Indigo Girls Drivers Education

Who loves you?

The answer of who specifically loves you isn’t the point. The point, the important part, is that someone loves you. This question gets to the heart, the universal fulcrum, upon which the development of selfhood (regardless of girlhood or boyhood) hinges. The idea that love relationships, be they non-normative or hetero-normative, and the pursuit of happiness are synonymous is one of “the main products produced by media that enables it to earn its primary revenue from advertisers” (182). Thus, love is an audience commodity. However, our capacity to buy into the products promising us love renders us not only sentimental, and perhaps a little naïve, but also products. The driving force of the Indigo Girls song, “Driver’s Education,” is the universal sentiment of needing to find love. Nevertheless, it is also keenly aware of the marketability of the condition. The chorus, “films, drills, and safety illustrations,” actively engages in the discussion that love (as a marketable enterprise) is also a time-honored practice of cultural and market repetition. Yet, despite the many filmic variations, however many times a love song explores heartache, least of all the promises made to ourselves to “think” before “leaping” back into another fruitless relationship, time and time, we buy into love as a packaged idea.

The branding of “guy types” in the opening verse indicates an awareness of love and our marketability; “I fell for guys who tried to commit suicide/with soft rock hair and blood shot eyes. He tastes like Marlboro cigarettes, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” the brand specificity of the lines implies a taste testing of a product line. Men are tried and exchanged for “Tattooed girls with a past they can’t remember.” Interestingly, the third verse introduces a “you” that resists embodiment; “When you were sweet sixteen, I was already mean.” Sweet sixteen could be a cultural script for girlhood, but gender lines blurred at the end of the second verse when the “girl without a past,” takes off drinking with older men. Further complicating the gendering of the song is the juxtaposition of falling for guys and the introduction of the “switchblade set” as a marker of identity. With the gender confusion, what remains constant is the sentiment of love, its unfulfilled promise of happiness, and the search for fulfillment in its wake. The song’s gender ambivalence creates what Butler calls “the gaps and fissures...opened up as constitutive instabilities of [gender] construction” (Butler 239). However, the song retains cohesion and relevance to a larger audience based on the thing it seeks to sell, selves, girl/boy, seeking identification through a marketed dream of being “loved.” Further, by resisting a physical sexing through gender identification, “kissing in the deep end,” can be read without the sexual stimulus invoked by the language. This is interesting in terms of how Butler imagines Bodies mattering. If sex is “absorbed by gender” or in the case of this song the ambivalence of gender, and “sex becomes like a fiction,” then what does it do to the “cultural intelligibility” of this particular song? (Butler 238-239) For me, it does something blissfully not in keeping with the contemporary. It pulls the focus away from bodies as representations, as products, as consumers, and places emphasis on something generalized and distinctly human.   

The move from an individualized first-person perspective to a pluralized first-person perspective is interesting. It asserts cohesion of audience regardless of personal sexual preference. The universal attributes, “waterlogged and tender,” imply that as human beings we are saturated with needs, desires, and frailties that don’t need to be supplemented with media propaganda.