During Super Bowl this year Chrysler poured $9 million into producing the longest running advertisement between quarters. The ad – by Portland-based brand agency Wieden + Kennedy – follows the silver grill of the new Chrysler 200 through a city, its gloss-black hood streaming with reflections of city lights as it navigates highway lanes and rolls between inner-city blocks. It has spurred a huge response from audiences and critics in America and boosted sales of the Chrysler 200, which went into production in 2010 at Chrysler’s Sterling Heights Assembly plant. To bring the plant back to life, Chrysler invested $850 million into it, thanks to the support of the US tax-payer.
The format isn’t dissimilar to other seductive car commercials: oblique camera angles of sensual curves. Its genius, however, is the use of Detroit to sell the car. Rather than contrast the city’s decay with the luxury brand, the advertisers have aligned it with the city’s industrial past and in doing so suggested a spirited resurrection: ‘What does a town that’s been to hell and back know about the finer things in life?’ narrates a distinctly Michigan accent. ‘More than most.’
It was a bold move. America’s former car-manufacturing centre has long suffered from economic crises dating back to the Fifties; the ‘white flight’ that ghettoised the city centre followed by the devastating race riots in 1967, and more recently, the crippling blow delivered in 2008 when the Big Three, GM, Ford and Chrysler, filed for bankruptcy. The ad’s tagline, Imported from Detroit, acknowledges this synchronicity of city and industry. It also reprimands the USA for its rejection of Detroit, a city deemed unAmerican because it failed.
The advertisers are effectively fighting against the way in which Detroit has become a case-study city. Academics, architects and economists use the Motor City as a model for their answer to the global downturn. One would be forgiven for thinking it a ghost town. One resident photographer, James Griffioen, says that many photographers have arrived in Detroit looking for stock images of degradation, which can symbolise America’s wider ills. ‘The real tragedy of this city [is] not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people,’ he writes. Billionaire property owner Manuel Moroun has resisted demolishing his derelict plots in favour of renting them out as post-apocalyptic sets for Hollywood.
The image of Detroit is being defined elsewhere. In London this February, World Architecture News brought together architects including Heatherwick Studio and Studio Egret West, along with London Development Agency’s Peter Bishop to ‘brainstorm’ the revitalisation of Detroit under the title, Rethinking the Post-Industrial City. On the eve of the city’s 310th birthday, the London team presented ideas to the Detroit Mayor’s office and local architects Hamilton Anderson Associates. The surgery session for the broken metropolis offered some remedial strategies and some conceptual solutions, but what, one wonders, can be achieved by considering a city in the abstract?
One opinion is that this Declinism is built into the American psyche. Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University said on BBC’s Today in February that in order to reinvent themselves, American cities must first fall apart and feel destitute. Slaughter’s argument is not that failure is the American city’s fate but an episode in its own narrative. The brooding techno of Richie Hawtin that blossomed during the last economic downturn in the 1980s is now as much part of Detroit’s identity as the Motown that went before it. The ad, says Aaron Allen, a creative director at W + K, prompted ‘closet Detroiters’ to once again feel pride and ownership over an important part of American industry’s history.
The relationship between America’s car companies and the place where they originally came from has not been a smooth one. The factory workers of Chrysler, GM and Ford were born and raised in Detroit – as they suffered, so did the city. A company like Chrysler rising from the ashes is significant to changing perceptions. Joe Staples of W + K says, ‘if the Big Three rise so does the city… it is a symbiotic relationship.’ The advertising campaign shows that despite huge doubts over the viability of car production in the city, this relationship must remain close. In attempting to change our ideas about Detroit, Chrysler hopes it can change ideas about its car.
At the advertisement’s close, a Detroit native, Eminem, steps out of the Chrysler in front of the Fox Theatre. Built in 1928 and restored to its former glory in 1988 by its new owners, the Ilitch family – they also own the ice hockey team, Detroit Red Wings and baseball team, Detroit Tigers – this represents the latest American holy trinity of sport, industry and pride. Though, of course, it won’t actively solve Detroit’s social and structural problems, the ad makes an incredibly bold attempt to shift perceptions of the city. Most importantly, Detroit is presented as unique rather than a symbol of national, or international, ills.
