The Wildlife in Mopar's Legendary Worlds
If you want people to imagine machines as animals, turn them loose in an imaginary world with its own story.
Photo by Alex Shuper via Unsplash
Animalized vehicles are modern fictions, and fictitious animals live most convincingly in fictional worlds. It stands to reason, then, that if you want to sell the fiction of an animalized vehicle, a viable strategy is to make your target market believe in a fictional world.
As a scholar, my way into English came through Philosophy, which helped me think about fictional worlds as real entities—about what they are, essentially. It helped me think about their metaphysical relationship to our own world, about how, from our world, it’s even possible for us to access them. But on that particular point Philosophy came up short. It could theorize alternate worlds; but at that time (some things have changed a bit), it didn’t make space for the kinds of conversations one could have about the experience of entering them. For those conversations, I had to turn to Literature. And the literati know that all literatures are functions of the languages in which they’re written. (Some philosophers want to blow past language and get to the things that words are referring to—to ideas and other entities.) So I became a scholar of English. But before I did, I read David Lewis’s essay “Possible Worlds.”
According to Lewis, “possible worlds” are
respectable entities in their own right. When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally. Possible worlds are what they are, and not some other thing. If asked what sort of thing they are, I cannot give the kind of reply my questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to something else. I can only ask him to admit that he knows what sort of thing our actual world is, and then explain that other worlds are more things of that sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them. Our actual world is only one world among others. We call it alone actual not because it differs in kind from all the rest but because it is the world we inhabit.1
Moreover, Lewis believes that “there are worlds where physics is different from the physics of our world, but none where the logic and arithmetic are different from the logic and arithmetic of our world.”2
So the notion of a “possible world” is a high-powered concept. If you’re still hazy on it but you’ve seen Back to the Future Part II, then imagine alternate-1985, where Marty ends up after Biff borrows the DeLorean for a minute. Alternate-1985 would be, from the point of view of real-1985, a possible world. In fact, it would be a possible world from 1885, when Doc and Marty save Clara from the train. But from those places alternate-1985 would not be the actual world.
I think this notion of a possible world is intriguing to many people, including writers, because we have this incorrigible sense that things might be otherwise than they currently are. We fear certain futures—certainly, this is part of my motive in writing Salvage—we long for certain aspects of the past to have become more prevalent than they have—another motive of mine. And all of this is to say that we chronically wish things were different.
What a car commercial (or any commercial, really) does is to play upon that wish. Some of the commercials we’ve seen are clearly playing on a wish for more freedom. “Become animal,” they say, “by buying this car, and you can leave the complexities of society behind.” In other ads the message is, “If you buy this car, you’re buying an easier-to-love version of an animal pet.” Whatever the play on our wishes, though, car commercials all offer us a little glimpse inside a possible world—a world that isn’t the actual one—and then they bid us to believe in the possibility so ardently that we become willing to make the possible world actual.
Here’s another way to say it: if a world is possible, that means it’s not actual, only believable. And to get people to believe in a possible world, you can’t settle for telling them about it, you have to show them. That’s the likeliest route to convincing them to make the possible content of that world actual. And where the possibility you want them to actualize is a car purchase, creating a thirty-second glimpse of a possible world may seem like overkill, but it’s a solid strategy for capturing imaginations, which is what Mopar’s commercials have done. And convincing people that their cars and trucks are animals is part of the surrealism of Mopar’s possible worlds.
(Real quick: in case you’re not a car person, “Mopar” is a family of automobile brands that includes the American marques Dodge, Plymouth, Chrysler, Jeep, and Eagle, among others. And where the Ram pickup was once a Dodge model, as in the Dodge Ram, now Ram is a stand-alone marque, as in the Ram 1500.)
2015: The Legend of the Dodge Brothers
Of course Mopar’s ad campaign began last century. But it seems fitting to start with the way their ads romanticized a brotherly competition intrinsic to the Dodge brand from its genesis. And so we begin a look at Mopar’s ads in 2015, in medias res.
To be honest, the only animals in this commercial are the Dodge Brothers, who are legendarized as a pair of scofflaws. Or “Dodgelaws”—get the pun at the end there? But this legend is an ur-text that makes sense of many of the other ads in this analysis.
