Of the dozens of television commercials for ever-smaller civilian Humvee variants — the H1, the H2, and the H3 — my favorite is at once the most realistic and the most preposterous. Realistic, because the spot portrays smirking, monied white Hummer owners walking away from and piloting their mammoth vehicles in ingratiating slow motion; preposterous, because a sanitized version of “Ruff Ryders Anthem”, a 1998 single from hyper masculine, canine-obsessed black rapper DMX (“Stop/Drop/Shut ’em down, open up shop”), plays over this lifestyle-porn montage.
You’ve gotta love the ironies at work: a domineering statement of hip-hop superiority courtesy of the feared “other” appropriated to sell functionless, beastly status-symbolism to folks able to blow $100,000-plus on an automobile that doesn’t even average 20 miles per gallon. Whereas other spots have made overt attempts to humanize the Hummer or reframe it as a scrappily iconic consumer choice, this one gives it to the public straight: driving this monster demonstrates that you’ve arrived, you’re special, you own the road, you’re ultimately better than everyone else.
Hate the game, not the player, right? But Hummers make for such hulking, imposing targets as physical stand-ins for all-American arrogance and mindless anti-environmentalism that they — and the folks who pilot them up, down, and across the nation’s paved game board — routinely come in for drubbings just by existing (let alone double-parking, forcing Prius drivers onto highway shoulders, or demolishing hatchbacks in traffic accidents and emerging largely unscathed).
A collection of cultural studies essays, The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture wrestles thesis-statement style with myriad realities and assumptions surrounding the behemoth that Arnold Schwarzenegger talked GM into putting on the market. Almost an afterthought, a poem is included; in this ivory-tower clash of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes references, Rene Cardenas’ “I Am the Humvee” might be the most clear commentary on offer here. “Guess who got the bucks/Don’t get petronomic on me, fella,” the poet insists, projecting mockery, later throwing down a representational gauntlet: “I am the might of what you see/I am what you want/I am fear/I am America/Take it or believe it.”
Elsewhere, the pondering is decidedly more intellectual, more detached. Derek S. Foster checks in with the online denizens of FUH2.com, where anti-H rants and digital camera/cell-phone snapshots of H-haters flipping stationary Hummers abound; Julia Humberg suggests that the entrenching of the Hummer in the United States both reinforces the notion of the vehicle as a patriotic statement and underlines — much like video games that allow civilians to take out virtual Sunni snipers in Baghdad or 24-hour cable reporting that lets us experience war maneuvers nearly in real-time — a sense of “playing war at home” while actual soldiers wage war abroad.
“The Hummer as Brute Image” studies its subject’s military associations and contemplates how they translate in the US, a Gulf War necessity refashioned as a cool suburban tool: “Once defined, the Hummer paradigm is immutable.” However, Alain Silver, the essay’s author, expends a bit too much ink on visual perception-tweaking techniques and theory; the boxy, tank-like contrivance at issue comes off as a glorified afterthought.
More illuminating by far is Shane Gunster’s “Primordial Enhancement: Print Media, Promotional Culture, and the Hummer’s Siren Song”, wherein probing perusal of a raft of media reports and reviews uncovers a disturbingly common theme: fourth-estaters test-driving Hummers routinely let go of their critical and journalistic facilities and embrace a base euphoria after climbing behind the wheel; skepticism yields to childlike excitement and the manifestation of a smug sense of power as strangers stare, beg for rides, and offer the thumbs-up. This coverage, self-knowing and relatively balanced as it is, becomes an unwitting part of the gas-guzzling product’s general narrative alongside television and print advertisements and the slowly growing omnipresence of the Hummers themselves, Gunster argues.
In “A Gated Community on Wheels”, Randel D. Hanson considers the Hummer-as-McMansion, a private, privileged divider between the haves and have-nots. “As a successful member of the new globalized elite, one can reside, shop, and play in privatized built environments,” Hanson writes. “Yet the roadways for the most part remain public space, filled as they are with the masses. SUVs provide a modicum of security in these public spaces, their sheer bulk, height, and weight a step above the majority of vehicles on the road.”
But: what will happen when the world outside wants in, to equalize, to confront, to vent rage? On 2007’s Kala, Londoner-by-way-of-Sri Lanka rapper M.I.A. articulated that sort of third-world/lower-class rage/blowback with a slurred patios: “I’m knockin’ on the dooooooooors of ya Humma, Humma.” Stop, drop, indeed.