With road-trip season upon us once again, here’s an examination of how American car culture has been romanticized by the entertainment industry; how automobiles, far from enablers of freedom and individuality, are in fact “turbo-boosted engines of inequality”; and how Hollywood can help remedy an ecocultural crisis it’s played no small role in propagating.
In any given episode, the action reliably starts the same way: a wide shot of the Batcave, Batmobile turning on its rotating platform to face the cavemouth, camera panning left as the Dynamic Duo descend the Batpoles. Satin capes billowing, Batman and Robin hop into their modified 1955 Lincoln Futura, buckle up—decades before it was legally required, incidentally—and the engine whines to life as they run through their pre-launch checklist:
ROBIN: Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed. BATMAN: Roger. Ready to move out.
A blast of flame from the car’s rear thruster—whoosh!—and off they’d race to save the day.
By the time the 1980s had rolled around, when I was first watching Batman (1966–1968) in syndicated reruns, every TV and movie hero worth his salt got around the city in a conspicuously slick set of wheels. Muscle cars proved popular with working-class ’70s sleuths Jim Rockford (Pontiac Firebird) and Starsky and Hutch (Ford Gran Torino). The neon-chic aesthetic of Reagan era, however, called for something a bit sportier, like the Ferrari, the prestige ride of choice for Honolulu-based gumshoe Thomas Magnum (Magnum, P.I.) and buddy cops Crockett and Tubbs (Miami Vice). The ’80s were nothing if not ostentatiously aspirational.
Even when cars were patently comical, they came off as cool despite themselves: the Bluesmobile, the 1974 Dodge Monaco used in The Blues Brothers (1980); the Ectomobile, the 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel in Ghostbusters (1984); the Wolfmobile, a refurbished bread truck that Michael J. Fox and his pal use for “urban surfing” in Teen Wolf (1985).
The DMC DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future is clearly meant to be absurd, designed in the same kitchen-sink spirit as the Wagon Queen Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), but what nine-year-old boy in 1985 didn’t want to be Michael J. Fox, sliding across the stainless-steel hood and yanking the gull-wing door shut behind him? And like the characters themselves, the DeLorean evolved with each movie, going from nuclear-powered sports car (Part I) to cold-fusion flyer (Part II) to steampunk-retrofitted railcar (Part III). “Maverick” Mitchell’s need for speed didn’t hold a candle to Marty McFly’s, who’s very existence depended on the DeLorean’s capacity to reach 88 miles per hour.
Vehicles that carried teams of heroes offered their own vicarious pleasure. Case in point: the 1983 GMC Vandura, with its red stripe and rooftop spoiler, that served as the A-Team’s transpo and unofficial HQ—a place where they could bicker comically one minute then emerge through the sunroof the next to spray indiscriminate gunfire from their AK-47s. The van even had a little “sibling”: the Chevrolet Corvette (C4) that Faceman would occasionally drive, marked with the same diagonal stripe. Did it make sense for wanted fugitives to cruise L.A. in such a distinct set of wheels? Not really. But it was cool as hell, so.
The Mystery Machine was the only recurring location, as it were, on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969), and the van’s groovy paint scheme provided contrast with the series’ gloomy visuals. Speaking of animated adventures, when once-ascetic Vietnam vet John Rambo made the intuitive leap from R-rated action movies to after-school cartoon series (1986), he was furnished with Defender, a 6×6 assault jeep. Not to be outdone, the most popular military-themed animated franchise of the ’80s, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1983–1986), featured over 250 discrete vehicles, and the characters that drove them were, for the most part, an afterthought:
With the debut of the 3 ¾” figures in 1982, Hasbro also offered a range of vehicles and playsets for use with them. In actual fact, the 3 ¾” line was conceived as a way to primarily sell vehicles—the figures were only there to fill them out!
‘3 ¾” Vehicles,’ YoJoe!
But who needs drivers when the vehicles themselves are the characters? The protagonists of The Transformers (1984–1987) were known as the Autobots, a race of ancient, sentient robots from a distant planet that conveniently shapeshifted into 1980s-specific cars like the Porsche 924 and Lamborghini Countach, among scores of others. (The premise was so deliriously toyetic, it never occurred to us to question the logic of it.) Offering the best of both G.I. Joe and The Transformers, the paramilitary task force of M.A.S.K. (1985–1986), whose base of operations was a mountainside gas station (what might be described as Blofeld’s volcano lair meets the Boar’s Nest), drove armored vehicles that transformed into… entirely different vehicles.
Many movies and shows not only featured cars as prominent narrative elements, but literally took place on the road: Vacation. Mad Max (1979). Smokey and the Bandit (1977). CHiPs (1977–1983). Sometimes the car was so important it had a proper name: General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–1985). Christ, sometimes it was the goddamn series costar: KITT on Knight Rider (1982–1986). Shit on David Hasselhoff’s acting ability all you want, but the man carried a hit TV show delivering the lion’s share of his dialogue to a dashboard. Get fucked, Olivier.
As a rule, productions keep multiple replicas of key picture cars on hand, often for different purposes: the vehicle utilized for dialogue scenes isn’t the one rigged for stunts, for instance. It’s notable that the most detailed production model—the one featured in medium shots and closeups, in which the actors perform their scenes—is known as the “hero car.” And why not? Over the past half century, Hollywood has unquestionably programmed all of us to recognize the heroism of the automobile.
A Real American Hero
In Greg Beeman’s License to Drive (1988), suburban teen Les Anderson (Corey Haim) yearns to be liberated from his crippling dependency on the public bus—an experience so traumatizing he has actual nightmares about it—in favor of the sexy independence of car ownership. Over dinner, Les and his brainy twin sister Natalie (Nina Siemaszko) debate the very subject:
NATALIE: Karl says that in America, people are misled to believe that a car represents freedom and individuality. . . LES (skeptically): Right. NATALIE: . . . when, in essence, it is more oppressive than anything else, burdening the individual with such materialistic costs as -- LES: Wait -- who cares what your commie boyfriend thinks? I say it’s great to be an American! — From License to Drive, screenplay by Neil Tolkin
At the film’s coda, Les cranks the volume on the dashboard radio and peels out, his blonde girlfriend (Heather Graham) riding shotgun, cheered on by Billy Ocean’s ’80s pop anthem “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.” The movie, in its final tally, very much validates Les’ perspective: cars good; commies bad. Say—any guesses to which demographic cohort the movie’s screenwriter (Tolkin) and director (Beeman) belong?
That the automobile was elevated from utilitarian appliance to American birthright during this period isn’t at all surprising. Having come of age during the postwar economic boom and suburbanization it spurred, a new generation of filmmakers—Baby boomers—was romanticizing the car culture that defined its youth. The era brought us all manner of hero-car cinema, from nostalgic paeans like American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978)…
… to Oil Crisis–inspired dystopian fantasies including Death Race 2000 (1975) and The Road Warrior (1981)…
… to Roger Corman–produced carsploitation comedies like Eat My Dust! (1976) and Thunder and Lightning (1977)…
… through Morning in America neoliberal propaganda, aimed squarely at the next generation of American consumers, such as License to Drive and The Transformers, the latter a narrativized toy catalog in which—pause with me momentarily to appreciate the sublime irony—heroic cars are the only bulwark against the exploitation of Earth’s natural resources. Even TV shows that weren’t explicitly about cars nonetheless existed to indirectly support the automotive industry:
“TV seasons always began in September. And that had something to do with auto sales, by the way. The new car seasons came out, and they were going to advertise heavily, so you wanted new TV.”
Leight, Warren. “How streaming caused the TV writers strike.” YouTube video, posted by Vox, 10:32. June 7, 2023.
Hell, boomers still love their cars, as evidenced by Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012–2019) and Jay Leno’s Garage (2015–2022).
