Coke Sober

FAN is Dirt’s column about the way fandom touches every sector of our culture. We’ve previously covered Kosovo pop, Costco and Moomins.

Jameson Rich on what, exactly, constitutes a Coca-Cola moment. 

The World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta displays less of an interest in sugar than it does in contract law. There is sugar, of course; when you leave, it will glaze the bottoms of your shoes. But a corporate museum needs a narrative, and this one is about ownership. Who owned Columbia Pictures when Gandhi (1982) won Best Picture? Yes, America’s high fructose empire has an Oscar for a movie concerning one of history’s most famous hunger strikes, a replica of which can be seen before trying 40 different flavors of international soda—most of them acquisitions and subsidiaries. Within the building’s orbit, the will to see everything in contractual terms is contagious. Near the entrance, a security guard addresses my girlfriend as my wife.

I had come to Coke World (a better name, I think) already a devotee. Coca-Cola is the sole brand loyalty I have acquired in life; I am the owner of too many opinions about which bottling methods, varietals, and serving presentations offer the best Coke experience. The origin of my attachment is, like the ingredients inside a bottle, hazy. My affinity is due in part to the brand’s endurance, the way it has survived the image crises that seem to fell a new American business each week. Once when coming down off of surgical anesthesia, I imagined the first Coke I would drink upon my release—poured tableside from an eight-ounce glass bottle into a highball of ice—and wept.

Coke World starts by welcoming you into a cherry red movie theater to watch a film called “Moments of Happiness” set to Imagine Dragons’ “On Top of the World,” a song of scant charm here looped to a hallucinatory six minutes. I can’t possibly tell you what defines a “Coke moment.” Examples include a soldier reuniting with his family inside a football stadium, a man proposing marriage in a hot air balloon, people shooting basketballs from a hotel balcony into the ocean, a young boy flirting with an older woman. Some of life’s great pleasures, surely, but the brand connection is tenuous. Against reason—perhaps due to the song’s Mormon optimism or the contrived vérité camera work—both my girlfriend and I cry.

After the film ends, the screen lifts to reveal a hallway flooded with light. This heaven we enter is the self-directed portion of the museum. The design of its body is like a well-funded public high school—glass, linoleum, recessed lighting. A schlocky wall decal advertises a quote from a 1915 design brief: “A bottle so distinct that it could be recognized by touch in the dark.”

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