Get in the car right now! screamed someone.
How many times have we heard that dialogue in the movies? A hundred times or a thousand or more? Crisis, action, chase, escape, journey, race, rescue, romance, seduction, sex, robbery, accident, death, near-death, even flights to the future, the past and the wild are most often staged with spectacular effects using a vehicle of one kind or another. For more than 100 years now, the car shows up infinitely, everywhere across Hollywood movies and TV shows, more than spaceships, more than airplanes, ships, horses and chariots. As far from reality Hollywood movies can be, they are but an outcome of our world. The one we dominate, overloaded with about 1.48 billion cars and more tomorrow, next week, next month, next year…
Hollywood’s liaison with the ‘motor’ is profound, and dare I say that the car is the actual ‘non-living hero’ of modern cinema. The motor which has transcended decades, along all the studs and starlets, heroes and villains, is stronger than all the technological innovations, CGI and depth of story telling.
Be it the old hooptie or the Ford Mustang or Chevy Caprice or the Hummer or Batmobile or the newest Tesla Model S, the motocracy of Hollywood is everlasting. Man’s killer instinct, that extended into the car on the silver screen. Like Tommaso Marinetti’s fanatic visions of “fire breathing machines” (1920), like some sort of manifest destiny which proliferated allover the world. What is it that makes fantasy, power and motocracy so seductive? Why do we adore cars so much?