Volvo 340 vs Renegade Crash Test Dummy (Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm)

The first piece of advertising I remember having any kind of strong reaction to was a 1988 TV ad for the Volvo 340. Throughout my earliest years of television-watching existence, every time they cut to an ad break this thing seemed to be perpetually lying in wait, ready to heap another dose of uncanny valley-isms upon my fragile infant psyche, to the point that I could recite the entire thing by heart long before YouTube enabled me to play catch-up in adulthood. It goes like this - a crash test dummy comes to life while its human overlords aren't around and flees the testing facility by driving the featured vehicle through a three-storey window, making an absolute wreck of both window and Volvo, but walking away unscathed to unleash all manner of unspecified mischief upon the world beyond. It touched such a raw nerve in the three-year-old me that, whenever it aired, I was in the habit of addressing it as "The Naughty Ad", a phrase that sounds so much more provocative to adult ears. I later rationalised that the "naughtiness" came not from the dummy's reckless driving, but from the dummy's lack of clothing. In fact, I'd concocted this entire narrative around the ad that ended with the dummy purposely walking away to buy itself some garments. (Back then, I had no idea what a crash test dummy was, so I was more likely to have connected these uncanny humanoids to the mannequins in shop windows, and I knew their whole purpose was to model clothing - a naked one was jarring.) On further reflection, I think that calling the ad "naughty" was my attempt to communicate, with my extremely limited vocabulary, that I found the content profoundly wrong on so many levels. It didn't terrify me witless, a la the Honey, I Shrunk The Kids TV spots, but it unsettled me in ways that I was anxious to vocalise, yet completely botched because the words I had failed me. So, nearly three and a half decades on, I'm going to try to do justice to the reaction of my three-year-old self, with the words I have at my disposal now.

First, though, what exactly is going on in this ad? Having your vehicle be abused and bent out of shape by a dummy with a mind of its own certainly is a novel means of flaunting its merits. I presume the whole idea was to convey that the Volvo 340 is a reliable car that you could feel quite safe in because the powers that be (be they rogue dummies or flesh and blood manufacturers) had diligently tested it to its absolute limits...with the slogan - "Tested by dummies, driven by the intelligent" - making it clear that they did not expect you to emulate the dummy's reckless behaviour (although at least it has the sense to buckle up first). The way the dummy pats the smashed Volvo at the end of the ad certainly indicates that it has a high opinion of the car's durability. What is not clearly accounted for is the surreptitious nature of the dummy's stunt - obviously it's pulling this off without the authorisation of those white-coated humans we see at the start, but what exactly is the dummy's motivation here? Is it looking to go that extra mile in testing the car's capabilities, apparently not giving a damn about whether or not the company's insurance policy will cover that broken window? Is it going on a simple joyride, the lure of the Volvo having proved too strong? Or is it pulling off a daring escape, having had its fill of the abuses it's been forced to endure as a crash test dummy, that broken window being a departing "Fuck you" to his human oppressors? Although that last scenario appeals to me most from a narrative standpoint, it raises additional questions as to why the dummy just ups and forsakes the rest of its kin, when there was room for four other dummies in that car? Are we to assume that the other dummies aren't alive? Or is it meant to be seen as the only one of them audacious enough to seize the opportunity? Might that be the real meaning behind the closing slogan - that this dummy showed intuitive, thus earning its right to be regarded as a driver and not a test subject? Noteworthy is that, at the very end, the dummy is walking away from the Volvo building, not back toward it, so presumably it has no intention of resuming the life of of a regular crash test dummy, and is instead off to attempt to assimilate itself into human society. That, or murder us all in our sleep. Maybe the revolution starts here, and our rogue dummy fully intends to go back and liberate the other dummies later on down the line, once sufficient bloodshed has unfolded.

  

 

The surreptitiousness of the dummy's actions was a large part of what bugged me about this advert as a child, for it appeared to confirm one of one of my deepest gut suspicions regarding what kinds of unseen forces there were stirring in this mystifying world with which I had barely yet had time to come to grips. I've mentioned that I thought of these dummies as being more-or-less the same thing as shop mannequins, and at the time I did not particularly trust shop mannequins. I disliked turning my back on them, as the idea that they came to life when no one was looking seemed only too logical (a paranoia I assume to be quite prevalent, given that we had a Twilight Zone episode based on that very premise, albeit with mannequins who were revealed to be fundamentally benign). That the dummy went on to drive a car through a window was really beside the point - the fact that it had purposely waited until the humans cleared the room before doing so was the uncomfortable part, making it clear that this dummy's agenda, however difficult to decipher, was at odds with our own. The dummy seemed like a shadow self, a darker side of human nature that only stirred when the lights were off and attentions were diverted. And now that it had broken through the barrier and into the bright wide open, the world was its for the taking.

 

The "naughtiness" of it all unsettled me so that I felt compelled to attach my own narrative to this scenario - and as loopy as it will sound, I decided that the whole thing was actually a creative metaphor for the birthing process. At three years old, I had only a very rudimentary idea as to how that actually worked, and I bridged the uncanny valley by coming to think of these dummies as proto-humans. Humans who were basically stuck in life's waiting room, with the window pane separating them from the outside world representing the fine line between existence and non-existence, and the Volvo being our portal into reality (that this unreality should be signified by such formal, sterile environs seemed only natural to me, even if the outside world didn't seem a great deal more lively). The dummy who escaped in the Volvo attained the privilege of becoming alive, and of joining the human race (and I would very much like to claim that I was connecting the violent spectacle of the dummy's escape, on some instinctive level, to the physical messiness of childbirth, but that much is probably a coincidence).  His next action, so my infant logic dictated, was obviously to go off and buy himself clothing, or how else was he going to blend in around here? The clothes, I imagined, would paper over his remaining uncanniness. The logistics as to whether or not he would already have a bank account set up enabling him to purchase material goods certainly did not occur to me, as at three I was still a few years off having to concern myself with such things.

The part that continued to sit uneasily with me was how those two men in the white coats were to be factored into all of this; obviously they represented some kind of authority in this prenatal waiting room (the dummies' creators? The people who oversaw the whole process?), and what I couldn't dance around in my constructed narrative was how the dummy was blatantly coming into being without their permission. What's important is how this enabled my allegiances to shift, from the humans unwittingly menaced by their own distorted mirror reflections to that uncanny dummy itself, and its struggle to survive in a world that did not expressly invite it. I realise, with hindsight, that the dummy's not-quite human qualities made it the perfect figure on which to project my own nascent existential anxieties; the sense that I was this little thing in an a vast and increasingly daunting universe, and that my very being here seemed somehow absurd. And the alleged naughtiness? On some level, maybe I admired the naughtiness. If there was any message to be gleaned from the dummy's gut-wrenching leap into the world beyond the window, it was that merely existing necessitates some degree of risk.