The plot of this Buick commercial, if I may briefly explain it to you, is as follows: A woman is standing on a relatively busy city street waiting for her friend to pick her up. Her friend says, “I’m right here. I’m in the Buick,” and the woman — because Buick’s current commercial campaign is basically “Whoops, sorry our cars used to look so crappy” — accidentally hops in an older-looking car for a second before realizing her mistake and finding her friend in the fancy-looking Buick. The end.
The action in the commercial raises a few questions, including, “How did she walk right in front of her friend’s windshield and make it all the way to the other car?” which doesn’t say a lot about her ability pick up on her surroundings, but says even less about the “friend” that let her walk right by and hop into a stranger’s car without so much as a wave or toot of the horn. And maybe one day we’ll talk about that. Today, however, we are going to talk about the guy in the other car. The one sitting alone in his parked car eating a huge hoagie at night on a semi-crowded street. This guy.
I’m gonna be honest with you here: I think about this guy a lot. Too much. An unreasonable amount, really. But I can’t help it. He’s the most fascinating person on television right now, and I have a near endless amount of questions about him. For example:
- What happened in his day, going all the way back to when he woke up, that resulted in him wolfing down a hoagie in his parallel parked car, by himself, on a city street?
- Why didn’t he take the hoagie home?
- If going home wasn’t an option, couldn’t he have eaten it on a bench in a park, or just, like, gone to a restaurant instead of eating a solo car hoagie?
- If he’s in a large metropolitan area, shouldn’t there be a diner or Chinese restaurant nearby?
- If he’s dead set on eating that hoagie in his car, if there’s no talking him out of it, why did he park in such a high-traffic area instead of a deserted parking lot or something?
- Does the Hoagie Man have no shame?
(All of those questions are more interesting to me than anything that’s happened on True Detective this season.)
The best answer I’ve come up with so far is that he’s a cop on a stakeout. Like, instead of “the Hoagie Man,” he’s actually Detective Hoagieman. It explains why he’s sitting in a parked car by himself at night (staking out a warehouse owned by a notorious crime boss), why he’s hurriedly eating a hoagie (classic stakeout food, preparing for a long night), and why he’s driving an older model car (unmarked, undercover). The only thing it doesn’t explain is where his partner is. My guess: Buying coffee. Possibly taking a bathroom break. Also, his partner is a gruff older cop who mocks him for taking cream and sugar in his coffee and calls going to the bathroom “taking a leak” and is Gary Busey. I told you I’ve thought about this a lot.
I don’t think I’m entirely out of line to make this leap, either. Remember the other Buick commercial where the couple uses binoculars to snoop on the Garcias from their kitchen? I made the case back in January that they were cops, too, and I stand by that. In fact…
Maybe Hoagie Man is spying on Mr. Garcia, too. Maybe that’s what he’s doing out there at night alone in his car. Maybe all these Buick commercials are actually a slowly developing narrative about a task force investigating Mr. Garcia. Maybe the next commercial will feature a SWAT team in a Buick Encore smashing through the door of the warehouse to take him down. Maybe the campaign ends with him being arrested by Hoagie Man. Maybe Hoagie Man gets a key to the city from the mayor. MAYBE HOAGIE MAN IS A HERO.
Honestly, I don’t see how we can rule it out.
