Cars

Saw Cars last and I enjoyed it. I’m a big fan of Pixar, and I’ve been really delighted with animated features coming from Emeryville, CA, the past two decades. Since Pixar merged with Disney last May, I’ve been eager to see what would come of the deal, creatively. Knowing Disney’s tendency to moralize, to idealize the American family, and to smuggle in apologies for consumer culture, I was wondering if Cars would be able to sustain the brilliance of Monsters, Inc. and the edginess of The Incredibles.

The film starts off on a high-kinetic note: the rookie Lightning McQueen, played by Owen Wilson, is on the verge of winning the Piston Cup. Suddenly there’s a crash and massive pile up (this sequence reminded me of the brontosaurus avalanche in King Kong: visually overstimulating and a little irritating). Lightning manages to get through the wreckage and come out in front. Shrugging off his pit crew’s pleas for fresh tires, he builds a commanding lead coming into the final lap. But about a quarter lap to go, he blows a tire. Then another. The favorite and the veteren cars–Chick Hicks and The King, respectively–close in on the struggling rookie. It’s all Lightning can do to stay get a 3-way tie in the photo-finish, forcing a run-off in Los Angeles, California, that will determine the winner. Thankfully, the film slows down considerably from here on out. The emphasis shifts from fast-paced action and exposition to character development and design. There are some amazing shots of Lightning’s trek across the country.

Lightning somehow ends up in a forgotten town called Radiator Springs. The town is run by Doc Hudson, played by Paul Newman. It’s an apt casting choice. Cars owes a good deal to the 1969 film Winning and, of course, the 1970 film Le Mans, starring Lightning’s namesake. Both films deal with the way external struggles interfere with a firecely competitive auto racer’s dreams of winning “the big race.” Lightning is cocky, stubborn, and self-absorbed. Worst of all, he has no real friends. Only a “fan base” (in one scene, a pair of groupie girl-cars flash their headlights at Lightning). Only until he recognizes what it means to be winner off the track will he be able to be a true champion. I know that sounds trite, but there it is. True to Disney form, the film’s moral is that there’s no genuine success without friends and family.

More precisely, Lightning needs to slow down. A blue Porsche Carrera named Sally, played by Bonnie Hunt, already recognizes the value of living in third gear, so to speak. Whereas the rest of the world zips by Radiator Springs as if it didn’t exist (once a popular stop along Route 66, the town has long succumbed to the effects of Interstate 40), Sally pulled off and never got back on again. It’s up to her to teach Lightning the lessons of life in the slow lane. And this is what is bothersome about the film. Lightning is disarmed by the beauty of the American landscape and he learns to share Sally’s overtly nostalgic sensibilities, as well as Mater’s sense of good clean fun (Mater, played by Larry the Cable Guy, is as enjoyable a comic foil as Ellen Degeneres’s Dory, from Finding Nemo).

But the moral lesson here (“slow dow, you move too fast”) barely cloaks what amounts to a rewriting of American history–and, strange as it may seem, this is precisely what makes this film a bit like Dances with Wolves. Both films center on a character whose process of self-actualization is the discovery of authenticity in a pre-history of America’s west. In the latter’s case, authenticity is located in the noble savage lifestyle of the Sioux. In the former, it is in the Golden Age of American Automobiles. Like Dances With Wolves, as well as other films that evoke what Jim Collins calls “the New Sincerity,” Cars suggests “the move back in time away from the corrupt sophistication of media culture toward a lost authenticity defined simultaneously as a yet-to-be-contaminated folk culture of elemental purity, and as the site of narcissistic projection, the hero’s magic mirror” (“Genericty in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, p. 259).

Unlike Monsters, Inc. or Toy Story, Cars takes place in a world which has no parallel. There are only cars (in other words, the cars don’t co-exist with humans, or occupy an underworld). John Ford’s classic westerners, the Ringo Kid, Ethan Edwards, and Tom Doniphon, are replaced by classic models like the Mercury Cruiser, the Chevy Impala, and the Hudson Hornet; and the tire tracks of these gas guzzling heroes stretch (literally, in several shots) across the big sky.

There’s little emphasis on other forms of transportation. Brief appearances by a train, a helicopter, and three fighter jets, serve no real function in the film–though an extended gag dealing with bovine-like tractors is exploited for some laughs. And there’s certainly no suggestion of alternatives to fossil fuels–the only alternative is not really an alternative at all: the “certified organic oil” (?) developed by Radiator Springs’ only fuel-efficient auto, the burned-out VW microbus, Fillmore, played sickeningly and stupidly by George Carlin.

I won’t spoil the ending by giving any specifics (although I can’t imagine the ending coming as a surprise to anyone), but I will say that it’s the figure of big oil (specifically Tex, a 1975 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with longhorns on his grille, played by H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, president and chief operating officer of Lowe’s Motor Speedway) that ultimately comes out on top.