1966-2016: The Dodge Rebellion
The Legend of the Dodge Brothers was essential to the possible worlds that situated Mopar vehicles in acts of rebellion. For example, check out this famous Pamela Austin commercial from 1966:
“What’s with the cannon?” you ask? I wondered the same thing myself for a moment.
First, a “Charger” is a horse trained for the battlefield and ridden by a cavalier. Chargers were trained to bear down on their quarry without flinching, as in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”—they were trained to literally charge the enemy so a human could fight on horseback. Among us non-riders, it’s a little-known fact that horses follow the lead their riders set for them; and in the eruptive conditions of the battlefield, this was superlatively true. For a charger to do what it was trained to do, both horse and rider had to be extremely courageous, particularly after the invention of gunpowder.
This orange Charger (yes, I’m getting to the cannon) presaged the then-future, now old television show Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985), a story of two Dodgelaw brothers who rode around backwoods Georgia in an orange Charger, the “General Lee,” with the Stars and Bars painted on the roof. The show’s intro sequence shows the Duke brothers shooting arrows at car tires, leaving dusty police cruisers in their wake during a high-speed chase, and hobnobbing with questionable women. Behind this, the theme song, crooned by Waylon Jennings, tells us the Dukes are “just two good ol’ boys/ Wouldn’t change if they could/ Fightin’ the system like two modern-day Robin Hoods.” And that’s where the seemingly random cannon figures in. In one fell swoop Dodge was capitalizing on medieval legend and the rebel spirit of the Old South, and the commercial wasn’t a robust enough possible world to do the job—eventually, they had to make the Dukes of Hazzard.
So the Charger in this commercial was a powerful metaphorizing force that distilled the chargers of medieval Europe, the Civil War, and Roosevelt’s Roughriders, into the General Lee over a decade later. And the General Lee was the paragon of the Charger as a tool of rebellion, as seen in the Legend of the Dodge Brothers but also in films, like at the climax of The Fast and the Furious (2001).
Because the charger (the horse type) was named for its intended purpose, the Charger (the car) might prompt us to consider not only the ways cars are often portrayed as animal-like, but also the ways animals were pressganged into human service, in wars, in hazardous work zones, etc., until human technological prowess rendered them obsolete. That’s a complex issue that needs closer scrutiny, but for now it’s worth pointing out that Mopar vehicles aren’t only haunted by the spirits of the Dodge Brothers (assuming you believe the legend), but also, in some sense, by the spirits of the animals who were replaced by machines like these. Do we name our cars things like “Charger” because we miss horses?
There’s a problem with marketing a car in a way that romanticizes the Old South: understandably, non-white America isn’t interested in entering that possible world.
So when Dodge advertised the Challenger in 2015, they produced this commercial:
(Sorry, you need to click this link because the YouTuber who hosted this video hasn’t allowed playback.)
This style of Challenger was first introduced in 2008 and was built on a modified version of the Charger chassis. That matters because here we see the Challenger charging like a charger (the horse), continuing the legend of Dodgelawry that was by then well established by the Charger’s history.
Now, I suspect no animals or humans were injured in the making of this commercial, and I love my car, and I believe freedom is self-evidently a God-given right extended to all human beings. But when I hear the narrator say, “Here’s a couple of things America got right: cars, and freedom,” I have trouble with the fact that a human-made machine is mowing down the horses and humans God created. Maybe it’s the homespun lilt of the violin music, which sounds hauntingly like “Ashokan Farewell” (but isn’t), but the legendary world that’s being constructed here, for me anyway, brings to mind Arthur Allen Leff’s haunting proclamation that “if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel.”3 And as a human, a member of the species of beings who were supposed to care for creation but instead have taken to fighting and killing one another, I’m a bit ashamed of how proud Mopar seems to be about the rebellious spirit it imagines was behind the American Revolution.
1969-2021: The Old West
Here’s a funny discovery for you: Mopar had a cozy relationship with Looney Toons for a while. From 1968 to 1980, Plymouth made a power car called the Road Runner, and the commercials for it were made by Warner Brothers, for example, this one from 1969:
Notice that the Road Runner even took advantage of Looney Toons-inspired vehicle badging (0:39), a move that’s brought television and films to life on American streets for decades since. (Personally, I’ve encountered Jeeps with Jurassic Park paint jobs, the Camaro Bumblebee Edition from Transformers, and all kinds of homemade Batmobile attempts. What have you seen?)
