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.