Unity. Common ground. Shared values. These are the buzz words of American politics and culture in the first months of 2021. They have been mouthed by the new president, Joe Biden, and are now the stock phrase of Republicans seeking to ward off an impeachment conviction of former President Donald J. Trump and to demand a chance to influence policy. Everyone has jumped on the “unity” bandwagon, including the makers of Super Bowl ads and sports utility vehicles, like Jeep.
The company aired a commercial during the Super Bowl last night featuring Bruce Springsteen reciting a paean to the notion of unity. The ad, which I watched on IGN this morning because I did not watch the game, featured Springsteen in his most recent incarnation, farmer-cowboy, and is one of Bruce’s first forays into advertising.
I find the ad troubling, both because Springsteen’s presence elevates what is really just a commercial endeavor into pseudo-art, and because the language being praised is flat and uninteresting, flush with cliches and a kind of popular hopefulness and desire for unity that has little to do with the division and struggle that has been at the center of our historical narrative.
Springsteen understands these larger historical currents, and has written about them over and over in his career. He’s built stories from the troubles and hopes of Americans and those seeking to become American, explored the intersection of the narratives we tell ourselves as Americans and the narratives we often refuse to acknowledge. It’s part of what has drawn me to his music — his mix of optimism and skepticism — and it is what has made him both an artist and an icon, which are two very different things.
The artist creates, which Springsteen has done and continues to do. The icon, however, is an image, a way of being seen by the public, which can be very different than the real person or the vision the artist wants to present. This has been something that has dogged Springsteen throughout his career, especially since the release of Born in the U.S.A. in 1984, when his image became intertwined with images of America and Americanness. so much so that the critiques contained in his music were misinterpreted and misused by politicians and fans alike. That optimism is important because it places his critiques in a hopeful context, creates a sense that there is possibility even at the darkest moments. There are songs that cut against this — “Seeds,” for instance, and “The Ghost of Tom Joad” — but even at his most pessimistic, a kind of light shines through. In the final verse of “Stolen Car” from The River, for instance, as dark a song as he has written, a story told in the voice of a man whose relationship has fractured, hope pricks through. He is driving a stolen car on the Jersey Shore (Eldridge Avenue in Neptune). The night is black and he is caught between hope and terror: “I'm telling myself I'm gonna be alright / But I ride by night and I travel in fear / That in this darkness I will disappear.” Sadness, pessimism, emptiness. And a note of something better. Maybe.
This sense of hope, even when it is just the barest drop, is necessary in the world of a Springsteen song, but when it is combined with anthemic music or flag imagery — as it was with Born in the U.S.A. (See “Reason to Believe.”)
In recent years, as he’s aged, Springsteen has taken on different personas, all of which in some way tie back to class and the American dream. This persona — a kind of American Everyman — has become more political, but it also has borrowed more and more from the mythologies of American cinema — which is where the cowboy hat and the Jeep Wrangler fit in. The cowboy mythos has continued to define us, even as the Western has died off as a film genre, infecting our politics (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush reveled in playing the roll), and often defining how we interact with the world.
The ad, says the company, was seeking to build off the Springsteen mystique — that combination of working-class gravitas and thoughtfulness that he often embodies. Oliver Francois, chief marketing officer for Stellantis, which owns Jeep, told AdAge the company was seeking “a spiritual experience from the first note to the last wave of Bruce’s hand as his Jeep pulls away.”
Francois points to Springsteen’s working-class appeal. He says he has attended a lot of his concerts and “the demographics and the psychographics of the Bruce Springsteen arena are exactly those of America.”
“Obviously America is polarized,” Francois adds. “There is a divide and what he wanted to do with us is speak to the common ground.”
The ad content, which was less ad than public service announcement, as a friend said on Facebook, is similar to other ads that have run during the Super Bowl — think Clint Eastwood’s “Half-time in America” plug for Chrysler (an ad also overseen by Francois), which eschewed traditional ad imagery and language, only alluding to the product in a way that identified it with a call to rebuild the nation’s manufacturing base. Eastwood, early in 2012, just six months before he had a conversation with a chair on the stage of the Republican National Convention, was still associated with a kind of old-school movie gravitas. He was the good guy who sometimes had to get his hands dirty, but always had the best of intentions. The ad’s argument was that America had been knocked down, but it was only halftime and the nation would rise again and find a way to win.