While it might be strange to think of this commercial as a portrayal of the Old West, note how crucial that environment is to the “Roadrunner and Coyote” shorts. Roadrunner has to have space to outrun Wile E. Coyote, and so long as we’re animating a spacious landscape it might as well be sublime. In the U.S., that usually means a possible world that looks like Monument Valley.
Maybe I should know who this guy is, but I must be too young. He looks a bit like Lorne Green in Bonanza. In any case, what we were being sold here is the pickup-as-workhorse, but with nary a mention of horses.
Remember the old F-100 commercial, from my analysis of Ford’s ads, the one filmed at Quantico? (Or was it filmed at ‘Quantico’?) It may not have been the first, but it was one of the earlier commercials in which a landscape helped sell a truck. This 1972 Dodge commercial is somewhere between that old F-100 commercial and the Ford Raptor commercial that came later. It’s using Lorne Green-lookalike’s vest and hat, that Old West saloon font, and most of all, the rail fence and rugged landscape, to transport the viewer to the Ponderosa, showing us that this truck is really just a horse. That’s why Lorne Green-lookalike rides off into the sunset inside it.
Here’s a weird attempt to pander to late-1970s feminists, an “attempt” because the sense of equality here rides on a double standard. He rides horses; she drives horse-named cars. This gal can do what the boys are doing—breaking in colts—only her Colt is a bumptious little car. The new Old West in this ad still doesn’t take female “cowpersons” any too seriously, and the fact that the car’s a compact adds to the head-pat tone. Finally, following the logic that the adjectives used to describe the car possibly apply also to its driver, if I were a woman watching this, I’d have been mildly offended by the ad’s description of the car as “frisky.”
The 1972 pickup ad was dull, but by 2011 Dodge had figured out how to tell a story visually while offering a sales pitch. First, in one minute or less and really make a viewer believe it, you have to get Sam Elliott to narrate it. He stood by Kurt Russell at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone and turned out to be (SPOILER ALERT) the Ghost Rider prior to Nicholas Cage in Ghost Rider. And then there’s his role in Ben’s whole baby snow owl awakening by the camp fire in Parks and Recreation. (If you know, you know.) You also have to get a bats-crazy outlaw like Walton Goggins to covet the truck. Goggins is a bit harder to remember than Sam Elliott, but he played Venus Van Dam in Sons of Anarchy (there’s the crazy—also, one episode he appeared in was called “Salvage”!), Boyd Crowder in Justified, and Billy Crash in Django Unchained (there’s the outlaw). He was also in Cowboys and Aliens, a terrible film I was deeply fond of; and that’s a seed for another Salvage post.
The point is, this commercial is a mini-film, complete with recognizable actors, and it’s visually telling the story of a covetable pickup riding gamely through an Old West landscape while Sam Elliott tells us all about the high American ideals that brought it into being. (“Honor.” “Pride.” “Guts.” “Glory.” But they forgot homey words like “Gumption.”) In other words, the pickup-as-horse is being sold as part of a package that includes the possible world of the Old West. “If you buy this truck you’ll be able to imagine yourself riding through the Old West—cowboy.”
2021: Jurassic Park redux
Speaking of (mini-)films, one of the most fascinating possible worlds Mopar deployed wasn’t actually a creation at all, it was an appropriation. I could tell you about it, but just watch the first 1:15 of this reveal video for the 2021 Ram 1500 TRX:
What did you see?
It’s a reintroduction of Jurassic Park, which, as I pointed out in my analysis of Ford’s commercials, was a giant infomercial for the then-brand-new Ford Explorer. If you understand this, then the 2018 Ford Ranger Raptor ad makes total sense. But in introducing the Ram 1500 TRX, Mopar hijacked the narrative—literally took over the possible world of Jurassic Park—to frame the TRX, a pun (if you haven’t already caught it) on “T. Rex,” as king of the dino-trucks.