I was as taken with the General Lee and KITT and the Transformers as any impressionable Xer raised on all that car-worshipping media. But I also grew up a city kid whose primary modes of transportation were skateboards and subways, so I can’t say I counted the days till I could get my driver’s license à la Corey Haim. My mother encouraged me to do so at eighteen, reasoning that if I didn’t get it then, I might easily find myself in my mid-twenties without any experience behind the wheel. So, I took the test and literally kept the license in my back pocket. I’ll admit it came in handy the following year, when I started dating a gal out in Queens. For the twenty years she and I lived in L.A., the car was absolutely essential. Now that we’re back in the Bronx, I’m grateful to be less reliant on it.
But as far as I can tell, the City of New York did not get that memo. The streets are hopelessly gridlocked. The highway out my window, the closest of three visible from my apartment, could easily be mistaken for a parking lot most of the time. And the nightly circle-the-block ritual of street parking has devolved from gladiatorial, when I was a kid, to Sisyphean. I stopped by a friend’s apartment down in Highbridge last month, and had no choice but to park my car on the sidewalk beside a vacant lot. It didn’t stand out, either, because it was far from the only one:
Much like the Gen X–venerated G.I. Joe toyline, expressly devised as a showroom of endless new vehicles for sale (action figures sold separately!), the American city was purposefully and pervasively reorganized to serve the needs of the automobile, with little regard—often flagrant disregard—for its denizens:
Even if most of us can sense the problems, it takes practiced eyes to know exactly what modern cities are doing wrong. Streets are the arteries of a city, and the typical American city has given that highly valuable real estate over to cars almost entirely. In some downtowns, streets and parking lots take up half the land. This is a radical change from the way streets used to be shared by pedestrians, horses, delivery wagons, bicycles, streetcars, and even trains. After World War II, all other forms of conveyance were evicted. As cars took over, the long decline of mass transit began. . . . In the second half of the twentieth century, these systems were starved of investment in favor of the new king of the highway, the car. . . .
Perhaps it was inevitable in the age of the automobile to connect American cities with fast roads, but was it inevitable to pierce the hearts of our cities with those highways? In almost every sizeable American city, one or more freeways were routed directly into the downtown. Apartment buildings, schools, and parks had to be ripped out to accommodate the new highways. . . .
As the freeways were planned, local leaders had to make decisions about which neighborhoods to destroy. You can probably guess that it was not the wealthy white neighborhoods that wound up on the chopping block. The hearts of many historic Black neighborhoods were bulldozed during the freeway binge, and the racism animating these decisions was overt.
Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis, The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 122–24
“Some guys get all the brakes,” reads the tagline for License to Drive. The movie certainly makes a persuasive case for that truism. Late in the second act, the Coreys get pulled over during a routine traffic stop, where the on-scene officer discovers Les is—surprise!—unlicensed. Upon searching the trunk, the cop finds Les’ teenage girlfriend stuffed inside, out cold in a drunken stupor. Called to respond to a nearby riot, however, the officer lets the boys off with… a very stern reprimand.
Sounds about right. Not one person in the city of Chicago, after all, thought it remotely suspicious that teenage trickster Ferris Bueller was cruising around in a limited-edition Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder on his legendary day off. Some guys get all the breaks, huh? Funny how those guys always seem to look like Matthew Broderick and the two Coreys.
But for many low-income and minority Americans, automobiles have been turbo-boosted engines of inequality, immobilizing their owners with debt, increasing their exposure to hostile law enforcement, and in general accelerating the forces that drive apart haves and have-nots. . . .
. . . A traffic stop can result in fines or arrest; time behind bars can result in repossession or a low credit score; a low score results in more debt and less ability to pay fines, fees and surcharges. Championed as a kind of liberation, car ownership—all but mandatory in most parts of the country—has for many become a vehicle of capture and control.
Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston, “Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It,” Opinion, New York Times, December 15, 2022
Got all that? Inner-city neighborhoods are deliberately selected as sacrifice zones so (largely though not exclusively) white people can flee to the pristine seclusion of the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them, which means public-transit services are deprived of funding to the point where residents of those areas are now car-dependent, too… which only further erodes quality of urban life and—bonus!—puts a target on the back of any persons of color operating those motor vehicles.
In short, many of the most acute American problems are all connected: racism and racial anxiety contributed to suburbanization, which led to the extreme dependence on cars that is now our major source of greenhouse emissions.
Harvey and Gillis, The Big Fix, 124–25
But tell me again, Les, how great it is to be an American.
Pumping the Brakes, Pulling the Levers
While it’s true that reconfiguring our cities and our lives around the automobile is arguably the biggest infrastructural fuck-up of the twentieth century, we can figure a way out of this mess, provided we’re willing to exercise political courage and moral imagination:
The forces that have shaped modern American cities, driving street life out of them and turning them over to the tyranny of the automobile, can seem impersonal and unapproachable. But these bad decisions were made by people. They can be undone. Citizen activists are proving it, all over the world. . . .
This is why people who care about the climate need to raise their voices in support of complete streets [those that allow for cars but have been narrowed to accommodate other activities], in support of bike lanes, in support of closing some streets to cars entirely. If a city’s bureaucracy won’t move, we need to haul out paint cans and put bike lanes and crosswalks in the streets ourselves. We need to go down to City Hall and make clear that we support wiping single-family zoning off the books, so that a gradual increase in the density of neighborhoods can occur. We need to speak up in favor of congestion charges in traffic-choked cities, with 100 percent of the money raised from these charges devoted to improvements in public transit.
We need to oppose freeway expansions, anywhere and everywhere they are proposed. Expanding the freeways to try to solve traffic is a fool’s errand; the wider roads simply draw more cars, so that traffic deteriorates back to the starting level.
ibid., 137–38
Right. And as much as this is a matter of more robust investment in sensible infrastructure, it’s also about enacting more socially equitable policies:
Though progressive in intent, the Biden administration’s signature legislative achievements on infrastructure and climate change will further entrench the nation’s staunch commitment to car production, ownership and use. The recent Inflation Reduction Act offers subsidies for many kinds of vehicles using alternative fuel, and should result in real reductions in emissions, but it includes essentially no direct incentives for public transit—by far the most effective means of decarbonizing transport. And without comprehensive policy efforts to eliminate discriminatory policing and predatory lending, merely shifting to electric from combustion will do nothing to reduce car owners’ ever-growing risk of falling into legal and financial jeopardy, especially those who are poor or Black. . . .
Aside from the profound need for accessible public transportation, what could help? Withdraw armed police officers from traffic duties, just as they have been from parking and tollbooth enforcement in many jurisdictions. Introduce income-graduated traffic fines. Regulate auto lending with strict interest caps and steep penalties for concealing fees and add-ons and for other well-known dealership scams. Crack down hard on the widespread use of revenue policing. And close the back door to debtors’ prisons by ending the use of arrest warrants in debt collection cases. Without determined public action along these lines, technological advances often end up reproducing deeply rooted prejudices. As Malcolm X wisely said, “Racism is like a Cadillac; they bring out a new model every year.”
Ross and Livingston, “Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It,” New York Times
But here’s the thing: These absolutely critical efforts in the fight against climate change—large-scale green-infrastructure projects and holistic environmental-justice policies—are going to require a major mindset shift, especially on the part of privileged Americans who, by and large, consider themselves politically liberal and reliably vote Democratic. (Like yours truly.) Because the car problem in America stems from the same entrenched mentality that fuels our gun problem: We love our cars. And the most powerful propaganda apparatus in all the world—Hollywood—has spent the last half of the previous century and the first quarter of this one nurturing our affection for the automobile, affirming it as the preeminent symbol of American identity.
In other words: We’ve been sold a lemon.
Petro-Masculinity on the Screen and in the Street
Released last month, Fast X (2023) isn’t, as its name might suggest, an off-brand laxative, merely one more shitty sequel in the hateful Fast & Furious series. This isn’t just another creatively subpar movie franchise; it’s a socially irresponsible one:
Southern California has long been an epicenter of high-speed car culture. Wild police pursuits dominate television newscasts. The “Fast & Furious” film franchise, which many cops blame for hyping street racing, was set in Los Angeles.
Police say incidents of street racing are on the rise, driven by popular culture and the use of social media to draw contestants and evade authorities. In what racers call “takeovers,” participants use their cars to block off streets or intersections to stage races. . . .
