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DEARBORN, Mich.—On the ride over to Ford's (F) Rouge manufacturing plant, Henry Ford's great-grandson came on screen to welcome us to a place where "our past and our future are side by side." I should have known then that the factory tour would completely ignore Ford's present.

Tour is the wrong thing to call what we went through. It was more an anachronistic theme park ride. In Disney World, every ride has a lengthy preamble that narrates a back story before you get to the main event. The music creates a mood; the lighting tells the eye where to focus; the placards and short films set the stakes. It is the ride before the ride—an exercise in storytelling that heightens the payoff later on. It was no different inside the Ford tour.

Ford's ride was bisected just like Disney's. First you go through an elaborate foyer of sorts, one designed to dispense a slice of propaganda with a dose of history. Then, once you're good and indoctrinated, you progress on to the real deal, the factory itself.

When we first entered the foyer, the music was already swelling to a crescendo. Its major key implied triumph, adventure, and invention. We may as well have been inside a Lord of the Rings movie. In some of the films screened during the tour, the music only got more grandiose, like adding another cup of sugar to a birthday cake that had already turned saccharine. It wasn't the music of a company emerging from trouble or a resourceful, plucky upstart making do with what it has. It was a score for Ford's cocky past. I've embedded a bit below for you to get a taste:

The lighting was dimmed from above, yet the room was illuminated in spots from below. The Ford cars that were parked in the showroom rested on a shaft of light that, when juxtaposed with the overall darkness, drew the eye. The combination gave the room a bluish-pink quality, like we were in that ethereal state between early morning and a new dawn.

Dotted around the room were placards that didn't emphasize fuel-efficiency, Ford's independence from government aid, or new fuel-cell technology. Instead they either focused on Ford's past or its star truck, the F-150, which is produced at the Rouge plant. The F-150 blurbs were designed to sell the trucks in 2004 (when the factory tour began) not 2009. "Strength from the bottom up" one said about the F-150's "strongest frame." "Strength when you need it," described its tow hooks. I was looking at the world as it once was, when it was a safer, less-threatening place for Ford and for Michigan.

The evasion of the present didn't stop there. Inside a movie on Ford's legacy, the narrator said that "Rouge was not immune to the darkness of the great depression." But there was no mention of the current situation. Lip service was paid to Rouge being one of "the most environmentally advanced plants in the world." In an effort to prove this was true, the tour included a visit to an observation deck overlooking Rouge's "living roof," where we were told that having grass (sedum, actually, but we'll gloss over the difference) on your roof makes the roof longer-lasting and thus adds efficiency to the plant. All well and good, but again there was no mention of whether the cars were just as sustainable.  The sales pitch was again aimed at a different era, one where the Prius was just a funny-looking thing from Japan.

But all of those oddities paled in comparison to the most overwhelming aspect of the tour's introduction. After the legacy film we were ushered into another room, one where about 50 individual swivel chairs were arranged in a diamond pattern on the floor. Above hung seven screens that spread the full 360 degrees around the room. We were treated to a wordless film that could have been a film student's thesis if it wasn't so lacking in irony. We saw an F-150 being manufactured from start to finish; but as our tour attendee put it, we weren't just going see it being created, we were going to smell it and feel it, too.

Never before have I watched a movie on seven screens while the seat below rumbled and the ceiling above hissed smells into the room. When rain poured on screen, strobe lights flashed in the room; when metal was forged in underground fires, the room got hotter; when a coat of red paint was applied to the F-150, the room turned crimson. It was a show of brute force—impressive the way a theme park ride is, and one that leaves you just as hollow. The whole experience was miscalibrated; a company that is struggling like Ford is shouldn't be treating me to this kind of lavish entertainment.

Finally, after all that foreplay, came the factory. Conveyor belts were everywhere, outnumbered only by the number of steel beams criss-crossing the ceiling. It was an engineer's wet dream; a small community planned for perfect syncopation. Different parts of the cars are suspended from the ceiling, shimmying along until they caught a ramp down to the floor. There, folks moved them along while chatting with others. Robotic arms spun and jabbed along with the workers. Everyone was dressed casually, many in shorts and T-shirts; it appeared there was no official Ford uniform.

The workers had just come back from a week off and were nearing the end of a 10-hour shift. Rouge has reduced its production to four days a week, which means it's only running two shifts, down from the usual three. At two shifts the place cranks out about 1,100 vehicles, and when you're overlooking the factory the accomplishment is considerable. As one of the tour guides told me, every 53 seconds another truck is produced.

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And there was still no mention of the current situation on any of the factory's official placards. Ford, remember, is the responsible one of the Big Three. It doesn't have outstanding loans with the U.S. government, as they've chosen to go it alone and avoid Obama's watchful eye. A factory tour is the perfect place to emphasize that independence. Rather than all the propaganda about Ford's legacy, why not push the message that Ford is the only responsible carmaker left in America? "We're the only one that managed to build a country without later robbing it," the official line could go. It's a compelling case, yet nobody's making it to the hundreds of tourists that come through Rouge every day.

Perplexed by this, I asked one of the tour guides whether any of the materials had been changed since their introduction in 2004. "With Ford's financial situation, it hasn't been a top priority," he said. That's the kind of inside-out thinking that got Detroit into this mess, and the kind that Ford has avoided better than its competitors. Not that you'd know that from the tour.

(Photos by David Backer)

The Birthday Present A Novel
Written by Barbara Vine

Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter–a beautiful, leggy, married woman named Hebe–the two become lovers obsessed with their trysts, spiced up by what the newspapers like to call “adventure sex.”

It’s the dress-up and role-play that inspire Ivor to create a surprise birthday present for his beloved that involves a curbside kidnapping. It’s all intended as mock-dangerous foreplay, but then things take a dark turn.

After things go horribly wrong, Ivor begins to receive anonymous letters that reveal astonishingly specific details about the affair and its aftermath. Somehow he must keep his role from being uncovered–and his political future from being destroyed by scandal.

Like a heretic on the inquisitor’s rack, Ivor is not to be spared the exquisitely slow and tortuous unfolding of events, as hints, nuances, and small revelations lay his darkest secrets hideously bare for all the world to see.

The Birthday Present is a deft, insightful, and compulsively readable exploration of obsessive desire–and the dark twists of fate that can shake the lives of even those most insulated by privilege, sophistication, and power.


From the Hardcover edition.