My Father's Oldsmobile

I noticed a Olds Bravada parked on the street yesterday, the discontinued SUV from the discontinued badge of Olds. It reminded me of the ad campaign from the 90's, "It's not your father's Oldsmobile." One of the TV ads in the campaign featured a grandson of Ernest Hemingway, and the ad somehow linked the Bravada to the novel "Across the River and Into the Trees." I loved that ad. It had a cool-looking guy (actually, he looked a lot like Papa Hemingway). It had an organic connection to offroading; you could take your Bravada across a river and into some woods, although of course almost noone really does. It made me think of the line from the novel, something like "He closed the car door quickly and well," which is a delicously appropriate parody of Hemingway's style, by the master himself. It made me think how much I liked "A Moveable Feast."

I also thought about my father's Oldsmobile. As it happens, my father actually did have an Olds. I think it was a 1955, which we had after the 1952 Buick and before the 1959 Ford wagon. With Dad at the wheel, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from his lip, the family took the Olds across the country in 1957, an epic journey that lives in our memory. So the ad campaign was right on target as far as we were concerned. But on the other hand, wasn't "Rocket 88" one of the early rock tunes? Wasn't that a love song to a powerful V-8 engine? How come Olds didn't come to have the cachet of, say, the '55 Chevy? Too bourgeois maybe. Too close to Buick to be cool.

Speaking of ads with literary associations, the Nissan Murano ran a series of spots featuring "on road adventures," which I thought were conceptually clever. People don't really take their SUVs off road. They buy them for safety and capacity. So the ads showed people doing cool on-road-oriented activities, e.g., buying a cello in a used-instrument shop, or hunting down a first-edition Vonnegut and having the great good fortune to run into Kurt himself, so he could autograph your new purchase. The tone of those ads was pitch-perfect. All of us boomers who grew up with Vonnegut were hit where we lived, unless we had outgrown our youthful enthusiasm, which I had. But the whole idea of flasttering the reader or viewer was great: we know you are the kind of person who hunts down great cellos and first editions. Yea, right. We know that's BS. but we love it anyway.
Posted by Finn MacCool