“We have the locations. We have lots of flat street. We have industrial parks. And the Hollywood connection,” said Chief Chris O’Quinn, who leads the California Highway Patrol’s Southern Division in L.A. County. “This is the place to be.”
James Queally and Nicole Santa Cruz, “Out of control,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2018
In 2013, Fast & Furious series costar Paul Walker, aged 40, was the passenger in a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT being driven by Roger Rodas, 38, on a curved street in suburban L.A. prized by racing enthusiasts, in defiance of the 45-mph speed limit, for its ideal drifting conditions. The Porsche crashed into a concrete lamppost and a pair of trees at a speed estimated to be between 80 and 93 mph. Both men burned to death in the wreckage.
That tragedy didn’t inspire so much as half a moment’s humility or introspection from the Fast & Furious producers or cast about the subculture they glorify or the message they send to their impressionable audience. But proudly looking no further than a quarter mile down the road is altogether consistent with everything about that braindead, billion-dollar-grossing shitshow:
From an eco-critical perspective, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious (2001) and its sequels, John Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Justin Lin’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Fast and Furious (2009), and Fast and Furious 6, like the 1954 John Ireland film, The Fast and the Furious, which inspired them, not only illustrate the devotion to souped-up high-speed cars and the stylish culture they represent; they also take environmental degradation to hyperbolic levels. These films go beyond merely highlighting the car as an American icon and valorizing a concrete highway built for racing. In spite of the more liberal class and race politics in the later films that serve to critique human exploitation, all these Fast and Furious films advocate a heightened abuse of nature and ecosystems. They rest on transformed natural and man-made environments, and on the environmental impact that is inherently a part of car culture.
In the contemporary Fast and Furious films, the situation is the same as it was in 1954—car culture celebrates speed and control, as well as the transformation of the natural landscape into a man-made landscape that is, in turn, itself transformed without questioning the environmental expense. These films demonstrate that the environmental impact of cars and the car culture in America has been treated as natural and desirable, as a given. Drivers in all the films appear to rebel against a conformist suburban culture that uses roadways for commuting and garages for parking instead of racing; however, they also conform to this same culture through their acceptance of environmental degradation in the form of both a transformation of natural and man-made landscapes, and reliance on nonrenewable fuels that contribute to global warming.
robin, “Fast and Furious Films and the Transformation of the Natural World,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment (blog), June 26, 2013
That Fast & Furious treats “environmental degradation [as] not only a given but a goal” (ibid.) is only one of its myriad unforgivable sins. These stories consecrate one of our most pernicious cultural archetypes: the tough-guy antihero who’s exempted from his obligations to the social compact because he’s just so fuckin’ special. Sociopathic assholes like Dominic Toretto and his “fambly” have systematically trained male audiences, through decades of patriarchal propaganda, to position ourselves as the righteous protagonists of our very own heroic narrative, and to view other people merely as “obstacles, roles, props or background noise,” to borrow one of my favorite observations from author Erik Tyler’s Alternate Reality.
Such are the dickheads that tear ass at all hours up the parkway that snakes through my Bronx community, whose roaring engines announce their approaching armada as far south as Upper Manhattan before rattling the windows of my apartment with the sonic boom they discharge as they blast by. I can still hear them long after they’ve crossed the county line into Westchester.
They’re the drivers who graffiti the intersections and parking lots around my neighborhood with doughnut tread marks. Who pull around me impatiently—and dangerously—on the highway onramp, because I’m wasting their time by yielding to high-speed oncoming traffic, flipping me the bird as they pass. Who blow through stoplights as if there were a grace period on them—a “five-second rule” that starts the moment they turn red. Who drive angrily and aggressively by rote, and who can never seem to get where they’re going—likely a job they hate, to pay for the car that gets them there—soon enough.
They are quite literally fast and furious, and those so-named repugnant movies enfranchise them and encourage a culture of petro-masculinity. Just like the speculative dystopian vision presented in Mad Max, the roads now belong to the fast and furious, who see themselves not as villains but antiestablishment heroes, and the other vehicles and pedestrians with which they are grudgingly forced to share the streets merely obstacles, props, or background noise.
But, like the conformists and suburbanites they reject, they act like everything in nature exists to be consumed and exploited. To them, the concrete paved landscapes of inner-city Los Angeles, Miami, and Tokyo are natural. Only their exploitative transformation of them provides them with what they see as a radical edge. When concrete landscapes go unquestioned, so do their transformations.
ibid.
This is the sociocultural mindset we’re up against. And it isn’t confined to high-octane action movies, either:
That promo makes me want to puke. It’s a grotesque exaltation of everything afflicting our culture right now: fossil-fuel consumption, environmental degradation, climate change, automobile worshipping, conspicuous consumerism, reality-TV exploitation, celebrity endorsements, commercial nostalgia, corporate infantilization—all it’s missing is grimdark superheroes for the sweep.
Until we learn to regard the automobile—and our programmed dependence on it—as a blight rather than a birthright, we will continue to see emissions rise, fatalities ensue, discriminatory policing and predatory lending persist, and quality of life diminish for all. Anyone who’s been behind the wheel recently has surely experienced the soul-deadening misery of the so-called open road. With increasing regularity, I’ve been spying this notice on cars all around my area:
This is what it’s come to: preemptively pleading with other drivers to exercise a modicum of basic decency. I somehow doubt, alas, a bumper sticker is going to make much of an impression on entitled gearheads—what I call Everyday Heroes (it isn’t a compliment)—who gleefully ignore stop signs and speed limits, who proudly live their lives a quarter mile at a time, and for whom going fast and driving furious isn’t a pathosis but rather a privilege.
Yes, we need improved infrastructure and equitable policies—absolutely. But we need a culture shift, as well. Hollywood can help. It’s helped before.
Course Correction
Fast cars weren’t the only de rigueur idiosyncrasy of the screen heroes I admired as a boy; so were cigarettes. Ghostbusters (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), Tremors (1989), and Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) all feature main characters smoking in scene after scene after scene. But…
By the time those movies got sequels in the 1990s, everyone had at some point kicked the habit offscreen. Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) explicitly mentions that quitting smoking was an intentional decision on his part in Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996). Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) earnestly gives up cigarettes in the closing moment of Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), and his subsequent nicotine cravings became a running gag in Lethal Weapon 3 (1992); by Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), the production designers didn’t even bother including ashtrays as background props. That’s how quickly the culture shifted. Hollywood filmmakers could do it—they could model better modes of living if they tried. It wouldn’t, as demonstrated, be the first time.
In The Big Fix, Harvey and Gillis encourage us make our voices heard at City Hall in support of abolishing single-family zoning, enacting congestion pricing, and opposing freeway expansion. We could make our voices heard in Hollywood, too, with the right application of social pressure. Have you heard of the Begley-Cohen test?
Inspired by and modeled after the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which is used to measure female representation in media, The Begley-Cohen Test is designed to help audiences quickly assess the representation and prevalence of single-use plastic within the content they consume.
A film or TV show passes The Begley-Cohen Test if…
(1) No single-use plastics appear on screen (i.e., the film/show is set in a time with no plastic, or plastics are replaced with refillable, reusable, or package-free options), or…
(2) If a single-use plastic item appears on screen, it is portrayed or discussed as problematic.
“Plastic Portrayal in Film & TV: The Begley-Cohen Test,” Plastic Pollution Coalition, October 6, 2022
Simple as that. We’ll call ours the Harvey-Gillis test. Here are the criteria:
- No motor vehicles appear onscreen (i.e., the film/show is set in a time before automobiles, or automobiles are eschewed for alternative options, like walking, bicycling, or public transit), or…
- If a motor vehicle appears onscreen, it is portrayed or discussed as problematic.