But why stop there? Did you notice the segment after T. Rex crushes the Raptor in his jaws and hurls it into the skeleton? It’s a montage of mechanical bodies: the Ram 1500 TRX, an electric guitar (Fender Stratocaster, I think), a couple of different kinds of planes, a dirt bike, a track runner, a welder, a rocket, and some fracking (maybe?). Apparently the T. Rex is somehow like each of these. Not everything in the montage is a machine, and not everything is a body. But the mashup is preparing us for what comes next.
It’s worth pointing out that Dune hit the silver screen in 2021 because, in a sci-fi twist, the 1500 TRX blasts through a dune, making it look like a sandworm. And then the camera dives down a hole in the sand to discover… a robotic metal T. Rex… that transforms into a pickup truck. Oh! it’s the Ram 1500 TRX.
In this one intro film we’ve been exposed to three possible worlds: Jurassic Park, Dune, and Transformers. Pick one. Or all three. If you buy this truck, it will make you part of one or all of them. And you will own the Raptors. But notice that whichever world you choose, the truck makes you part of a monstrous mechanical animal: a CGI T. Rex; a CGI sci-fi sandworm; or a Transformers Dinobot.
2021-Present: The Future Apocalypse
Later in 2021, Mopar released this commercial for the 1500 TRX:
Some of the footage here looks like the montage from the 1500 TRX reveal video, but instead of a gesture at Dune it’s situating the truck back in the American West. The same montage-logic insinuates the truck’s reptilian-ness as we see a snake and the flank of a Gila monster, and amid the montage the camera offers short glimpses of the truck’s body parts, following the technique of the old Buick Wildcat car wash commercial in my analysis of GM’s ads.
The other aspect of this ad worth mentioning is the soundtrack. It’s a remake of “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes, but listen to the musical, lyric, and vocal changes. The minor key connotes a foreboding, predatory revelation as we wait, like Kip Dynamite, to see a “full-body shot” of the truck. Lyrically, the song has shed the peppy “bum-bum-bum” opening and offered a more-meditative, or perhaps seductive, singing that, were it only the piano and the vocalist, would fit in a speakeasy or lounge. And then we hear the autotuning and distortion. Is this a male or female vocalist? The Chordettes aren’t pleading for a boyfriend anymore. It sounds like a mechanized David Bowie singing about a woman. But that doesn’t make sense, does it?
The TRX promises the would-be driver that the truck will make them animal in some regard. But who’s the would-be driver? There’s a slinky, kinky, sexualized gender fluidity at play in the future-dream package, even as the song—a throwback to the fifties—implies a deadly new return to the ostensibly Great America of the mid-twentieth century. If you’re a MAGA Republican looking to survive the implosion of twenty-first-century America, the TRX will make you an epic warlord, the Roadwarrior par excellence. And if you’re a truck-loving lesbian who believes in cyborg feminism or a posthuman future, the truck will make you a slinky sex symbol in the apocalyptic-but-still-sublime environment of a warming globe. This is not a truck for the normalcy of farming, or even the hard labor of ranching; it’s a new breed of ancient-future beastiality available for sale to the extreme fringe for whatever conquests they can imagine.
The increasing scariness of vehicles strikes me as a projection of our own fears of an increasingly-uncertain world. Those of us who’ve seen Cloverfield, Black Mirror, or the YouTube short Slaughterbots will recognize the genre of this ad for the Dodge Hornet:
What do you see? And more to the point, if this is the future of automobile ads, how will it shape our thinking about animals?
Next post I’ll compile all of this thinking about car commercials into a shorter piece that helps readers regain the big picture. Then we need to start thinking about some very old ideas whose shadows nevertheless loom over even our own time.
In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing from you. If you have thoughts on this post you’re welcome to leave them in the comments below. Also, subscribers to Salvage receive email invitations to discussion threads, where you can meet and converse with other readers.
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.
David Lewis, “Possible Worlds,” in Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings, ed. Michael J. Loux (London, England: Routledge, 2001), 161.
Lewis, 164.
Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979:6 (1979): 1249.
This quote really stuck out to me, “Whatever the play on our wishes, though, car commercials all offer us a little glimpse inside a possible world—a world that isn’t the actual one—and then they bid us to believe in the possibility so ardently that we become willing to make the possible world actual.” I had thought about advertisements basically being alternate realities.