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fins, the grinning grilles, the oversized bodies, the wraparound windshields, the hood ornaments, all that chrome—even the obvious references to air and space travel in the names. To the buyers, according to McCracken, these cars represented the future: “The 1954 Buick was science and technology ‘come down to earth,’ proof of what the cascade of progress could do for the consumer.”
    The Forward Look may have lasted for only a few short, but wildly successful, years, but it helped change the relationship people had with their cars. “To take the wheel in 1954 was to control three and a half tons of metal and glass and gain dramaticallyin the speed, grace, and power with which one moved,” argues McCracken. “Unable (or unwilling) to see exactly where driver leaves off and car begins, drivers were inclined to take credit for properties that belonged to the car. They were now large, gleaming, and formidable. The speed, grace, and power of the car now belonged to them.”
    More than that, in the 1950s, people talked about “getting ahead,” “travelling in the fast lane” and “heading straight for the top.” And there was no better way to show off social status than with a car. As the post-war baby boom peaked, parents wanted a house in the sprawling suburbs, a television (ideally a colour one) and maybe a mahogany dining room set. And they wanted to be able to trade in their automobile every couple of years. There was so much homogeneity in society—practically everyone watched The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night—that a great new set of wheels was one of the few ways to stand out in the crowd. A car, right down to its age and even the trim level, defined social status, and people were jealous of what their neighbours drove. “The automobile was a consumer good that didn’t merely claim or show or seek to prove mobility,” McCracken contends in his essay, “it was mobility.”
    MCCRACKEN REMEMBERS seeing the way young men identified with their cars in 1962. As an eleven-year-old boy in suburban Vancouver, he and his buddies liked to stand on a street corner in the Saturday evening dusk and wait for big Chevys and Fords to stop. Once the boys caught the eye of the driver, one of them would hork on the hood. And then, as soon as the enraged owner had stepped out of his beloved machine—often leaving it unattended on the street— the little imps would run like hell. Since they called the drivers greasers, the boys dubbed their game “calling grease.” It was just a mischievous bit of fun, but it taught McCracken something about the relationship between people and their cars (even if it took him years to really understand it). After one getaway, the boys smokedtheir victory cigarettes and pondered the reaction of the drivers. That’s when the sagest of the spitters explained to his co-conspirators, “They don’t see any difference between themselves and the car. You spit on their car, you spit on them.”
    Eight years after those carefree days of “calling grease,” McCracken got a job as actress Julie Christie’s chauffeur while she filmed Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller in Vancouver, though he drove her around in a Volkswagen instead of a limo. Later, he became a contemporary cultural anthropologist who studied the value of objects in our consumer society and now works around the world as a consultant to companies such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Kraft. His services, which he describes as ethnographic and anthropological research, help these clients understand the “head and heart of the consumer.” He now lives in Connecticut, where “the signature car is a tiny, stick-thin blonde in a gigantic black SUV.” McCracken still believes there is a lot of meaning to be found in our cars, though there’s much more diversity today, both in what we drive and how other people