We can't let reality get in the way of a good fantasy

The need to beat the others away from the traffic lights are further proof that our emotional attachment to the car hasn?t moved out of the playground. Photo: Darren Pateman

When I was in my late teens there was a TV advertisement for Martini that used to trigger a powerfully nagging, yearning impulse in me. For 30 seconds, it opened up a world of sophistication, wealth, success and happiness, where I knew I must be destined to belong.

I hope that reading that paragraph made you squirm. It certainly made me squirm to write it. Not just because the thought of Martini makes me queasy with memories of youthful excess.

Of course that advertisement drew that response from me when the sap was rising. I was a self-obsessed young person, like all the rest who just knew that I had to ...

In the desiccated cynicism of middle age I know responses like that for the fleeting phantasms they really are. Advertisers continue to try to evoke them, and the reason it's a bit embarrassing to contemplate the effect they aim for is that they do it by reaching into our subconscious and reflecting back fantasies that are there. The manipulation is obvious, its effectiveness the source of endless research and debate.

The advertisers don't create the dreams, they merely dig them out and externalise them. They may not show our more admirable characteristics but in themselves could be seen as relatively harmless .

Where cars are concerned though, they suggest we're in thrall to infantile fantasies that blind us to appalling realities.

In the news business, I often feel like a man on the bank of a river, downstream from some terrible massacre. We barely look up when the latest police media release bobs past bearing details of the P-plater who died on an empty road at 3am, the pedestrian knocked down in a suburban street. Only when the victims are especially young or numerous do we point and talk for a bit — and then we lose interest and look away.

We look misty eyed at the fantasies: a woman who watches the other mums stare at her in slow motion envy as she arrives outside school in her four-wheel-drive; the couple whose off-road choice turns their neighbours into social inadequates, drained of colour; the boy who papers over his family car to make it look like next door's.

Advertisements don't cause fatal crashes. But they do reveal that our emotional attachment to the car hasn't moved out of the playground. We're too willing to accept the relentless deaths, fight each other over who should be first at the lights, and bastardise our domestic architecture to give our cars bedroom space.

Cars are fantastically useful. But we need to think about them rationally, as adults with some iron in our soul, not imprisoned by dreams of steel and chrome.

Cars can be beautiful. Whenever I see a Ferrari, an Aston Martin or a Maserati — all design marvels — I point it out to my kids.

But I know that one day they have to grow out of the infatuation. We all need to.

Source: theage.com.au