The Safe and Delusional Urban Setting
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- more than that if one considers indirect purchases. A good answer to the question
what is the Jetta couple doing that afternoon in an urban setting might be: looking
for drugs. Doesn’t it make more sense than anything else? At the conclusion of the
commercial, they are taken out of their obvious “trance” by a truck passing and
splashing water on the windshield - the music stops and the couple look straight
ahead, still a little dazed, as if coming sown from a high, and the young man says,
“Wow, wasn’t that interesting.” The paradox is classic: the reality of the street
scene is the source of the “high.” The couple must pass through the urban experience
in order to get a feel for living. This is, either literally or figuratively, a drug run.. .and
it’s all safe and comfy inside the corporate shelter of the Volkswagen Jetta.
There must be a reason why so much of our television experience centers
on sanitized versions of urban imagery, while so little of our time and efforts go
into thinking about the deep and extended problems of urban realities. To be engaged
in urban existence without awareness or consideration of social realities, all for the
sake of countering a feeling of lifelessness in virtual suburbia, is at least as
destructive as trying to ignore such realities altogether. When the young man at the
end of the Jetta commercial states how “interesting” it all is, there in the protective
shell of the brand new Volkswagen with a super sound system, he is, I believe,
despicable. But if that’s too strong a word for a “hannless,” daunting, catchy and
extremely successful commercial, then perhaps I should say instead that he
represents a generation or two of young people who believe life-affirming
experiences can only be found in abundance in urban settings, that being high is a
gateway to that experience, and that a corporate shelter, whether it be a Jetta, a pair
of Nike sneakers, a coke, or a pair of Dockers, will be the ticket to a safe and
convenient exit from any titillating turn down a street that is usually off-limits.
Ross Talarico