Far from a creative restraint, such stricture could be a creative opportunity! Consider the comic mileage, if you’ll forgive the obvious pun, Married… with Children got out of its still-uproarious 1990 episode “We’ll Follow the Sun,” in which the Bundys head out for a Labor Day road trip—“We’re gonna go where people pretend they wanna go when they can’t afford to go someplace good,” Al enthusiastically declares: “We’re gonna see America”—only to spend the entire episode logjammed in standstill freeway traffic, fighting verbally amongst themselves and eventually physically with other frustrated motorists.
Long before he was struck by a minivan while walking along a rural Maine road in 1999, Baby boomer Stephen King didn’t necessarily share his cohorts’ nostalgia for car culture, frequently portraying the automobile as a supernatural force of malevolence—most famously in Christine (1983), but also in “Trucks” (1973) and From a Buick 8 (2002). And the protagonist of Misery (1987), celebrating the completion of his new novel, notably titled Fast Cars, crashes his vehicle while driving drunk, only to discover upon returning to consciousness he’s been taken captive by a sadistic fan. I don’t imagine either the title of his manuscript or the means by which his nightmarish ordeal starts are accidental.
The point is, what a largely untapped narrative goldmine storytellers of all genres and mediums have waiting for us by recasting the heretofore heroic automobile as nefariously antagonistic, and reframing car culture as patently detrimental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And filmmakers who refuse to challenge their automotive assumptions, who continue to romanticize the road and propagate petro-masculinity, need to be held accountable.
We can use the Harvey-Gillis test—and social media—to make content creators more sensitive to how unconsciously they take for granted “their acceptance of environmental degradation in the form of both a transformation of natural and man-made landscapes, and reliance on nonrenewable fuels that contribute to global warming” through their depiction of automobile usage and glorification of car culture in their movies and shows. There was a time, well within living memory, when we accepted cigarettes as a ubiquitous fact of life—not just in our media, but in offices and restaurants and airplanes, as well. Now they’re an anomalous aberration.
We could do the same for automobiles. Change the culture, and public policy will soon follow. We need morally imaginative storytellers to show us a better path forward—a path for hikers, bicyclists, trolleys, outdoor diners, pushcart vendors… hell, even horses. Why not? But not more cars. We tried that already, and it’s a road to nowhere. Because as the old lyric goes: “Summer’s here and the time is right / For dancing in the street.”
Oh, would that we could.
California State Senator Henry Stern selected the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, established by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, as his 2023 Nonprofit of the Year honoree. I am a founding member of the SFV Chapter and proudly continue to serve on its leadership team, from the other side of the country, as Member Mentor. If this essay offered you some measure of value, kindly consider showing your support with a donation to the SFV Chapter, whose citizen activists work tirelessly—and selflessly—on initiatives including educational presentations, climate legislation, sustainability practices, environmental justice, and rights of nature.
Excellent post, Sean. I’ve never been car-impressed, though I remember wanting to get my liscense ASAP when I was 16, so I didn’t need to ask for rides from mom. I think devotion to cars is mostly, but by no means exclusively, a guy thing in the US (that petro-masculinity you mentioned, along with gun-adoration, applies to some women too).
I thought you did an illustrative job of talking about the socio-economic implications of cars. Not to mention the impact on the climate, road safety, neighborhoods, policing, personal debt, and common courtesy. If nothing else, it’s clear that Hollywood has perpetuated an irresponsible disregard for all of the above.
As always, I enjoy your push for “political courage and moral imagination.” It’s inspiring, and the parallel to nixing cigarettes in most films means it’s not only possible, but it can work. Great post, my friend. 🙂
Thanks, Diana! Agreed: Love of cars, like love of guns, is not exclusively a male pathosis, and women are just as capable of seeing an Everyday Hero in the mirror. (I know my share of Everyday Heroines.) But there’s no question the United States currently suffers from an epidemic of toxic masculinity (of which petro-masculinity is a subset), and movies like Fast & Furious — to say nothing of noxious Internet personalities like Andrew Tate — encourage that culture and enfranchise those who embrace/exhibit those qualities.
Women can be assholes, too — absolutely! — but seldom are they proudly assholes vis-à-vis their male counterparts. For men, assholery is often an expression of our identity — of our patriarchal birthright, of our programmed delusion that acting like a self-serving dick is somehow antiestablishment. That’s the “heroic narrative” so ingrained in our culture, through our pop culture, that needs immediate rehabilitation by morally imaginative storytellers, like Jason Sudeikis and his colleagues have done on Ted Lasso.
I suspect movies like License to Drive (1988) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), which feature white suburban kids getting away with shit an inner-city Black kid would’ve been sent straight to Rikers for doing (provided, of course, he survived his arrest), were not written maliciously but rather from a place of unconscious bias, a position of white privilege. I don’t hate those movies. On the contrary, there is much about them to enjoy. But it’s important they be viewed within the cultural context of the time they were made, and that the white-privilege values encoded within them be subjected to critical interrogation. And the danger of endlessly rebooting, remaking, and sequelizing media franchises from the ’70s and ’80s — no less than Ferris Bueller is getting a nostalgic spin-off titled Sam and Victor’s Day Off — is that the outmoded values embedded in those stories are carried over and passed down to a new generation of viewers.
Such is why I’ve spilled so much ink on this blog advocating for morally imaginative storytelling. Commercial storytellers play an outsized role in shaping the culture, and that power needs to be wielded responsibly. And I’m going to call it out when it isn’t, and always push for Hollywood — for all of us — to do better.
Thanks for your support, Diana. And congrats on your Next Generation Indie Book Award for Fantasy!
I just added a new word to my vocabulary – “assholery.” Lol. I love that. Thanks!
I aim to educate and entertain here! “Assholery” has its own entry on Wiktionary, so if that doesn’t establish its lexiconic legitimacy, what’s the world coming to?
Don’t sell yourself short. You do educate and entertain us. But you also Inspire us and call us to action
And I believe there’s some artistic expression here too
Hey, thanks, pal! Most of my posts, particularly those written over these past three years, have primarily been about educating myself. To borrow E.M. Forster’s quote (yet again): How do I know what I think until I see what I say? Any essay or story we take on presumably has a thesis or theme that interests us, and the process of composing that work should yield deeper insight into the subject matter than we had at the start of the project. That’s what makes the creative process so thrilling: It’s an intellectual expedition.
The word educate, after all, comes from the Latin verb educo, which means to “draw out.” The idea is that education is less about imparting knowledge than it is processing knowledge: contextualizing data, drawing connections between disparate notions, extracting insight. That’s what our philosophers and our storytellers do. I hold my work to the highest possible standards, and I tend to trust that if I’m able to take value from something I’ve written, others will, too.
Have a safe and happy Independence Day, all right? Enjoy yourself!
All these big and little screen cars made me think of Herbie the Volkswagon, too. I enjoyed your post, Sean, lots to think about.
Thanks, Vera! All the “hero cars” I mentioned in the essay’s opening salvo, from the Batmobile to the DeLorean to the Ectomobile, were vehicles I loved — and toys I coveted — as a boy! Somewhere in my mother’s apartment is a great photo of me at ten years old climbing out of KITT from Knight Rider at Universal Studios in the mid-’80s. (I tried like hell to find the picture so I could include it in this post, but my mother has endless albums and boxes of old photos from the pre-digital days, and at some point I had to give up the hunt.) I had fun reminiscing about those movie and TV cars from my youth, including Herbie the Love Bug, which didn’t get an explicit mention but was not overlooked when I was researching this piece. One of my hopes for this post is that others will share some of their favorite “hero cars,” too! Thanks for being the first!
What a summary! The cars in old Hollywood movies never bothered me, but I see where you took that theme. In a winder lens, you are so right. Hollywood likes pushing their vision of the world on the rest of us through movies. I’m pulling away from them of late, returning to good books.
Thanks, Jacqui! As I said to Diana above, while Hollywood has definitely shilled for the auto industry — more so through TV than feature films — I suspect most of the car-worshipping in our popular culture comes from a place of unconscious privilege. A filmmaker like George Lucas, for example, grew up loving cars, racing cars, and cruising downtown Modesto on Saturday nights, and he wanted to celebrate those formative experiences in American Graffiti (1973). I get that. But I’m also sure that as a straight white male, growing up in a middle-class family in Northern California, it never crossed Lucas’ mind that not everyone had such romantic automotive experiences — that his experiences weren’t necessarily universal experiences.
