Tuesday, December 03, 2002

There were three kinds of hidden headlight treatments in American car design of the '60s and early '70s. Each had a distinct, and distinctive, cognitive effect, tweaking that part of you that responds to the front of a car as if it were a face. (The whole uncanny valley thing pertains to this in a nice way.) One can speculate that the reason for the decline of this basically tacky and ridiculous (but richly evocative of its time and place) stylistic device was the overthrow of the mandatory sealed-beam headlight. Once domestic stylists had the freedom to shape headlights (long enjoyed by their european counterparts), the motivation to use hidden-ness as a distinguishing gesture all but disappeared. Okay, so the styles were: 1. Hidden by a flap of bodywork. The only technique still extant. Found then mostly, and now exclusively, on sports cars. Originating (presumably) as a way of making the front end of a sports car more aerodynamic, this is the most stylized method of "hiding" the lights, since they are hidden in a completely obvious way; the lamps themselves being replaced by a trapezoidal region of bodywork dilineated by a vivid black boundary. Nevertheless, the effect produced - the evocation of shielded or hooded "eyes" within the "face" of the front end - is present and pronounced, and - as with the other methods described below - is strongly reminiscent of the effect sometimes sought by wearing dark sunglasses. Presumably, the use of this stylistic gesture on full-sized cars (e.g. the Dodge Monaco, Mercury Marquis, Lincoln Continentals of the early '70s) was intended at least in part to give a "sporty" flavor to the front end, rather than purely for the "hooded eyes" effect. 2. Hidden by (real) grillwork. The most striking, complicated, and rarest technique, consisting of hiding each bank of headlights behind a movable (but otherwise genuine) piece of grillwork. In order for the headlights to be effectively invisible, they must actually be rotated out of the way, so that their lenses aren't just sitting right behind the grill in (more or less) plain sight (something one sees, incidentally, in at least one old Peugeot). Found only (to my knowledge) in certain late-'60s models of the Buick Riviera and Oldsmobile Toronado, the effect achieved by this technique is the most striking and complete of any described here: beyond "dark sunglasses" into the same affective terrain inhabited by Geiger's Alien; completely eyeless yet still eerily cognizant. 3. Hidden by fake grillwork. Popular, and rarely if ever anything but tackily unsuccessful. This technique consists of hiding the lights behind a matte-black plate covered with the same ribbing making up the actual grill. In all but the most favorable lighting, the eye easily reads the difference between the "real" grillwork, with dark, empty space behind it, and these backing plates. (One can see, however, why this method was vastly more popular than #2: the headlights can simply be bolted to the structure of the car, instead of to a complicated rotating platform.) Examples of this technique abound; in fact one often saw "upscale" versions of full-sized cars sporting lamps hidden in this way, where their more common cousins simply had their lights mounted in fake-grillwork surrounds. Whether an impression of greater opulence or sophistication was actually conveyed is arguable. While never that good-looking, the relative degree of success of this method depends on the character of the grillwork itself: mostly its density, and to a lesser extent its "texture". For example, the best example I can remember seeing was a Chrysler New Yorker whose grill was made up of closely spaced vertical ribs (a quote of the Airflow's "waterfall," I think) bisected horizontally by a thick, opaque decorative bar. Even in relatively unobscured views, the eye sometimes read those headlight covers as the real thing. On the other hand, one late-60's Eldorado sported a version of this so completely unsuccessful as to trick the eye into, helplessly, interpreting an entire third texture, distinct from both bodywork and the "real" grill itself, due to the coarse, egg-crate grillwork pattern that left the backing plates completely and vibrantly apparent even to the most perfunctory glance. Note: another interesting lost technique of American styling, often found on the same cars as those bearing the gestures described here, is that of enclosing the grill and headlights and often the license plate entirely within a large, elaborately shaped chrome bumper. Similarly at the back. 3:06:31 PM

An interesting cognitive phenomenon: the percieved age of fellow humans changes to keep constant with your own age. In other words, when I recall the face of someone I went to third grade with, then someone I went to college with, then someone I work with today, the three faces "feel" the same in some basic sense. But of course, a third grader I see today looks like a little kid; similarly, a college student I see today looks strikingly "young." This is so obvious in my kid: even though he interacts with us all the time, it's clear (from his expressions, proto-sentences, etc.) that when he's playing around with other kids, he's interacting with people he's modeling as peers - as opposed to "big people." Like his parents. 1:45:20 PM