How Ford has Rendered the Animal Body

Car commercials primed us for the unveiling of biorobots

Photo by Prometheus via Unsplash

As it turns out, Henry Ford didn’t invent the assembly line. He repurposed the disassembly line:

For rarely recalled or interrogated is the fact that Ford modeled Highland Park’s auto assembly line on moving lines that had been operating at least since the 1850s in the vertical abattoirs of Cincinnati and Chicago, with deadly efficiency and to deadly effect. Ford, deeply impressed by a tour he took of a Chicago slaughterhouse, particularly with the speed of the moving overhead chains and hooks that kept animal “material” flowing continuously past laborers consigned to stationary and hyper-repetitive piecework, devised a similar system of moving lines for Dearborn but with a crucial mimetic twist: his automated lines speed the assembly of a machine body rather than the disassembly of an animal body.¹

This passage, one of the most laden, gut-checking two sentences I’ve read in a while, is from Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009). The book has a strong Marxist bent to it that I’m not necessarily endorsing, though I understand it and see its importance to her thinking. But I’m not convinced that turning a profit is always bad. Marxism, at least Shukin’s form of it, powerfully critiques the mentality that literally everything can be reduced to profit. (My main objection to Marxism is that, in order to issue such a critique, it has to see everything as potentially reducible to profit, making it somehow complicit in what it claims capitalism does. In other words, “Takes one to know one.”)

The second sentence of the quote above does much of the heavy lifting. In case you missed it amid the complicated syntax—which, can we just appreciate, arrests our attention and hauls us through it like a cow carcass on the mechanistic works of a packing house—Shukin is saying that Henry Ford once took an abattoir tour. What’s an abattoir? Back home in 50317 no one uses that term, though we had an abattoir, now operated by Pine Ridge Farms, that was so smelly it’s come under scrutiny by the City of Des Moines. We called it “the packing plant” and it was less than half a mile from my first employer, Anderson-Erickson Dairy, which is where I also took my first industrial tour.

AE’s tour was about a half hour long, during which we caught a whiff of old milk only once. (You have to clean things somewhere.) But can you imagine half an hour in a facility that’s entirely pervaded by the stench of dead flesh, old blood, and fecal runoff—that’s so stinky it can taint an entire zip code? And Des Moines’s little rendering plant has nothing on Chicago’s, which, around the time of Ford’s tour, you’ll recall, were made infamous by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905). In an episode that reminds me of Victor Frankenstein’s description of sourcing his materials from “dissecting rooms” and “charnel houses,”² Ford tolerated that environment long enough for a walking tour. And he came away inspired.

Shukin retells this episode in Ford’s professional journey as part of her larger enterprise, which is to establish the usefulness of the concept of “rendering” for cultural critique. For her, the term “rendering”

indexes both economies of representation (the “rendering” of an object on page, canvas, screen, etc.) and resource economies trafficking in animal remains (the business of recycling animal trimmings, bones, offal, and blood back into market metabolisms)… Rendering an object’s likeness, in other words, is not sufficient to gain power over it; the power to affect the other also requires stealing a tangible piece of its body in order to establish a pathological line of communication between “original” and “copy.”³

Depending on what she means, I might disagree with that last sentence. What we’re about to see is a series of advertisements that don’t, in and of themselves, engage the act of taking “a tangible piece of [animals’] bodies.” Nevertheless, the product they’re vaunting—the American automobile (or pickup truck)—has had a profound impact on nonhumans by directly contributing to the destruction of the environment we share with nonhuman species. On the other hand, perhaps the theft of a tangible piece of animal tissue need not have been perpetrated by the commercials’ makers. Perhaps it’s enough that the abattoir Ford toured was slaughtering animals that day because the rendering process at that time and place set in motion a long cause-and-effect chain that led to what you’re about to see. What’s ultimately important here, though, is that Shukin’s larger-picture purpose is to show us that, if animals are regularly commodified in order to drive profits, the ability to profit off of animals relies on a steady supply of animals to be commodified. That’s the driving under-current in the videos below.

In the account of Ford’s tour of the Chicago abattoir, Shukin’s reference to “a crucial mimetic twist” is not only genius—as you imagine meat twisting from a hook as it’s towed along on a chain, “crucial” should pique crucifixion imagery because the animal has literally been “lifted up” like the Son of Man⁴—with “mimesis” it points out mimicry. Ford’s assembly line was a reflection of the abattoir’s disassembly line. And that means that the terms in which he thought about cars were likely to be corporeal.

Check your automobile vocabulary for corporeal language. Your car gets hit and needs repair? Take it to “the body shop.” You only dented a corner of it? What, the “quarter panel”? As in, “drawn and quartered”? “Quarter” there is a butcher’s term. If someone’s following you, you’re “being tailed”; and if you crash into someone going the opposite direction it’s “a head-on collision.” Never mind that every car’s front end presents us with a face, suggesting it’s a person. And every car’s engine compartment is haunted by the ghosts of rendered beasts, of whom all that remains is their “horse power.” I bet you can find other examples.

