July 05, 2009
UTNE READER

Pop Culture

America's decline in a Coke bottle

November/December 1996
By Steven Garibaldi, Probable Cause 
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God, this Coca-Cola is good. This bottle is an artifact, an icon of the American Dream, as timeless as an Ionic column, as final as an arch. It cannot be improved. Cool green and fleshy, the shape both phallic and feminine. Designed to be instantly recognizable even when it's broken in the street, its lines recall the curve of a woman's hip in full recline, the classic pose of prostitutes in Renaissance paintings and movie stars in pinups of the forties. It has been called the perfect container, second only to the egg, but what it holds is far more volatile.

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In the first days of nursing, lactating mothers secrete an opiumlike fluid along with their milk. This allows the baby to imprint on the mother, to fix upon the breast. At what age did we substitute that cool wet nipple of glass? The original formula contained trace amounts of extracts from the coca leaf, but even before these were quietly removed, Coca-Cola knew what it was selling. "Nothing is so suggestive of Coca-Cola's own pure deliciousness as the picture of a beautiful, sweet, wholesome, womanly woman," said a turn-of-the-century ad. From its earliest days, Coca-Cola's ads portrayed beautiful women--painted by some of America's highest-paid and best-known illustrators and artists--sucking down, or about to suck down, the contents of that seductive bottle. In one from the mid-1920s, a rosy-cheeked flapper, her lips rounded into a perfect red O, lovingly regards with low-lidded eyes the Coca-Cola bottle in her hand. "Delicious and Refreshing"? Oh yes.

The generation that grew up immediately after World War II was nursed on Coca-Cola, nursed and never weaned. Norman Rockwell painted Coca-Cola ads. The Nelson family--Ozzie, Harriet, and the kids--endorsed the drink. Coke-bottle glasses, football star and naval hero, rolled his flat feet hollow on Coca-Cola bottles so that he could go to war. Children who grew up wearing Coke-bottle glasses went on to refine the bottle's shape into America's most identifiably American car. The voluptuous body of the Chevrolet Corvette reproduces the lines of the Coca-Cola bottle, and its strange sexual ambivalence as well. A Corvette is shiny, long, hard on the outside, yet the cockpit is small and intimate and wraps around your trunk and legs--a man to show to the world, and a woman just for you.

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