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September 29, 2002 You Are What You Drive About a year ago, in a burst of patriotism, my wife and I went out and bought a car. Well, yes, it was a Swedish car, but at the time this perfectly ordinary act of conspicuous consumption felt like -- and more to the point, was being widely promoted as -- an act of civic duty. Of course, there was more to the decision than the defense of our way of life. The two of us had arrived, in our mid-30's, at the grassy plateau of adulthood, having acquired over a decade or so all the trappings of that condition: each other, two children, real jobs and 30 years of mortgage debt. But it had been 10 years since our last car: a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass, a classic old-lady car passed down from a grandmother, with plush bench seats and a V-6 that accelerated silently and in its own good time. Then we moved to New York, perhaps the only American city where car ownership may, in fact, be a folly. One night, an enterprising and highly specialized thief pried off the metal trim around the headlights, leaving our poor Cutlass with a look of popeyed shock. So we retired her to the care of my sister-in-law and joined the New York multitude of weekday subway riders and occasional weekend car renters. But as our oldest child approached school age, a restlessness began to set in, and we started to come up with practical arguments for buying a car of our own. We needed to be able to drive him to school on rainy days, to ferry him to activities in parts of Brooklyn not easily reached by public transportation, to take him and his sister on spontaneous excursions in search of open country or grandparental attention. Chiefly, though, we were thinking of ourselves. Without a car, our lives felt incomplete. The decision to buy a new car, however, raised a daunting question: who, exactly, were we? Car ownership in America, at least since World War II, has posed an exquisite and exemplary paradox of consumerism. You are what you drive. Your car is a bold statement of individual identity. But it is, at the same time, a piece of mass-produced, assembly-line goods, marketed not to you alone but to thousands of others like you. So the question became, What kind of people are we? As we browsed the Web sites and cruised the local parking lots, it seemed we were being offered not only chrome, horsepower and fake wood grain but also the possibility of self-discovery or even self-invention. As we pondered the options -- All-wheel drive? Manual transmission? Sunroof? -- and studied the actuarial tables looking for optimal safety and reliability, we were also trying on fantasy selves. An old commercial used to invite you to ''imagine yourself in a Mercury.'' I couldn't quite manage that, but I did sometimes dream of rolling through Brooklyn in a Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows and a six-CD changer, like a stock-option millionaire or a wannabe hip-hop grandee. I fixated on the ovoid headlamps of the new Mercedes sedans, much in the way I had a few years earlier on ultra-slim, many-buttoned, narrow-lapel suits. In both cases, I knew I could never carry such merchandise off -- much less afford it -- but it was nonetheless tantalizing to dream of the gratuitous sex appeal that owning it would confer. But of course we were not only -- or not really -- about to express our individual uniqueness but rather our allegiance to a social type. There are, we discovered, red-state cars and blue-state cars, white-collar cars and blue-collar cars, gay cars and straight cars, although there is perpetual disagreement about which are which, and more promiscuous mixing of types than is commonly admitted. Above all, according to an unscientific survey conducted by the ''Car Talk'' Web site, there are guy cars and chick cars, which basically means Mustangs and Corvettes on one side and Volkswagens on the other. Horsepower versus cuteness of design. And for all I know, as I dreamed of a big V-8, my wife might well have been conjuring images of a new Beetle. Anything to avoid being confused with what, to the naked eye, we so obviously are: a middle-class family whose needs would best be served by a minivan. When it comes to consumption, in any case, ours is a type that lives by a very strict, if contradictory, code in which certain purchases are required to be not just statements of taste but also indicators of virtue. Consumption should be conspicuously inconspicuous. Thus, in my neighborhood, every utterly special, exceptionally gifted child is strapped into the exact same Maclaren stroller as her peers. The wheels are small and elephant gray, the frame is sturdy aluminum and the seat is available in blue and green tartan plaids. They are uglier than most other strollers, and they cost more, too. The Maclaren is an ostentatiously unflashy symbol of the owners' responsibility, restraint and good sense. It is, in other words, the Volvo of strollers. Some years ago, the literary critic Stanley Fish published an essay called ''The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos,'' in which he mocked the fetish among academics and other self-conscious, self-effacing members of the upper middle class for boxy, stiff-driving Scandinavian wagons. You see, these cars say, we don't care about material things, and by the way, we paid as much as we would have for a Mercedes. In recent years, the Volvo monopoly on virtuous auto consumption has been challenged by super-reliable Japanese imports and, more recently, by the handsome design and improved engineering of the new Volkswagens. An S.U.V., despite my occasional self-reinvention fantasy, was for us out of the question on ideological grounds. We needed a station wagon, of course, because . . . well, we just did. Our choices, as we pondered them, narrowed down to two, which seemed to reflect the two sides of our generational and economic profile. The politically minded, flannel-shirt, organic-food side was embodied in the Subaru Outback; the more hedonistic, J. Crew, goat-cheese-and-olive-oil side by the Volkswagen Passat. As we wandered the brownstone-lined streets, it seemed that nearly every car we saw was one or another of these, which meant that whatever we did we would be just like everybody else. So we bought a Volvo. With cars as with real estate, it is absolutely imperative to be able to brag about the deal you got. You would think this would be tricky, given the laws of the marketplace, but really it is a matter of psychology and of proportion. I am happy to report that as my wife was filling out the final papers, the salesman said, ''Boy, we practically gave you this thing,'' but I am also obliged to report that if I had had my way, we would have given him a lot more for it. Luckily, I was not actually the one buying the car, since I have no talent for bargaining. Though I pride myself on a certain skepticism about marketing hype -- I mean, I drive a Volvo, you know -- I abandon it as soon as a guy in a blazer comes up and shakes my hand. My wife does not share this pathology and has the further advantage of hiding, under a demeanor of almost naive open-heartedness, a ferocious determination. So I fled the lot, and before long we were in possession of a shiny 2000 Volvo V40, for which we paid even less than the Consumer Reports wholesale price that arrived in the mail the next day. Because it began life as a floor demo, the car is loaded with irresponsible luxuries we would never have asked for (what kind of people do you take us for?) but nonetheless adore: a sunroof, a CD player and, as part of the sport package, a button near the shifter with the letter S on it that makes you feel really cool after you press it. The phrase ''love affair with the automobile'' has always sounded silly to me, but now I find that it accurately describes the last year of my life, which has been dominated, more than I'd care to admit, by a deep and almost shameful infatuation. I spend a decent amount of time driving -- car-pooling, caravaning, sitting in gridlock -- and an indecent amount thinking about it or leafing idly through the owner's manual while I sit in the passenger seat. Climbing in behind the wheel, after the children are securely fastened in their five-point restraints, I feel freer than I do elsewhere, and also more at home. Everything is familiar, self-contained, under control: what I need is in easy reach. The people I care about are all around me. But at the same time, there is something exotic, something not quite me, a feeling of escape, of possibility, of reinvention. Who am I to be snuggled down in this leather seat, surrounded by music, the wind in my hair? Car ownership, I've discovered, feels like a voluptuous, almost sinful thing, even if you take all the requisite steps to guarantee its virtue. A.O. Scott is a film critic for The Times.
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