The designers among us will argue this language is a skeuomorph, a vestigial remnant from a bygone age when we used horses, not cars, to get around. Maybe. But Ford not only repurposed the plants that reduced horses and other animals to every possible nickel that could be wrung out of their remains (read Shukin’s book; it’s heady but poignant), he and his heirs doubled down on the horse-car metaphor for—well, it’s going on a century now. And that’s what you’re about to see.

Before we watch commercials, it’s worth knowing that there’s a sub-field of English called “onomastics,” “the study of names.” Names matter, and if you think about the names Ford has given its cars you’ll immediately recognize a number of animals, most prominent of which are the horses, Mustang, Bronco, and yes, Pinto. But Ford also produced the Thunderbird, the Falcon, the Taurus, the Cougar, the Puma, the Bantam, and the Scorpio.

It’s one thing to skeuomorphically continue talking about the new automobiles in terms of the old horses. But it’s quite another to render automobiles as animals in order to sell them—especially long after the average buyer was too young to ever have made a grocery run on horseback or in a horse-drawn carriage. But Ford even took it beyond the names listed above. By the time you’ve read this, you’ll wonder whether it’s possible to sell a car without somehow evoking animality.

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1940s

If you clocked it you noticed this is a one-minute commercial, but the first ten seconds were spent showing seagulls in flight. “The magic… of soaring wings!” that announcement that starts the pitch, is wonder language, the same genre as “The Astounding Athletic Power of Quadcopters” or “Meet the Dazzling Flying Machines of the Future,” as we saw last post. In fact, the commercial’s entire script is wonder language, but it’s worth analyzing the rest of it because it’s showing us how to sell a car in mid-twentieth-century America. Check it:

...and the smooth action of the new Ford-soft transverse springs… with the balance… and ease… of gulls in flight. A stabilized ride… new-cushion comfort. Ease and quiet. New travel luxury in every Ford car. Get the feel of V-8 performance! See your nearest Ford dealer for a ride in the quality car in the low-price field.

As it turns out, the seagulls were about shocks. Great.

But, if you’re familiar with the Transatlantic accent, which pronounces “girls” as “gulls,” they were also a pun: “If you drive a Ford, you’re going to see gulls—lots of ‘em.” Or at least two. Notice how the two women show up on-screen at exactly this point in the script. And with those two girls (or gals), you might go see some gulls. And then, who knows? If they roll with balance and ease, those gals might just give you some smooth action in exchange for the stabilized ride you gave them. Wink-wink. The pervy coded language isn’t all that subtle, and it’s all the more deplorable for making the seagulls complicit in the objectification of women. See, that’s the logic of the ad. The gull is a wonder, a desirable object. The car is like the gull. Get a car, you get the gull-like traits that will get you the gals. The natural wonder of gull flight thus becomes a gateway to potentially infinite accessorizing, a sure route to getting your jollies.

What do you see here? What have I missed?

1953

I confess, I love the subtle complexity of this commercial. By calling the air freighter a “flying boxcar” and then having it unload a pickup, we get three quintessentially American vehicle references in one: airplane, railroad, pickup truck. It’s vaunting Postwar American infrastructure, for sure.

But check out 0:19. This airplane is also corporeal. It’s literally giving birth to an F-100 pickup. (My wife’s a pelvic floor physical therapist. Birth is dinner-table conversation at our house and I can’t not notice these things.) Remember this artifical birth imagery because we’ll see it again in a Mercury commercial later on. The birth scene is a clue that the rest of the commercial is the F-100’s coming-of-age story, a character arc through which it grows up to become a contributing member of society. It’s “bound for a rigid series of tests” (0:24), an apt description of K-12 education even in the fifties. Let me walk you through it. (That’s a pun. You can chuckle at it.)

• First, the truck’s “as easy to handle as a baby carriage” (0:49). We hear this line as it slaloms the posts on a parking-lot course, like Bambi learning to walk.

• “Next, the Marines put the pickup to work” (0:54). From the “driverized cab,” in the “Guadalcanal Section” of Quantico the driver notices a beast crossing the road. Oh wait, never mind—that’s a tank. But the tank’s animal-like behavior and truck’s deference to it, like it’s on safari or something, is difficult to miss.

• From there the truck goes on “to save time, to save money, to get jobs done fast” (1:24).

The arc here partakes of corporeal imagery at points along the way, particularly in the encounters with the plane and the tank, but it also sets up a logic of organic development that’s characteristic of biological bodies, not metal machines. (On the bright side, there aren’t any bad animal puns about getting girls.) There are no animals in this commercial, but animality has been rendered down and mapped onto the vehicular bodies in order to sell returning G.I.s a vision of (biological) flourishing made possible by owning a pickup, a life that mirrors the death they saw machines deal in WWII.

