The Pilgrims who came to these shores came to an inhabited land, not the vacant wilderness they had imagined...

...compete for status and power...

...In return, you have the opportunity to test yourself and, if that is not enough, you will be rewarded with the wherewithal to break free—after hours, on weekends...

...They go for long periods without speaking...

...institutions do that...

...He is handsome in a blank way, expressionless, almost robotic...

...It is the end product of a complex set of marketing decisions and therefore, in part, a useful searchlight into larger patterns of meaning...

...For all three, though, feeling is revealed to be difficult and dangerous—as Crockett discovers when he lets himself fall for the femme fatale...

...The Lone Driver finds congenial company, breaks through the crust of claustrophobic society, and roars into overdrive action...

...Supermanager and his racketball partner, Superpro, step into nearby vehicles to emerge as streamlined go-getters...

...The cars swooped along diagonal lines in severely foreshortened perron Gitlin teaches sociology and mass communications at the University of California, Berkeley...

...its very technology, like other technologies, merges from a matrix of commercial interests, within a culture of privatized individuals...

...The new Dodge...

...one way or another, she is setting him up for the bad guy...

...Yet neither has paid much attention to the stultifying forms of popular culture, to the ways in which mass-circulation styles train their audiences to see accordingly and discourage practitioners from making unconventional statements...

...Yet the fantasy retains its extraordinary force...

...Today's commercials reproduce the world view of a manager who fancies himself, however inaccurately, in the driver's seat, mastering all the onrushing force technology can provide...

...He manages a grin only at the moment when he finds himself—through no apparent action of his own—behind the wheel...

...rather, it should clarify something that has been forgotten, or repressed, as television has made more promises, become more complicated and confusing...

...self-consciousness is precisely the point...

...It has a life of its own—indeed, more life than his own...

...The image of the car soaks up certain ideals in circulation at the moment, and squeezes a version of them back at us...

...often stare past each other...

...The safe thing is to stay cool, hang loose, be a pro, wear mirror shades, keep to the surfaces...

...It might be found swooping through unpopulated nature, showing its stuff, for example, on a snaky mountain road or through the Arctic tundra...

...West Germans confront at least a soap-opera version of the Holocaust...

...Thus, a commercial is, among other things, a tiny Utopia...

...Cosmopolitans by upbringing and training, they uproot with relative ease when the company or the career track relocates them...

...The car itself is intrinsically a symbol for the simultaneous pleasures of freedom and containment...

...The car commercials match certain moods present in prime-time mayhem...

...Troubled...

...Their ambitions are as unbounded, indeed celestial, as they are abstract...

...The "shining city upon a hill" of which John Winthrop wrote exists only in commerce with other cities upon other hills—not all of them shining, but all of them utterly real...

...Vice's environments of artifice are intended to arrest the attention...

...take care of business...

...they go to school to become not entrepreneurs but managers and professionals whose career paths will be sheltered from both risk and failure in quite firmly established enterprises...

...In one of the few variations featuring a woman, the car glided up a building wall—transformed for the occasion into a mountain—to summon her from her closed-in apartment...

...Artfully placed in a long shot on the beach, they are the Crosshatch where sound waves meet...

...BY TODD GITLIN This commercial ran on the networks through 1984 and 1985, an unusually long time in the high-turnover world of the TV spot...

...Our car commercial manages to reconcile the ideological uplift of the Reagan years with its more downbeat realities...

...Copyright © 1986 by Todd Gitlin...

...Whether found in the mountains, in deserts, or on the beach, in space, in the future, or in combinations thereof, the su-percar slid free of a car's normal settings...

...Consider how we witness the fantasy of ultimate, self-sufficient innocence in Ronald Reagan's "dream" of a Star Wars shield which presumably guarantees national security—although the same people who today call Star Wars "the only thing that offers any real hope to the world" have been telling us for forty years that nuclear deterrence was, itself, that hope...

...And therefore television bears special watching...

...The music was electronically synthesized, pulsating, thumping, thrusting...

...For television is not an apparatus invading us from without...

...Teenagers in the hinterlands discover rock-'n'-roll dancing on American Bandstand...

...Their boss, Lieutenant Castillo, in one way surpasses them, displaying a constant effort to clamp a mask over suppressed grief and rage as he passes down the higher-ups' stupid commands...

...But even as television becomes television-plus, it remains the national dream factory, bulletin board, fun-house mirror for distorted images of our national desires and fears—and yet none of the metaphors seems quite right, because finally television is not quite anything else...