Same could be said for writer-director Gy Waldron, who celebrated Southern car-racing culture in his 1975 action-comedy indie Moonrunners and the massively successful TV series it spawned, The Dukes of Hazzard. For Lucas and Waldron, the car represented speed and freedom, with likely little to no thought given to the environmental degradation that made that speed and “freedom” possible, nor to the privileges afforded to white male drivers, for whom reckless driving was all “fun and games.” (Christ, the General Lee was adorned with a painted Confederate flag atop its roof!) Smokey and the Bandit, for instance, would’ve been a very different movie had the Burt Reynolds part been played by Richard Roundtree or Melvin Van Peebles.
These are the kinds of considerations fans and filmmakers ought to entertain, however uncomfortably, whenever we feel inclined to wax nostalgic about the good old days. It might be time for new modes of thinking, and, as Naomi Klein suggests, new stories to inspire them — in all mediums. Thanks for visiting, Jacqui!
I started to comment then I had to run off. Now I don’t remember if I ever hit “post comment.” Anyway, I enjoyed this post, lots to think about. Made me remember Herbie the Volkswagon.:-)
Oh sure, NOW I see my previous comment. It’s one of those days…!
No worries whatsoever! I’m grateful for the time and attention you invested in my blog post this morning, Vera. I know those are precious commodities, and I don’t take it for granted when someone spends that capital on me. Thank you.
Well, bless you, Vera, for coming back to complete your comment despite the disruption! I appreciate that.
Two days ago I was driving my work van. I put on my right blinker and started to make a right turn onto a side street. A guy on a motorcycle decided to pass me ON THE RIGHT!
I didn’t even know he was there until I heard him collide. I’m fine My van took some cosmetic damage. HE went tumbling. He seemed more or less okay, he got up and he was coherent. His bike was a total loss
But he did not want to wait for the ambulance or the police. Turned out he has no license, no registration, and he gave the cops a phone name at the hospital
Of course the most suspicious thing is this: He hit a commercial vehicle. After you realize you’re alive and all, what’s the first thing you think when you hit a commercial vehicle? LAWSUIT!! But not this guy. He just wanted to leave!
This was a motorcycle, which uses less gas than a car. But I think some of the same principles apply
I’m glad to hear you’re okay and that the motorcyclist walked away basically unharmed. Jesus. That stuff is scary and it happens all the time. The more often drivers bend the rules of the road, the more inclined they are to do so repeatedly, and ever more boldly, until the rules no longer apply. And motorcyclists — and I’m speaking of them, perhaps unfairly, as a monolithic group in this instance — have never operated on the presumption that the rules apply to them. Ever. They’ve always assumed that their vehicular flexibility — to weave through traffic — extends to road rules, traffic signals, street signs, and even parking spots (I see them parked on the sidewalk all the time, and all I can think is, That can’t be legal…). Even absent a healthy sense of petro-masculinity, motorcyclists have always acted on the assumption that the bike gives them license to do basically whatever the fuck they want. And petro-masculine bikers are the worst, delighting in the noise pollution they create.
Anyway, glad you’re all right, pal. I got rear-ended by a truck last summer on I-95 in Connecticut — I was completely unharmed and the damage to my car, which has since been repaired, was minimal — but I appreciate the feeling of gratitude that seizes you any time you can walk away from an auto accident intact!
I’m glad you’re all right, too
This artist I follow, husband of an artist I follow, was killed in a road rage incident. He was not raging, but the two idiots in front of him were. One deliberately cut the other off, spinning both cars, the artist tried to avoid them, hit a center divider, and the wife had to face the lost of her beloved husband while the world has to face the loss of a talented artist
Oh, that’s absolutely heartbreaking. I see road-ragers all the time on the parkway, and my immediate priority becomes putting as much distance between them and me as possible. It’s awful. Every time I’m behind the wheel — and particularly if I’m responsible for passengers — I’m so acutely aware of the potential for danger at every moment. You have to treat the machine you’re controlling with utmost respect. Life-and-death accidents happen instantaneously. We don’t know precisely how the Porsche carrying Paul Walker wound up crashing into that lamppost at 90 mph, but it’s not a stretch to assume those guys — or at very least the driver, Roger Rodas — started acting like the characters in F&F and lost control.
And I suspect the reason we’ve never had that conversation — about the circumstances under which Walker died — is because that franchise is a major cash cow for Universal, and neither the studio nor the producers wanted to acknowledge a direct link between the subject matter of those movies and the nature of the fatal accident that killed the star. Nothing to see here! Christ, they even kept Walker’s character alive, forever offscreen, like the family dog sent to “live upstate.” Both onscreen and off-, this was a coordinated denial campaign.
Wearing that hypocritical T-shirt costs Vin Diesel nothing. But considering the possible social consequences of his abhorrent movies — that would require humility, hard conversations, and very likely calling an end to the media franchise keeping him gainfully employed and culturally relevant. So, no fuckin’ way that was gonna happen. How has no one held the studio and the producers to account for the noxious messaging of those movies? If anything, they’ve gone on to become A-list affairs, costarring no less than Kurt Russell, Charlize Theron, and Helen Mirren! What the fuck, man…?
No doubt the auto industry delighted in cars being hero-worshipped in movies and TV shows. Imagining how much they fought for placement of their vehicles, I’m always caught by the absurdity of the AMC Hornet being featured in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ (1974, Roger Moore). AMC was defunct by 1988 because no one every hero-worshiped an AMC car, despite their best attempts.
Ironically, before they began to strive for the car-of-the-future look, AMC (Rambler) were the most fuel-efficient American car on the road. In the 50’s & 60’s, they were the good guys, environmentally speaking. (Full disclosure, my father worked on the AMC assembly line for 25 grueling years.)
Indeed, Dave. From an ecocultural standpoint, it definitely didn’t help that the automobiles that received heroic screen treatment were, more often than not, gas-guzzling muscle cars and sports cars. It wasn’t merely that Hollywood glamorized the least socially compatible form of transportation, but also the least environmentally friendly models! Car ownership became synonymous with the postwar American Dream, and Hollywood has, for the most part, existed to support — not challenge — the mythologies and sociopolitical narratives that allow for the consolidation of power and wealth under the pretense of defending and/or exercising “personal liberties”:
That’s a bit of a digression, I’ll acknowledge, but I think it’s important to illustrate the influence Hollywood has on the culture, and how it hasn’t merely endorsed bad products (like fuel-inefficient cars) and encouraged bad practices (like reckless driving), but it has inculcated a mindset that has become central to the identities of a certain type of man, a certain type of person in general, and definitely a certain type of American (often but not exclusively a politically conservative one). “In short,” as Harvey and Gillis note in The Big Fix, “many of the most acute American problems are all connected.”
Thanks for visiting, Dave. I encourage everyone to read Dave’s recent review of Sarah K. Jackson’s ecofiction book Not Alone.
Keep in mind that the histories of Public Transit and of the Interstate Highways are embedded w/ racism
It’s so ridiculously difficult to find ANY American institution that is NOT embedded w/ racism
I know this. Yet I’m constantly surprised
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/racism-has-shaped-public-transit-and-its-riddled-inequities
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-24/bulldoze-la-freeways-racism-monument
Ditto all the sentiments expressed in these articles, Dell. Thank you for sharing them. Harvey and Gillis cover this same ground, in their own way, in The Big Fix, a book I recommend.
I recall Ken Burns saying a few years ago something to the effect of, “I’ve made over thirty documentaries, and all but three covered subjects inextricably linked to systemic racism.” It is the original sin this nation must absolutely confront if we’re going to heal and move forward in any meaningful way. Progress is being made: The California Reparations Task Force submits its two-year report on June 29. And Biden’s investments in green infrastructure, which represent a historic step in the right direction, have prioritized environmental-justice concerns — which is historic in its own right.