1974-75

Remember the airplane that gave birth to the F-100 in the fifties? Here we are, twenty years later, and now it’s a helicopter giving (re)birth to a (Mercury) Cougar. “For 1974, Cougar is totally new!” (0:18) This is Shukine⁵ mimesis, a parallel to Ford’s reconfiguration of the abattoir: if a wildcat can be trapped and shoved into a metal cylinder, a car can be released from it. Or: if a wildcat can be caught and civilized, a civilized automobile can be unleashed and turned loose. In fact, the narrator literally announces, “We’ve civilized the big cat” (0:24).

But as with the seagulls in the 1940s, here again the animal is bound up in sexual politics. All of the “civilizing” that’s been done apparently applies also to the woman who climbs into the car and lustily strokes the giant kitty in the back seat. (Seriously—that’s somebody’s daughter!)

There’s a range of meaning to the term “cougar,” as you can see from this entry in the Urban Dictionary (pardon the language; I didn’t write it). My preferred source on etymologies, The Oxford English Dictionary, registers nothing on this range of meaning for “cougar.” But I grew up in the early twenty-first century and can tell you that since the late 1990s, at least, “cougar” has carried Urban Dictionary’s connotation. I can’t prove it, but I suspect that range of meaning—the older woman stalking younger male prey—comes from this next commercial. Which is to say, Farrah Fawcett was the archetypal cougar, in the Urban Dictionary sense of the term.

They didn’t stop objectifying women for male viewers, but somewhere between 1974 and 1975, someone in Ford/Mercury Marketing figured out they needed to stop selling a wife car to men (1974) and start selling a power car to women. Here the animal symbolizes an appeal to the animal sexuality implied in 1974. In 1974 the message was, “We civilized the Cougar so you can give one to your wife, who can be as uncivilized as she likes inside this boundary you’re buying for her.” By 1975 the message was, “‘It’s restless. It’s civilized. It’s challenging. It’s serene.’ (0:01) And if you drive it, you will be too.”

The cut at 0:25, from the cougar running over the dune, to Farrah Fawcett driving, to the Cougar prowling down the highway, maps the three onto one another, reinforcing the message.

We should also spend a second on the dress-drop and backless swimsuit. Many of the Christians I grew up around would complain that “it’s too revealing.” But “revealing” is entirely the point. The apocalypse is a common move in selling tech to the public. We’re used to thinking of “apocalypse” as a war or a cataclysm, but the word literally means “unveiling.” This is literally an unveiling of the car for 1975, and it’s celebrated by an unveiling of Farrah Fawcett. If she is the car is the cat, then this unveiling is mimetically an unleashing—of Farrah Fawcett, of the cat, and of the car for the year. And one more thing about apocalypse: any time you see birth imagery, it’s apocalyptic also because birth is just another kind of unveiling. As W.B. Yeats wrote, “a terrible beauty is born.”⁶

2013

Up to this point, the analyses I’ve offered lay out all the major concepts you need to see interesting things in this commercial. So before you read my analysis, what do you see?

For one thing, the apocalypse we saw in the 1975 Farrah Fawcett Cougar commercial returns here. Check the way this Mustang keeps unveiling its many selves. As with Farrah Fawcett, it’s seduction, plain and simple. And it’s not subtle because they’re seducing viewers by showing them how the car seduces onlookers in a commercial.

But the really interesting moment is when the car rolls up on the little gal in the pink leotard and it tries to transform, only to be rebuffed by—by what? Her spirit?—so that the pink Mustang turns into a black Cobra. If you’re not familiar with the Cobra, it’s the high-performance model of the Mustang. And if you’re not sure how to tell the difference, the Mustang emblem is in the center of the car’s grille whereas the Cobra emblem is on the passenger’s-side end of the grille. As the now-black Cobra cruises past her, the girl’s reflection plays on two animal images at once, the way the car has just done. But whereas the car is both a Mustang and a Cobra, the girl’s black leotard and feathery wings figure her as both a cobra and a (black) swan. Three years on the heels of the film Black Swan (2010) starring Natalie Portman, this trope would have been intelligible to most viewers: she has a secret darkness.

Here in 2013, the animal’s doing the same work it’s been doing since the 1940s. Its traits are being appropriated by a car company, their vehicle is being figured as animal in order to sell the vehicle’s features, and the animalization is used to appeal to humans who want those features or, perhaps, who want to see the animal as their spirit animal. When you stop to think about it, the mimesis at play here is doing eerie things. It’s suggesting that we’re machines. Or animals. Or both. In any case, it’s objectifying us as much as we’re objectifying the car or the animals and actors selling it.

