Greenwashed Car Commercials

We’ve all seen it a dozen times on television, a commercial shows a shiny, new car driving up windy, mountainside roads, and a narrator lists all the environmentally friendly aspects of the vehicle. The automobile company will argue that it’s the greenest car out there, and they have the best ideas for a sustainable auto industry. You’re quickly distracted by all the promises of high gas mileage, road handling, comfortable interiors and safety features. Before you know it, the car has reached the top of the mountain, looking out onto a bright, sunny field or even a clear, blue ocean and sometimes even the surrounding wildlife like it! This specific car is one with Earth, in complete harmony with its surrounding environment.

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Advertising and the environment: videos from class

If you are interested in taking another look, here are the videos we watched in class on Thursday.  Stories, metaphors, and images of the environment often come to seem deceptively transparent  through long usage.  It is our job as literary and cultural analysts to uncover how they are working and to make them strange again.  And if you watch these commercials enough times they definitely start to seem really strange.  Kids dressed up as trees and flowers blowing in the wind.  Making garbage disappear simply by holding a beautiful poster in front of it.  A car that transforms into animals in order to navigate a rugged landscape.  Weird stuff!   Environmental and literary tropes — like the sublime, the pastoral, harmony or the ecological web, and wilderness (see the Buell glossary of terms for explanations of these) — are everywhere; you just have to keep your eyes open for them.  Where do you see them in your day to day lives?

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