...If television is going to give America's central tension its due, it needs the relative amplitude of the episode series...

...The CEO's maneuvers are so masterful, his self-assurance so sublime, that his transportation must be supreme to suit...

...The airline commercial has come a long way from the time when all it could sell were the few inches' length of the stewardesses' skirts or the many inches' distance between rows of seats...

...There have been other approaches to slippery television, too...

...There was no traffic, no rush hour, no parking crunch...

...It offers the incarnation of a popular ideal—or, rather, of the ideas of that ideal held by the marketers...

...it is a satisfied go-getter who now turns to us and grins...

...then, in imagination, at least, you can cut loose—even peel off the road altogether and take off into another dimension, into a dream of unbridled freedom...

...Here the Lone Driver and the national ensemble can be blended into the elite team...

...If nuclear weapons threaten the prospects of life on earth, instead of rethinking the international system and the politics which has normalized the threat of Armageddon, spend hundreds of billions of dollars on dubious protection—making the world safe, in a sense, for nuclear bombs...

...Television is a screen on which the absurdities and abominations of our politics and morals are displayed in living color...

...He is man on the move, man ready to go anywhere, man whose mobility is literal as well as lateral, carrying him forward, onward, or upward, off the road, if need be, but always advancing...

...Once again, the promise of freedom conceals the fact of dependency...

...Thus, for example, The '86 Toyotas are blasting off, rocketing into the starry heavens...

...This article is adapted from "Watching Television," published in January by Pantheon...

...Everything that exists meets the eye, and the trained eye— the voyeur's eye—refuses to blink...

...suggests, the car's pilot is all but helpless before his equipment...

...even the hard-boiled I of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Ross Mac-donald's Lew Archer honors the depth and power of social decencies and binding commitments...

...occupy your niche...

...And then, with the abruptness of a jump cut, he finds himself in the driver's seat...

...Those who start as distracted robots can get promoted to the status of free men...

...both varieties of tunnel vision miss the way television reproduces larger ideologies, registers grander fantasies...

...Today's Lone Driver is a substantially updated figure, however: He looks out for Numero Uno and doesn't care who knows it...

...National economic policy rewards cozy deal-makers more than risk-takers...

...Indeed, the tag An American Revolution may remind us—may even be meant to remind us—of the Chrysler Corporation's Federally subsidized rags-back-to-riches story...

...he might be the last man in the world...

...The commercial is of a piece with the 2.5 million copies of Iacocca in print, with the book's astonishing full-year-plus at or near the top of The New York Times's nonfiction bestseller list...

...If the city has become poisonous because of cars, get a car to escape it...

...The dream of soaring to consumer heaven presupposes a too, too solid earth...

...Suddenly he spins around, as if startled by a sound...

...It pursues him, calls him, teases him...

...At the wheel, on the road, they are wild and safe, free and contained all at once—this is the ideal bargain for which managers and top professionals strive, or settle...

...Other cars succeeded in escaping the gravitational pull of earthly nature altogether and soared into the ultimate postnature: space...

...Vapors hover in the street, catching the light...

...The entrepreneur is, of course, more honored in Washington rhetoric than in real life...

...The songs themselves are thick with portent, suffusing the action with a blanket of import draped over the thin characterizations and holes in the plot...

...Indeed, the little thirty-second Utopia with which we began carries the same wishful premise as Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: Whatever technology has rendered problematic (including human life itself), technology can save...

...Now he turns and goes after the Dodge, which gives him the slip...

...As long as television is among us, let us at least scrutinize it for what it reveals about our whole society, about the institutions where power is lodged, about the nature of life—including television-watching—in the late Twentieth Century...

...In this science-fictional future, the man has left behind the present, society, the clutter of other people...

...Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Toyota, and Renault—to name only the major players-thumped out similar revved-up, high-tech, staccato barrages of images with a whoosh of crisp editing, as if the commercials themselves were being driven at four-on-the-floor, zero-to-sixty acceleration...

...Is he liberated...

...The car that was the point of the whole exercise wasn't slipping reassuringly out of the old-fashioned suburban driveway, or decorously proving its compatibility with a European chateau...

...DODGE, says the closing logo, AN AMERICAN REVOLUTION...

...This fantastical paragon is a pilot who soars through things untouched and unimpeded...

...In the process of selling their product, they crystallize a pattern out of a soup of popular moods and predispositions...

...The premise, at first, was that the media operated "hypodermi-cally," injecting propaganda into the unsuspecting social bloodstream...

...To do so is supposed to be the business of scholars...

...they are blank from the outset...

...His blankness fades...