2018

I want to talk about the Ford Ranger Raptor next, but first I have to make sure you’re fresh on an old classic, Jurassic Park (1993). Well, just this scene:

“Wait a sec, Aaron,” you say? “I though this was about car commercials.” It is. Did you know that Jurassic Park was also the unveiling of the Ford Explorer? Marketing the brand-new SUV was a major piece of the film’s commercial work. But even more interesting is this bit from MotorTrend on whether the Explorers used in the film were early tests of a self-driving system. What’s more, this was the first time CGI had ever successfully portrayed lifeforms like the raptors and tyrannosaurus rex that scared so many of us so well. The CGI Spielberg used was so compelling George Lucas finally felt able to remaster the original three Star Wars films and include the alien creatures he’d always wanted to portray.⁷

Look at how corporeal these Explorers are when the T-Rex attacks, though. Instinctively, he overturns the vehicle with the kids in it and then attacks it, ripping out its guts and kicking the ‘carcass.’ (Catalytic converter thieves, y’all got nothin’ on T-Rex.) The suggestion of the truck’s corporeality isn’t subtle, and the fear of nature that the film was deploying was amplified by the insinuation that some natural creatures are so powerful that not even “Ford Tough” can withstand their attacks.

But the T-Rex looming over the cowering SUV in this scene is just an historical backdrop for the next ad, which features—tellingly—the Ford Ranger Raptor. If you haven’t seen Jurassic Park, or haven’t seen it in a while, the only creatures in the film scarier than T-Rex are the raptors.

Before you read my analysis, what do you see here?

It’s also worth remembering that “raptor” doubles as a reference to large birds of prey, and you heard it there at 0:28, while you were looking out over the entire mining site. That one bird call does a ton of work. The echo creates a sublime sense of the mine’s vastness. And the sound itself vaunts the truck’s prowess even as it reminds us that “raptor” also includes “eagle,” which is historically a symbol of American military dominance and of the divine. The animal coding is brilliant.

In the opening shot that mimics a Nielsen rating screen, the truck is labeled in yet another animal epithet: “Badass.” Like the Mustang commercial in 2013, animals get mixed. “Raptor” already connotes both a dinosaur and an eagle; and then to those we add the donkey. I once had a neighbor who drove a Ford pickup with a bumper sticker that said “My [male anatomy] are bigger than my brain.” The chimera of species mapped onto the Raptor makes me think that guy was Ford’s ideal customer.

The logic of the old F-100 commercial returns here as well, but on a larger scale. There are many species of vehicle in this mining environment, including rabid packs of motorcycles, vicious herds of dune buggies, and of course, the mimetic correlate of the looming T-Rex: an end-loader. As the Raptor scoots beneath the arm hoisting the end-loader’s bucket, with its row of sharp teeth, it’s hard not to read it as a rewriting of Jurassic Park. In 1993, T-Rex kills the raptors. A quarter-century later, the Raptor escapes T-Rex’s mechanical look-a-like.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the way this commercial renders bodies lies in the sort of vehicular surgery it does. Check out the bit at 1:12, where the Raptor is being pursued by the pack of dirt bikes. There’s a cut to the truck’s suspension right around 1:15, and that cut—it’s a cut, people; that’s what filmmakers call it when you switch shots—opens up the truck’s body, as it were, showing us its organs. It’s an innovative application of the classic adage, “Show, don’t tell.” Rather than Howard Cosell’s skeevy grandpa crooning to us about “smooth action” as we look at seagulls, we get a first-hand glimpse of the Raptor’s rugged features. This truck isn’t for picking up chicks, it’s for leaving dirt bikes in the dust. It’s “The Astounding Athletic Power of Quadcopters” all over again, only this time with a pickup truck.

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If I seem annoyed, even outraged in places here, it’s because this isn’t what God created nonhuman species for. This sex-joking objectification, this cutting open, this grab-it-and-make-it-serve-us mentality—these all lie along a continuum with the small-animal torture we worry about when we see it in young boys. They’re evidence of a culture with a death drive, and as I’ll have to expound later, to love what God has made entails something we might call life-ism. Christians believe in a Christ that conquered death, who offers eternal life. And depending on how you define “animal,” that offer may extend to beings in creation who exist well beyond the human circle.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.

1. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 86.

2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, England, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37.

3. Shukin, 21-22.

4. John 3.14.

5. Nicole Shukin, if you ever read this, I hope you’ll pardon my turning your last name into an adjective. But it happens in academic writing a lot. Marxian. Levinasian. Wellsian. Faustian. Chaucerian. Shavian. So why not in internet writing as well?

6. W.B. Yeats, “Easter, 1916,” The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1996), 180-182.

7. If you sift through Star Wars message boards you’ll find another version of this. Mine’s kinder, whether or not that’s warranted.