But the more progress we make, the more so many of us begin to realize how far we have yet to go toward making things fairer. It’s a massive course correction we need to make, and it won’t be done overnight, nor without coordinated effort among all our institutions — Hollywood included.
In the TV Supernatural, they drive a 1967 Chevy Impala that Dean calls “Baby”
Dean loves that car, is almost in tears when it gets stolen or damaged (one of the few times a man is allowed to be vulnerable is when his beloved vehicle is stolen or damaged, though this must be mixed w/ a strong dose of anger). When it’s totaled occasionally, Dean works for hours and hours to fix it, won’t even consider replacing it. It’s basically the third star of the show, eclipsing some of the other regulars, and surviving to the end when many of the regulars (mostly the female ones) didn’t. It even had its own very special episode
It’s also in the prequel series The Winchesters
If somebody loves you and will fight for you nearly as much as Dean loves and will fight for that car, you are truly blessed
Oh, and for maximum machismo, the trunk is filled w/ weapons (which actually IS reasonable in context for monster hunters, though)
–
Oh, and despite the excellent points you make, I am NEVER giving up my love for the Mach 5! (the cartoon. there was never a movie and don’t say there was even if it would have had a great cast!)
Oh, is that right? I watched maybe the first few episodes of Supernatural way back in the day before deciding I’d seen the show already when it was called The X-Files. I know it’s got a massive cult following, but I just never got into it.
There’s a difference between caring for your stuff and loving it. We love our phones. We love our guns. We love our cars. We know how hard Jack Sparrow fought — for a decade — to regain the Black Pearl, but when it’s endangered by the kraken, he orders all hands to abandon ship. When his first mate objects, Jack says, “She’s only a ship, mate.” We need more of that from our cinematic role models, and less of the obsessive materialism demonstrated by Dean Winchester. (Or at very least, Dean’s behavior should be portrayed/discussed as problematic and unhealthy, not quirky and endearing.) As the Minimalists are keen to remind us: “You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.”
Speed Racer is one of those multimedia franchises I’ve been aware of my entire life but have never really consumed in any format. Who knows why. That said, we certainly needn’t reject the stories we’ve loved just because we realize at some point they’re not “perfect,” just as we wouldn’t reject the people we love for being imperfect. And we don’t have to feel guilty about taking pleasure from movies with problematic messaging and/or elements. Those kinds of contradictions and incongruities — especially the ones that exist between the morals we espouse and the fantasies we enjoy — are what make us human.
He beat me to the punch with the Supernatural reference! That was the first thing I thought of reading this article. Check out the first few minutes of the Season 5 finale (which at one point could’ve been the series finale). Talk about romanticizing your car!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Dg3Umuvr0
Mother. Of. Mercy.
That could be the weirdest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen. I daresay that had Supernatural aired on premium cable, that segment would’ve ended with Chuck sinking his Scotch, unzipping his fly, and fucking that car. What a loser!
As I understand it from a friend of mine who was tangentially connected to the Supernatural production, creator Eric Kripke had planned a five-season story arc and had fully intended to end the series at that point… but I guess the show was popular, so it went another decade beyond that! My friend told me the season-five finale very much feels like a series finale because it was written and produced to be exactly that. I just went to Wikipedia to confirm that, in fact, and I saw this paragraph under the Conception and creation subheading of the entry’s Production section:
That is a textbook example of exactly what I’m always going on about on this blog: that writers tend to regurgitate “cool tropes” (by using their commercial imagination) without challenging the values embedded in those archetypes and/or conventions (which would require using their moral imagination). Having not seen much of the show, my hunch is that it embraced the tropes of its genre more than it subverted them. I remember even saying to my wife around the time the show first came out that I thought “Supernatural” was a terrible title for a series. Contrast that with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which conveys everything you need to know about it in four words: It’s comedy, it’s horror, it’s action. The X-Files is another great title, because it suggests mystery, conspiracy, and anthological storytelling. Great stuff. The title Supernatural is too generic to be meaningful or intriguing.
But Jesus H. Christ, if I’d had any idea that show was so masturbatorily inclined toward its four-wheeled costar, I would’ve definitely mentioned it in the essay. Thanks to you both, Jeff and Dell, for bringing it to my attention!
For those who may not know, Jeff has just released his new epic fantasy novel The Murder of Heracles: An Amazon Odyssey. Here’s the blurb:
The book is available in hardcover and for Kindle here.
I can’t lie–I had but one ridiculous car obsession I made happen–my mid-20s pride and joy was a black ’94 Ford Mustang GT 8-cylinder manual transmission. I ordered it exactly as I wanted it (and could marginally afford at that time) so it was literally made for me, and I can say literally correctly in this context! For about a year, I felt like a rock star. Months into ownership, my Mustang was taken out by a woman who managed “not to see me–where did you come from?” on her way to the liquor store. . . Neither I nor my Mustang ever recovered completely. I sold it soon afterward and have been behaving more responsibly and sustainably since, which is no small feat in our not terribly eco-friendly city. Thought-provoking post, both in retrospect and in looking ahead to necessary changes.
You and I are both Xers, Wendy — all the media we were raised on programmed us to regard the automobile as an expression of one’s identity as much as it was a means of transportation. Think of all the hair-metal music videos from the ’80s that featured Tawny Kitaen spread suggestively over the hood of a muscle car! Or the sundry pop songs from the late 20th century that romanticized the automobile: The Beatles’ “Drive My Car”; Foghat’s “Slow Ride”; Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”; Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty”; Rush’s “Red Barchetta” (I love the way Alex Lifeson’s guitar riffs suggest shifts in gear); The Cars’ “Drive”; Cyndi Lauper’s “I Drove All Night”; Prince’s “Little Red Corvette”; Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55”; one-hit wonder Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway.” I mean, the list goes on and on!
While I never really envisioned, let alone owned, a quote-unquote “dream car,” as a young man, I was nonetheless as taken with automobile culture as anyone in our cohort. Very early in my screenwriting career, I wrote a script called Delivery Boys, an action/comedy about a pair of pizza-delivery buddies in Monmouth County, New Jersey, constantly on the run from their Mafia-owned competitor. (The project, which was inspired by my cousin’s real-life experiences, was pitched as The Dukes of Hazzard meets The Sopranos.) Like the movies I critique above, Delivery Boys was as guilty of venerating car culture without so much as an offhanded comment about the ecological expense. I even — many, many years ago — went to a NASCAR race at Dover Downs Speedway in Delaware! LOL! Cars can be fun!
But it’s becoming ever-more-apparent that four-wheeled fun has come at a staggering cost to both our environment and our quality of life, it’s widened the inequality gap, and it’s cursed society with a proliferation of petro-masculinity. It’s just been a bad deal all around. So, now that we know better, we’ll aspire to do things differently — that’s all. I’d like to see Hollywood start shaming petrol-heads like Dominic Toretto and Dean Winchester rather than celebrating them. In the meantime, parents and educators like yourself have an opportunity to teach the next generation to be less enamored with the automobile than the boomers and Xers were. We should openly concede our overreliance on and reverence for the car was a mistake — a lie we were sold — and the time has come to quite literally take back the streets. As I said about the antiheroes of Heat 2, I hope Dominic Toretto represents the last of a dying breed. Good riddance to him.
Thanks for sharing your car story, Wendy! Wishing you only the best for a joyous — and safe — summer…
Sean
Wendy, While I have never seen cars as anything other than transportation, I must cop to one experience that parallels yours even to the make and model of the car! I I feel your pain and share with you that lasting wisp of sadness at the loss of, what seemed at the time, a object of excitement that got taken away. My story happened long before yours and was over much more quickly. It was 1971 – my 16th birthday. I had just gotten my drivers license and my father’s gift to me was a pristine, steel blue 1963 Mustang. The day he brought it home, and in spite of a prolonged, loud argument from the family, my mother, who was known to be a distracted driver, insisted on driving the car before I even had a chance to get inside of it. Blocks from the house she totaled it. Fortunately, she was not hurt. But the car was a goner. sigh! So close and yet so far………..
