The SUV Fantasy 1 Running Head: THE SUV FANTASY Living Above it All: The Liminal Fantasy of Sport Utility Vehicle Advertisements Richard K. Olsen, Jr., Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Wilmington 601 S. College Rd. Wilmington, NC 28403-5933 (910) 962-3710 Email:
[email protected] Final Draft for inclusion in the edited volume Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture edited by Mark Meister and Phyllis Japp The SUV Fantasy 2 Living Above it All: The Liminal Fantasy of Sport Utility Vehicle Advertisements American popular culture offers a long history of celebrating modes of transportation. From the pony express through the various planes, trains and automobiles, each has captured the national imagination. Television and movies such as Route 66, Knight Rider and Smokey and the Bandit, among others, have made particular automobiles popular. This essay does not examine the popularity of a particular model of vehicle such as the Mustang, but rather an entire category of vehicles: The SUV. The sport utility vehicle has become a dominant vehicle on both the physical and cultural landscapes of America. The popularity of SUVs, and the way they have been portrayed in advertisements, reveals a cultural stance regarding the environment and speaks of what “wilderness” can mean in popular culture. In this chapter I briefly review the popularity of SUVs as well as some negative implications of that popularity. I then introduce the concepts of fantasy theme, dialectic and liminality, which will guide my analysis of SUV advertisements. Third, I offer analysis of the advertisements from the vantage point provided by these concepts to demonstrate that the fantasy operating in many SUV advertisements attempts to position the SUV as a purchasable and permanent resolution to the dialectics inherent in our relationship with the environment.