Nonhle and the Saab

So Nonhle Thema drives a Saab. We know this because she tweeted about it today, twice. To whit:
“My SAAB was custom made for me.No one else has it General Motors did this for me a gift ” and “And my car was half a mill…thank u General Motors”.

75 627 people follow Nonhle, ready to receive her every pearl of wisdom. Just today, these include:
“I have been the FACE of sooo many brands Love Life,Legit,Always Ultra pads,General Motors and sooo many others i cant count them all.BLESSED”
“Headline shud say.Nonhle Thema The BEYONCE of TV in AFRICA”
“like i care what the sunday papers write about me.IM NONHLE THEMA im a star its their JOB to make up ish.keep me famous yall”
“At the Trey concert i was mobbed by my LOYAL fanz..i love my fanz but it gets crazy sometimes and im a small girl”
“GOD is GOOD HE does NOT judge..THANK YOU LORD for LOVING me alwayz for dayzzzz”
“When i buy a car tomorrow it will CASH….i roll like that Cash baby”

There’s plenty more, but there isn’t the space to quote it all.

I’m sure Saab is enjoying all the publicity. The brand never enjoyed the kind of desirability in the South African market that it did in the US. Once upon a time, Saab was the epitome of cool. There was a time when Saabs were all over movie sets. If you wanted to position your character as quirky and alternative – hipster with money and taste, say – you had them driving a Saab. Jerry Seinfeld drove one. A Saab featured in Grosse Point Blank, in which John Cusack plays an impossibly cool assassin. Or you could use a Saab to allude to a present filled with disappointment at the failure of past expectations to come to fruition, like Paul Giametti’s character in Sideways. The old Saab he drives is as much a character as any of the supporting acts.

The choice of vehicle for a character in a movie must, I would imagine, be as important as the selection of a wardrobe, perhaps even more so. Few things are so pregnant with social meaning as the cars we drive. So a car offers useful shorthand for character. The redneck, the Wasp, the soccer mom, the boring suburbanite (who always drives a Volvo).

Jettas and Priuses are big in indie movies right now. A couple of months ago I watched Beautiful Boy, which is very depressing. The father played by Michael Sheen. He drives a Prius; his wife drives a Jetta (incidentally also driven by Joseph Gordon Levitt in very watchable latterday noir The Lookout — his character kills several people in a sports car in the opening sequence, so the Jetta is the polar opposite).

The Prius is so powerful a brand icon, so compelling a social marker, that it steals the scenes in the Will Ferrell comedy The Other Guys. (You can watch their tribute to the Prius here.) Toyota had nothing to do with the movie, but was apparently amused nonetheless. In a way they’re the Crocs of the automotive world, except that Hollywood stars like Leonardo di Caprio drive them. If Crocs are faced with metahatred, then the Prius enjoys metalove: people feel duty-bound to like it, because they feel that everybody expects them to.

In the Will Ferrell movie, the Prius ends up in pieces, a disaster on wheels, which when you think about it, is a bit like what’s happening on Twitter right now. There’s even a joke about tampons in there somewhere. Maybe the Always Ultra people should give Nonhle another call.