Well, Tara, as heartbreaking as that story is, at least it’s an original: Usually it’s the teenager that totals the parents’ car, not the other way around! At least the car was the only thing that didn’t come home that day. That’s a blessing… even though I’m sure it didn’t feel like one at the time.
Okay, sit down.Brace yourself. Seriously
In Furious 7 the big race event that takes place in the desert outside of the city is called Race Wars. I don’t have much more info than this. I don’t know if they use the name deliberately and/or ironically. I haven’t seen the movie. All I know is that they have a race called Race Wars
I did tell you to sit down and brace yourself
That sounds vaguely familiar. Several years back, I punished myself this one week by screening the first seven F&F movies before deciding I didn’t possess sufficient self-hate to ever watch another. By the time I got to Furious 7, I was so simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed that I actually recall very little about it. My strongest recollections from that series are limited to the first three movies; beyond that, it’s all a blur.
One thing I can say with certainty is that nothing about those movies is smart enough to be even accidentally ironic or clever. Those films are so proudly dumb, morally toxic, and creatively bereft. I submit as Exhibit A the latest sequel’s earnestly self-righteous key art and idiotically nonsensical tagline:
Hell, the first movie is a beat-for-beat rip-off of Point Break (1991); Diesel and Walker even eat at the same goddamn seafood restaurant as Swayze and Keanu! Given that The Fast and the Furious (2001) takes its title from the 1954 Roger Corman film and its plot from Point Break, it’s not like this series even started out on a particularly original or innovative note. The mere fact that Neal H. Moritz has squeezed this much pulp from a concept that was altogether juiceless from its commercial inception is perhaps the only impressive thing about this knuckleheaded franchise.
Hi Sean. What a fascinating post on evolution of the car and what it leaves in its wake and status. I was married to a car dealership guy, and learned a lot about cars from him. Personally, I’m not into fancy cars, but must be a midsize. I grew up learning to drive in the big boats of the 70s, so I could never get used to driving a small car. 🙂 Also, when you talked about New York traffic, I’d like to add that my city, Toronto, already feels like driving in New York. Not enough roads for the growing population and construction. Oye! Don’t get me started. But great post! 🙂
Hey, thanks, Debby! As you can see from the photo I included of West 169th Street, I drive a no-frills ’07 Civic, whose only “amenity,” as it were, is a CD player — cutting-edge ’90s sound technology. But the car is reliable, well-maintained, (long since) paid off, and gets me where I need to go on the one or two occasions per week that I need it. My wife and I could’ve upgraded a long time ago, but what for — just to have something shiny and new? Why take on another car payment unnecessarily?
And to your point about Toronto: It is by no means only American cities that endure the tyranny of the automobile. Canada, Europe, Asia — metropolitan areas all across the developed world are grappling with this issue. One very promising solution — coming soon New York! — is congestion pricing:
I very much believe New York’s experiment with congestion pricing will be successful — and that it will establish a template for cities like Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, to say nothing of Toronto and Vancouver. You get a metropolis as sprawling and unwieldy as New York under control, and other cities have no excuse not to follow suit.
Thanks for stopping by, Debby. Wishing you a joyous summer season!
Sean
Hi Sean!
Thank you for this wonderful post! I must admit I’ve been a big fan of Knight Rider forever and ever. I like super cars – just always had a thing for them!
Thanks, Lena! Oh, gosh, I loved Knight Rider as a boy! I spent many, many hours sitting in the front seat of our Plymouth Duster when it was parked in the driveway of my grandmother’s house in Paramus, pretending I was Michael Knight on some urgent mission! As I said to Vera above, somewhere there’s a photo of ten-year-old me in the front seat of KITT, back when Universal Studios featured one of the picture cars as an attraction at the theme park in the ’80s. Here’s a pic I pulled off Wikimedia Commons:
It’s funny to think that the novelty of KITT was that the car was self-driving, GPS-enabled, had a viewscreen on the dashboard, and could talk — features that are pretty standard now! Knight Rider was a fun show because, other than the car itself, it was very low-tech. It was basically a Western, with the hero riding into town, solving some problem that usually had to do with crime or corruption, and riding out at the end of each episode. It was a classic heroic narrative — Hasselhoff had exactly the right eye-twinkling charm for that part and didn’t take it too seriously — and the show worked for its time.
Being in that front seat must have felt like a dream come true! I remember dreaming about writing that kind of stories when I was that age – with lots of action. I only realized later that it worked better as a tv show than a novel. Ha ha! It is funny that it sort of predicted future technology. Loved it. Also loved the theme song.
Oh, yeah — that Stu Phillips theme music is classic! Mysterious, heroic, synth-tastic! I suppose it was the music-video mentality of the decade, but the action series of the ’80s had great opening-credits sequences, from The A-Team (Mike Post) to Miami Vice (Jan Hammer) to Booker (Billy Idol). The stuff of a preadolescent boy’s heroic fantasies!
To your point about Knight Rider being better suited for TV than prose: While it was perfect for the small screen, the silliness of the concept and shallowness of the characters would’ve been undeniably exposed on the page. Knight Rider is not merely a product of its time — it’s very ’80s — but also of its medium (network television). The vehicular stunts were the entire point of the series, much the way the gorgeous lifeguards of Hasselhoff’s other career-defining hit were the point of Baywatch (which had so little narrative content, it often featured multiple music-video montages per episode!). These were shows that appealed to visual appetite, not so much an intellectual one. Certain concepts and characters have flourished in different mediums — Dracula, Batman, Rambo — but most are best suited to one and only one.
Maybe half a dozen years ago, I was driving east on the 101 through Calabasas, and a black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am pulled onto the freeway beside me. I glimpsed the dashboard, which was completely outfitted with all of KITT’s instrumentation! And as I pulled ahead of the Trans Am, sure enough it had the front-mounted scanner bar, too! I honestly don’t know if it was one of the screen cars from the series or just a replica that some superfan had built. But it sure was a thrill to drive beside KITT on the California freeways for a few miles!
Now that you mention it, the A Team was always one of my favorites as well – theme song and the works! About knight rider – the show really was just light entertainment at the time, I think. The stunts worked – like you said, they were the point of the series. It must’ve been quite an experience to drive alongside KITT!
Conceptually, The A-Team was inspired stuff: The Dirty Dozen meets Mission: Impossible. And like Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team was expertly cast with actors who somehow made the inane material they’d been handed work, through sheer commitment and chemistry. Critics (rightly) deemed all of those series idiotic, but it didn’t matter: The producers/cast knew full well they were making ephemeral entertainment meant to appeal to the 10-year-old kids of the 1980s. That was the audience those shows were speaking to — myself among them — and who, in turn, made those shows big hits.
Funny enough, Knight Rider was remade as a 2008–09 network-television series (under the creative auspices of Gary Scott Thompson, no less, creator of The Fast and the Furious), and The A-Team got the feature-film treatment in 2010. Both were commercial failures. There’s never just one reason for that, but I would argue both of those remakes failed to understand the original shows were products of their time, from their sci-fi trappings (in the case of Knight Rider) to their sociopolitical underpinnings (the A-Team were Vietnam vets).
Furthermore, neither felt comfortable enough to fully embrace the inherent silliness of the source material. Justin Bruening played Michael Knight (son of Hasselhoff’s character, who briefly reprises his role in the TV-movie pilot) as a brooding ex–Army Ranger, given to responding to KITT’s wry commentary with a condescending smirk, whereas Hasselhoff always seemed like he was having the time of his life both with and in that car. The producers of the remake tried to impose “depth” (or at least some degree of self-aware irony) on a premise that was only ever meant to be an earnest, live-action cartoon. Such is what happens when filmmakers are embarrassed by the juvenile nature of the source material, as exemplified by the infamous — and appalling — “Fuck Batman!” scene from Titans.
And Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team took the series premise, about itinerant soldiers of fortune lending their services to those in need while they try to clear their name (Rambo meets The Fugitive), but supersized it to meet the demands of a Hollywood blockbuster — a noisy, globetrotting, high-stakes, us-against-them action thriller à la Fast Five. But unlike John Rambo and Richard Kimble, both of whom at least had a modicum of psychological credibility (Rambo having originated in David Morrell’s novel First Blood, and Kimble having been loosely based on real-life neurosurgeon Sam Sheppard), the members of the A-Team — Hannibal (George Peppard), Face (Dirk Benedict), Murdock (Dwight Schultz) and B.A. (Mr. T) — were one-dimensional archetypes. Those characters — and Michael Knight, too — appealed to ten-year-old boys not because they were psychologically complex, but because they were happily heroic, one-note action figures. And there’s nothing wrong with that, provided we appreciate the era in which such characters were created and their originally intended audience. The bastardization of children’s characters to appeal to adults is a subject I’ve addressed in other posts (under the category Commercial Adolescence), including “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30,” “Superman IV at 35,” and, most recently, “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born,” which examines how Buffy the Vampire Slayer went from an unpretentious empowerment tale for preadolescent girls dumped straight into the pop-cultural dustbin to a misogynistic revenge fantasy beloved by a generation of superfans.
Thanks, Lena, for taking such an interest in this post! I value your input and contributions.
Sean, As usual, your piece here is an excellent analysis of a massive subject that goes much deeper into the psyche of the American culture than most people would see on their own. We have become so accustomed to the presence of cars, and the priority placed on them, that it starts to seem invisible. Your article pulls away all the blinders so many of us have lived with for so long and exposes the insidious threads that keep us connected to the very things that reinforce our addiction to car culture. Well done, Sean!! I applaud your calling out of the media & entertainment industries for the continuous reinforcement of destructive mindsets that not only do not serve us, but actually cause us to choose behaviors that harm our bodies and our environment. I would add the need for the same exposure in a number of other areas: #1: Video games. The violence in many of the most popular games plays right into the same forces that create the hyper-masculine approval of car crashes, physical combat and disregard for the suffering of others. What we learn as teenagers becomes a foundation for who we grow up to be. #2: Gasoline-fueled power tools. You are actually making yourself sick while you use them but, I’ve been told, real men like to make big noises. #3: Fireworks. This one hurts. Growing up I always loved watching the beautiful sparkly colors. But once someone explained to me that what you are doing is exploding chemicals into the air that we all breathe I stopped being a fan. Hollywood could go a long way in changing the acceptance of these things if the writing was done with, as you say, moral imagination. Just as you pointed out with the change in the treatment of cigarette smoking, stories that offer safer, healthier alternatives could have a huge impact on future generations. That being said, (see my comment to Wendy Weir above) the 16-year-old me will always feel that little bit of sadness that I never got to drive that 1963 steel-blue Mustang!
Thank you, Tara, for reading the post and leaving such a thoughtful comment! And I appreciate your patience for my response.
You and I are old L.A. friends, and certainly L.A. would be entirely unimaginable without its network of paved arteries and all the vehicles it accommodates. Hell, this image is as identifiably L.A. as the Hollywood sign:
So, it isn’t altogether surprising that L.A.’s main export — movies and television — would treat the automobile, and the paved-over landscape on which it operates, as a God-given absolute, like the Santa Ana winds. Car culture is so ubiquitously pervasive in L.A., where most of our commercial filmmakers live (at least part-time). Such is the reason I would encourage those storytellers to apply the Harvey-Gillis test to the projects they develop… not that I really have the cultural influence to make that happen! LOL!
And you’re right: Videogames are an enormous problem, too. While I doubt Grand Theft Auto has inspired any of its devotees to pursue a career in car theft, the values embedded in that mega-successful game’s ethos have unquestionably perpetuated a petro-masculine mindset — an “approval of car crashes, physical combat and disregard for the suffering of others,” as you so pointedly phrased it.
I don’t necessarily think violent entertainment creates violent people — an idea I touched on in “Scream at 25″ — but I sure as hell believe it contributes to a cultural acceptance of “the virtue of military supremacy and the political efficacy of violence” (Matt Taibbi, “If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop, Too,” Rolling Stone, February 16, 2018). And as I explored in posts including “Patriarchal Propaganda” and my review of Heat 2, certain types of entertainment give assholes license to be themselves — with impunity.
Like you, I abhor gas-powered appliances — leaf blowers, etc. — and will celebrate the day they are outlawed.
Fireworks. Yeah, I’m with you on that one, too. While I certainly appreciate the nostalgic ambience of Americana they conjure, particularly on the Fourth, they’re not worth the air or noise pollution they create (the latter of which torments house pets and wild animals). This is 2023, and we can retire that technology in favor of drone shows, which are “quieter, safer and better for the environment.”
To your last point: There is absolutely nothing wrong with nursing a modicum of sentimental affection for bygone days and practices. As I said in my exchange with Lena above, I will always have a fond place in my heart for childhood faves like Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard, despite the fact that both shows are premised on concepts (and, in the case of The Dukes, incorporate symbolism) I now find problematic.
But I don’t long for that kind of entertainment or the ethos it embodies. As artifacts of more innocent days, those shows now serve as markers of the developmental arc of my own moral imagination, as well as reminders as to why it is necessary, as social activist Naomi Klein prescribes, to let go of comforting stories that no longer serve us in favor of new narratives that might inspire our better angels. In an IP-driven pop-culture ecosystem in which we are encouraged — and even conditioned — to pledge lifelong fealty to the media franchises of a previous century, this blog attempts to interrogate the values of those stories, debate their relevance in this unprecedented era, and supply the tools required to move on from them.
Thanks, as always, Tara, for your support and your contributions here. You’re the best!
Sean
Excellent and well thought out post, obviously. It made me realize the challenge of not just trying to “change” our culture for the better, but the entire process of unraveling all of its intertwined threads.
I’m in my seventies and have only recently discovered the joys of car non-ownership. What a burdon it was, all my life. And I was one of the lucky ones, in a manner of speaking. I worked on my own cars, or if not, at least I was not easily hoodwinked and scammed by dealers and mechanics. I had lots of cars, but never paid more than $400 for one for the first impoverished 14 years after high school. I never had insurance during that time, either. Couldn’t afford it. I cringe now when I think of the liability that I so blithely ignored.
Anyway, just acknowledging what you say makes sense. I live downtown and I’m a pedestrian most of the time and my perspective shifted toward the more sane human angle the first time a motorist yelled at me for being in his way as he was trying to make a left turn as I was trying to cross the street. Sad to say so far being morally right can be a losing proposition.
Roy,
Thank you for this wonderful comment — and please forgive my tardy reply. I wanted to give your feedback the response it deserves, and I’ve been preoccupied this week launching my new novel.
To address your first comment: Yes — the existential challenges to both democracy and civilization do not exist in unrelated silos. They are very much intertwined. That’s what the Green New Deal recognizes: that interconnected problems require holistic solutions.
The good news is that the upcoming generations — Gen Z and Gen Alpha — recognize how ineffective 20th-century practices are in a world that’s changed radically since things like automobile ownership and the 40-hour workweek and employer-based healthcare were institutionalized. They want change. They want sustainability. And older generations — the Silents, the Boomers, and the Xers — are coming around to the idea that a 20th-century mentality is not serving us well or solving the problems of our new millennium. Just today, this happened:
This is a great first step toward empowering the younger generations to build the world they want, instead of clinging possessively to the one we’re comfortable with. Bully for Biden! And for older Americans who see the automobile as their God-given birthright, they would do well to remember that their way of doing things was just as socially disruptive when it was first instituted:
But even though Americans hate traffic as much as we hate our dysfunctional for-profit healthcare system, it’s what we know, so we cling to it. But at some point, we need to recognize that our way of life is destroying our quality of life, and that we don’t have to keep going on like this. We have the solutions to our problems in hand, we need only the political will and the moral imagination to implement them. The sociocultural battle currently being waged is whether we want to keep living in the last century, or whether we envision and enact new modes of existence, relevant and sufficient for this unprecedented new era. I have no doubt we’re going to choose the latter. The sooner, the better.
Thank you, Roy, for the great conversation. Please come back again!
Sean