American movies’ fast and furious love for the car
“Muscle beats import every time,” sneers a character in “Fast & Furious,” the latest installment of the auto-fetishizing Hollywood action franchise that celebrates gas-guzzling hot rods, well-upholstered females and action heroes with chests the size of V-8 engines. If only that statement were as true in Detroit as it is in Hollywood fantasy. As it stands, two of the Big 3 could soon be parked in bankruptcy court or, in the case of Chrysler, begging for a tow from an Italian automaker.
The opening of “Fast & Furious” on Friday came scant days after former GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner was forced by the White House to step down as part of a last-ditch restructuring deal that may be too late to save GM from the scrap heap of bankruptcy, if not history. If GM were only doing fractionally as well as “F&F;,” which opened at No. 1 last weekend with a dazzling $72 million in ticket sales, we might not be wondering whether in the not-too-distant future we’ll be driving trucks with names like Yangtze and watching Scott Dixon win the Indy 500 with Team People’s Republic.
With the U.S. auto industry in precipitous decline, will Hollywood’s car worship follow suit?
Of course, the movies, which are as much of an iconic American industry as the Big 3, helped globalize car culture over the last century by making autos seem cute and cuddly (“The Love Bug”), sexy and stylishly nonconformist (“Rebel Without a Cause”) or preternaturally, even malevolently potent (“Christine”). Cars are inextricably tied to 20th century American identity and its attendant ideals of individual self-expression and the Creator-endowed right to life, liberty and the 70-mph speed limit.
As enjoyable as the new “F&F;” is, it also feels a bit passe. In its nostalgic depiction of souped-up vintage muscle cars as representing some sort of pinnacle of American technological know-how and macho can-do, the movie displays a sentimental longing not only for cars but also for the showroom pedestal that cars have occupied in American popular culture for a century.
Cars have been present in the movies since the silent era, when the Keystone Kops went tearing around in their jalopies. The blatantly fake rear-screen projection of a receding roadway behind two chattering Hollywood stars became a cinematic convention of the 1940s and ‘50s.
And what is the chariot contest in the 1959 version of “Ben-Hur” but a drag race in sandals and mini-togas, as George Lucas tacitly acknowledged with his “Ben-Hur” parody space-pod race through the Tatooine desert in “Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace”? Years earlier, Lucas practically had created his own private retro-mythology of cars in pop culture when he made “American Graffiti” (1973), which came fully accessorized with a soundtrack of vintage Top 40.
Losing its luster
The holy union of cars and movies was officially (i.e. financially) sanctified with the birth of the drive-in movie theater. By then, cars were an inescapable part of American culture, from remotest Appalachia to the Golden West, a phenomenon encompassing all social classes. And in the movies, cars were an essential plot line in the national narrative, from boyish Pat Boone cruising across the USA in his Chevrolet to the desperate Joad family rattling across the Dust Bowl in its wheezing junker.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Toyota dealership (which is how Harry Angstrom, the decidedly unheroic protagonist of John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels, made it rich). Gradually, the great American auto fixation, as reflected in the movies, was losing its luster.
Hippie-chic had decided that big, padded, family-friendly bulge-mobiles were for squares. Captain America, in “Easy Rider,” rode a motorcycle, not a Mustang. Michael Moore laid bare the brutal corporate calculus that made scores of loyal shift workers instantly disposable in his 1989 mockumentary “Roger & Me,” in which he stalked GM honcho Roger Smith.
More recently we’ve had “Little Miss Sunshine,” in which a Volkswagen T2 Microbus that has to be constantly push-started represents the delusional hopes of a disenchanted American family, and Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” about an old codger who’s as antiquated in a rapidly changing world as the hulking pile of metal that he drives. Though different in theme and approach, as well as make and model, both were huge hits at the box office.
To the scrap heap
Old, reliable clunkers may still be beloved in the movies, but that doesn’t offset the problem of having new, unreliable clunkers in our nation’s strip-mall showrooms. For the sad reality is that Americans today may be better at making movies with and about cars -- as well as designing auto-themed video games -- than they are at designing autos.
It’s fitting that by the end of “Fast & Furious” all those big, bad cars have been utterly trashed, ready for the scrap yard. Dom, played by Vin Diesel, employs his set of wheels to impale a villain, one of those scary, scarred-up guys who looks like he uses his face to pull monster trucks. For all the love that the movie lavishes on cars, it regards them in the end not as masterpieces of style and design but as weapons to be wielded like blunt objects.
That final apocalyptic image of automotive carnage may be a perfect symbol of how the Hollywood-Detroit partnership may be reaching a dead end. It’s as if the filmmakers are urging us to have fun, fun, fun till Daddy takes the T-Bird away.
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