What to say about Eminem's Chrysler commercial?
Some are saying that for “native Detroiters” the ad provokes goose bumps. (Since leaving southeast Michigan almost ten years ago I've met native Detroiters from Toledo, 32-mile road, and Ann Arbor.) Others are calling bullshit on a gritty rustbelt ad put out by a company that is now owned by Italian auto giant, Fiat. In the end though (as reported by Businessweek) pop and pathos may not be enough to save Chrysler.
Basically the spot features Eminem driving all around the Detroit metro area looking for the Fox Theater – River Rouge, Hart Plaza, the D.I.A., the suburbs, he even makes it over to Belle Isle at one point. Considering the car appears to have a navigation device this seems like an unnecessary odyssey, even for a guy who moved to the ‘burbs years ago. (Formerly of 8-mile, Em now resides north of 27-mile.) Mr. Mathers lost in the city is not, however, the only unsettling aspect of the ad. Like an out-of-towner trying to find I-75 North, the whole message is confused and more than a little panicked.
Geography is no joke in the two-minute spot. My first reaction to the ad was: Why Eminem? Why not Iggy Pop or Aretha Franklin? The answer is perhaps obvious: as a white rapper from 8-mile, Eminem can deftly navigate the city’s nasty racial politics. 8-mile road – as this image shows – is the dividing line between Black Detroit and the White Suburbs. Claiming 8-mile places him directly on the liminal space between black and white. Eminem has enough urban cred to rep Detroit, but he’s also white; he can sell Chryslers to all those folks who live north of the city (think of those big houses at 0:51). As does his persona, the rapper’s day-long trek attempts to suture the racial cuts that have defined the city's politics and geography since well before the 1967 “riots.”
Like the steam that rises year-round from the city's grates and manholes, the ad's message seems both out of place and ephemeral. The two-minute spot is filled with moments of race and class ambiguity, instances in which Detroit’s past is both evoked and erased, its “ruin porn” celebrated and eschewed. The image of Eminem griping the wheel of his Chrysler 200 is skillfully juxtaposed with the statue of Joe Louis’ fist in Hart Plaza. When Em grips the grain, does his fist evoke the Black Pride imagery of the Joe Louis Memorial or supplant it? With both images we see power, progress, and movement, but at what price? Can we even begin to compare the legacies of the two southern-come Detroiters?
(Are his palms sweaty?)
When the voice over claims “it’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel” should we simply think of Detroit’s recent hard times as a metaphor for the foundry, or should we also think of the history of “Devil’s Night” or the 1967 urban revolt that sealed the deal on white flight?
In fact, for a real treat, listen to the audio from the Chrysler commercial while watching this video on mute:
More than a strange coincidence, the mash-up of these two Detroit scenes is precisely what the Chrysler ad does in the first place: it juxtaposes past and present, pain and profit. The city's journey "to hell and back" didn't start with the economy tanking, or Colman Young or even summer '67. (And if you disagree you should read this.) And just as it's an error to see a "riot" as something that creates social conditions rather than an event that stems from them, we need to take the long view on this one. Pain and profit are imbricated in Detroit's history, the city stands as a testament to the failure of the system by which it was created. And while Chrysler isn't responsible for the brutal logic of capital that made Detroit, it isn't without a strange irony that this history is evoked to sell us more cars.
And speaking of the logic of capital, who would have thought they’d see Socialist realism in a Super Bowl commercial? Sure, if you want to get at the genuis loci of the city, feature Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals in the ad. But that’s just it, the murals speak to the foreclosed possibilities of both racial integration and labor organization in the city. They depict labor as both thriving and integrated, neither of which ever materialized in Detroit. They evoke a vision of Detroit, one in stark contrast to the city's material existence. In focusing too tightly on Rivera, however, I miss the forest for the trees. Forget the mural, what about the Chrysler ad? Industry, ruins, the promise of the future, bodies in motion - have you ever seen so many hands in a commercial? - this stuff puts Rivera to shame. It's as though the bailout money actually turned Chrysler into Socialists. Would that it were that easy.
Where the spot really errs is in its representations of real people. In an ad so high on pathos what are we supposed to think (feel?) when the first human interaction we get is with this guy:
I'm not trying to tally representations of whiteness and blackness here, hence my not mentioning the white cop that motions us to "go right ahead!" at 1:00. It's not about that. But it's Detroit in 2011 and the first person we see in this ad is a black porter giving us an approving nod? Really?
In the last analysis, my issue with the spot is that it evokes a history of bad decisions as the reason to make more of them. From pollution to the death of the union, it uses the failure of American industry as a way to rekindle faith in that very institution. It also, and with a heavy if unintended dose of irony, co-opts socialist iconography during the most capitalist of time-slots. And, in an ad that stakes a claim to city-wide solidarity, it juxtaposes burnt out buildings with posh suburbs. The ad lays bare all the bad bets Detroit has made and then, by some miracle of logic, tries to convince us to double-down. The commercial closes with Eminem solemnly intoning "This is the Motor City, and this is what we do." Sad thing is, he just may be right.
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