The Eastwood ad pricked a nerve. We were just four years out from a brutal recession from which we have never truly emerged. There were sectors of the economy that remained battered — like manufacturing — and Detroit’s troubles offered the perfect symbol, the auto industry standing for decades in the American mind as a singularly American institution.
At the center of Eastwood’s call to arms was a familiar refrain: “A fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.” The line comes at the mid-point of the ad, and shifts what had been a harsh descent into darkness into the light. The ad maintains its somber, solemn visual tone. Eastwood’s raspy voice continues at just above a whisper. But suddenly, the darkness gives way to an American can-do attitude. “We always find a way,” Eastwood says, emphasizing the we. Unity. Us. Winning.
The new Jeep ad calls for finding common ground, a middle we like to think exists, that we all say we wish for. It unfolds in a series of cliches: The middle as difficult to find, as being stuck between Red and Blue. Between extremes. This is the 2021 version of Eastwood’s “fog of division” line, meant to evoke a border between a vague other and our “better angels,” a phrase that has become common in Springsteen’s speech of late.
The Springsteen Jeep ad is similar to the Eastwood ad in that there is little reference to the product, aside from images of Bruce behind the wheel and an important shot of Springsteen’s boot and the Jeep logo as the singer appears to be getting out of his car. The recitation is flat, somber, meant like the Eastwood ad to evoke a sense of dread, of trouble. To establish an emotional crossroads. It opens with a single, two-lane highway running vertically down the center of the road. An empty highway. Snowy. Gray. The kind of image used in Nordic Noir to evoke distance. The camera slowly plans up. The singer describes a church in Kansas that is always open, that sits at the exact center point of the “lower 48.” The physical mid-point meant to evoke a national center.
Kansas. The epicenter of our fascination with middle-America. With the White working class. Flyover country. Thomas Frank, the historian and political commentator, used his home state as a template in What’s the Matter with Kansas? to underscore the divisions that were increasingly making the passage of progressive legalization impossible. Kansas, once home to a populist economic movements that challenged the corporate status quo, he wrote, has become the home of a religious and cultural intolerance that has aligned distressed workers with the plutocrats who have condemned their neighborhoods to decline.
Kansas, in the Jeep ad, plays on the first part of this and ignores Frank’s critiques. It is part of a glorification of a version of America that is more notional that real. It is waves of grain, freight trains, an American flag in the shape of the physical nation with a cross at its center. It is the middle, a “hard place to get to lately,” and lately is the key word here. It is the word that drives the mythology, that and the non-specific language used throughout. We can take what we want from this ad, can define unity, the middle, however we need. Politics is excluded. Freedom is all of ours, but freedom is undefined. “The very soil we stand on,” Springsteen says, “is common ground.”
What exactly do we mean by common ground, and how do we get to it? Is common ground the provision of health care to all, regardless of net worth? The right to be safe in our homes? Not to be stopped and maybe killed because of race? Common ground implies compromise, but it is difficult for me to see from where this compromise will come. My reading of the long history of America is that the definition of common ground has always been contested, has never included all. Slavery and then Jim Crow. Racial pogroms. Anti-Catholic attacks. Violence against Jews, Muslims, immigrants. Much of our history has been an effort to define what it is to be an American and who is allowed to claim that title. Much of our history has defined American too narrowly — a reality we still live with today.
Unity and common ground. Common soil. This is the America the Springsteen character wants us to desire, the place he wants us to get to. I say character, because that is what he is playing here, what Eastwood played in his ad, what all celebrity artists ultimately are — characters in the stories they seek to tell. The current character — Springsteen the farmer/rancher — may be an extension of the earlier Springsteen characters, but it is still a character and this character seems to be asking us to buy a mythology that romanticizes a dream-state version of America.
“Buy” is an important word here, as well. This is an advertisement, after all. It is not poetry, nor is it a PSA, even if it feels like one. It is not art. It is commerce. And while the Springsteen character may want us to buy his notion of America, Jeep wants us to buy its products, and it wants its products associated with a vague hopefulness for America and not with anything actually happening on the ground — which is why the call for unity has been depoliticized, sanitized of ideology, and is expressed in the kind of anodyne language reserved for selling product. In the end, this is not about unity. It is about selling Jeeps. However much we might admire its calls to find common ground, we should not be fooled into thinking there is more here than there really is.