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Traces and snippets of production do occasionally flash across the screen -- usually as markers of something else. Such moments have been most likely to appear in automobile and truck ads. Automobile ads, on the one hand, will sometimes visit the factory (e.g., Ford and Saturn) to demonstrate how advanced their technologies are, and how well these technologies harmonize with their workers. These ads typically include two to three second scenes of stereotypic footage of robots or sparks flying as metal is welded to indicate productivity.
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 It is ironic that in a world materially influenced by greater and greater degrees of scientific precision, public relations images of work have become increasingly blurred and visually dislocated. This freeze frame -- taken from Ford's tribute to Henry Ford ad, where it was situated to testify to Henry Ford's enduring pledge of commitment and dedication to cars and mankind -- actually begins to resemble the appearance of a Cubist painting. But whereas Cubist artists endeavored to shatter the aesthetic of realism in trying to grasp the emergent industrial/modernist experience, images such as this mystify the experience of late capitalist technologies.
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Truck ads, on the other hand, for Ford, Mazda, Chevy, and GMC routinely depict their typical user as physically powerful men in the construction trades or in heavy-hauling non-urban activities vaguely involving the domination of nature. When depicting the truck as being as powerful as the worker who uses it, the truck is made to resemble the ideal traits of the group being hailed. It is heavy-duty, durable, capable of carrying heavy loads. "Like a Rock," sings Bob Seger for Chevy Trucks as the imagery focuses on solitary working men who, like their vehicles, are represented as being tough, hard working and able to transcend the forces of nature that they must master in order to make a living.  Another current example from the Ford F Series ads dwells on big men wearing hard hats. Once again these appear to be construction workers (maybe members of road crews -- but they could as easily be oil riggers or ranchers) who work outdoors. Images of the old industrial working class are punctuated in the Ford ads by the sound of a heavy hammer on spikes/rivets. This plays on the now all-but-forgotten imagery of John Henry (the "steel drivin' man") who could defeat even the machines of industrialization. Ideologically, the sound of hammer on steel, now refers to a machine age that has been tamed and made to serve the working man, rather than a force that threatens to vanquish them.
Though appealing, the logic of such ads is deeply flawed. The traits that are glorified in the Ford truck ads are precisely those which are less and less rewarded economically in the new global information economy. In fact, in today's occupational world, the muscular bodies depicted here are less and less often the product of daily workplace activities. Such bodies are far more likely the product of workouts conducted at the health club.
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Though Susan Willis's analysis of the workout focuses on the Nautilus activity as the ultimate form of non-productive labor for women, her argument more and more applies to men as well. As she points out, "the workout, as the contradictory synthesis of work and leisure, may well represent the most highly evolved commodity form yet to appear in late twentieth-century consumer capitalism" (p.69). Whereas, the young man's muscular body might once have been a consequence of the industrial capitalist separation of conception and execution, it is now a product of privatized exercise. In this sense, and this sense only, there is slightly greater social truth in the imagery of commodity fetishism that appears in Budweiser ads.
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In the realist discourse of 1990s advertisements, the working class has been reduced imagistically to the hardhat. It hardly even seems noteworthy anymore that the hardhat image has become more a method of hailing a particular category of male consumer as a demographic category than a statement about these men as workers, though one could infer a moment of flattery here as "the salt of the earth." To illustrate, I have lifted this image from a Burger King commercial in which the Burger King logo labels the scene of a hardhat-wearing forklift operator moving steel drums.
 The hardhat has become a second-order sign: a signifier of the working class that has nonetheless been emptied of its history. It is now an "indexical" sign that does nothing more than point toward construction workers. Still, we must not forget that this sign does have a referent in the real world as a helmet devised to protect the skull from falling objects. See the History of the Hardhat
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