Drive

Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes

Iain Borden

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780230719
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

"The open road"—it's a phrase that calls to mind a sense of freedom, adventure, and new possibilities that make driving one of our most liberating activities. In Drive, Iain Borden explores the way driving allows us to encounter landscapes and cities around the world. He takes particular notice of how driving is portrayed in film from America to Europe to Asia and from Hollywood to the avant-garde, covering over a century of history and referencing hundreds of movies. From the dusty landscapes of The Grapes of Wrath to the city streets of The Italian Job; from the aesthetic delights of Rain Man and Traffic to the existential musings of Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point;from the freeway pleasures of Radio On and London Orbital to the high-speed dangers of Crash, Bullitt, and C'était un Rendezvous; this book shows how driving with different speeds, cars, roads, and cities provides experiences and challenges beyond compare. Borden concludes that as an integral part of modern life, car driving is something to be celebrated and even encouraged, making Drive a timely riposte to anti-car attitudes, and those blind to the richness of life behind the wheel.

1 CITIES

The single most powerful idea attached to urban driving is that cars and driving are true harbingers of democracy, creating a world where all men and women are equal, where they can go anywhere, do anything, meet anyone. The road is ‘the meeting place of democracy’, asserted engineer Pedro Juan Larrañaga, a place where ‘the Rolls-Royce limousine, the Ford tourer, the cycle and the donkey cart will learn to know and respect each other.’¹ Importantly it is not the car itself but the car journey that fulfils the promise of the city – as a place of work and creativity, anonymity and sociability, structure and adventure, history and progress, now liberated by the driving’s propensity for communication, discovery and speed. ‘The wheels move endlessly, always moving, always forward – and always lengthening the American road’, proclaimed a Ford advertisement 1951. ‘On that road the nation is steadily traveling beyond the troubles of this century, constantly heading towards finer tomorrows.’²

Getting On, Falling in Love

The association between urban car driving, freedom and democracy is predicated on a sense of social mobility: automobiles let people get on in life, furthering their economic, cultural and personal achievement. Thus while early American documentary films such as Automobile Parade (1900) and Boarding School Girls (Edison, 1905) show automobiles as the preserve of the privileged, within a decade class-conscious films like The Girl and the Chauffeur (Yankee Film Company, 1911), Putting the Bee in Herbert (Floyd France, 1917) and The Apple Tree Girl (Alan Crosland, 1917) were depicting the car as a way for industrious working-class men to succeed, both economically and socially.³ Other early films such as The Elopement (Billy Bitzer, 1907) and A Change of Heart (D. W. Griffth, 1909) similarly use the car to signify social freedom, class mobility, domestic rebellion and changing values.⁴ Less dramatically, but nonetheless in an overt class setting, in The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) the status of the nouveau Morgan family, whose wealth has been founded on car manufacture, grows just as that of the old-moneyed and conservative Ambersons declines. In very different economic circumstances, The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) shows how even destitute Oklahoma sharecroppers – the Joad family – possess a car, and indeed are wholly reliant on this 1926 Hudson Super Six on their desperate journey along Route 66 to California and during their subsequent shuttling from one migrant camp to another. As challenging as these times are, the family survives, and the film concludes in the front of the Hudson with Ma Joad asserting to her husband that ‘We keepa comin’, we’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, because we’re the people.’ A final shot reveals a long line of similar vehicles, families and journeys being undertaken, emphasizing that these experiences were repeated across thousands of American lives, a condition which is also recorded by photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon.⁵ Also set in the Depression era is Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973), this time in Kansas. Although the gritty portrait of the robust Joads is replaced by a much more whimsical study of selfish tricksters Moses Pray and young Addie Loggins, the essential theme remains of getting on through driving and staying one step ahead of dire poverty and ruin, this time with the aid of a 1936 Ford v8 De Luxe.

The final shot from The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940).

In post-war America, and in a sensitive exploration of respectable affluence, Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989) shows how Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), an aged Jewish widow living in Atlanta, is reliant for her daily routines on a car driven by chauffeur Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). At one point, Hoke leaves the state of Georgia for the very first time, crossing over into Alabama while driving Daisy to a family event in Mobile. Contemporary racism in America is also explored here, as when Hoke is stopped by Alabama highway patrolmen, who refer to Miss Daisy as an ‘old Jew woman’ and Hoke an ‘old nigger’. Above all, the car interior becomes a space of class and ethnic negotiation, and although Driving Miss Daisy romanticizes racially constructed relationships of employment and servitude, it also displays considerable sensitivity to complex questions of multiculturalism, especially when Hoke gains Miss Daisy’s grudging respect and friendship. Eventually Hoke – as with many Southern state African Americans who used cars to provide mobility and social status – manages to purchase his employer’s Hudson Commodore.⁶

As Driving Miss Daisy suggests, the association between freedom and driving is particularly evident in prosperous everyday circumstances. Even before the Second World War, many Californian youngsters viewed a car as a social necessity, and from the 1950s onwards cars became an increasingly common purchase for the American urban as well as rural working classes.⁷ Consequently in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), automobiles like a 1941 Chevrolet Special De Luxe, 1946 Ford Super De Luxe and 1949 Mercury Coupe provide transport for teenagers; even the 15-year-old Plato has a 1940 Motor Glide motorized scooter. Similarly in George Lucas’s nostalgic American Graffti (1973), driving is the key for teenage transition to adulthood, granting young men the freedom to move across town, hook up with girls and generally fool around. An English exploration of similar themes occurs in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) when bored working-class Colin and Mike steal a Ford Consul Mk1 for a cheery joyride, during which they pick up Gladys and Audrey with promises of ‘scooting up and down them hills’ and ‘round them bends’. The seduction works, and Colin loses his virginity with Audrey. Similar explorations of coming of age and youthful masculinity occur in more recent American settings like Corvette Summer (Matthew Robbins, 1978), Boulevard Nights (Michael Pressman, 1979) and John Hughes’s massively popular Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), although in the latter the teenage frivolity of high-school seniors Ferris, Sloane and Cameron in a 1961 Ferrari GT California – which initially stimulates escapism, fantasy and teenage sexuality – eventually culminates in an emerging sense of responsibility after Cameron sends the car careening out of his father’s glass-walled house into a ravine.

Many other 1960s films also returned to the kinds of class sensibility articulated in The Magnificent Ambersons and The Grapes of Wrath some twenty years earlier. For example, Blow-Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal study of media, aesthetics and morality in mod London, is partly based on the life of the working-class photographer David Bailey. As part of his glamorous life, Thomas (David Hemmings) guides his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III, replete with radio-telephone messaging, while scouring places for a shoot amid new housing, demolition sites, working-class streets and industrial areas. A year later, Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, 1967) also shows its eponymous character driving a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III as celebrated writer Charlie (Finney) returns to his native Manchester. This time, however, the car marks not a way of connecting but being distanced from working-class streets. Beginning his journey north in the golden limousine, Charlie and his young assistant Eliza (Liza Minnelli) are stared at by the occupants of a small saloon with both fascination and resentment, while a petrol station attendant is wordless and surly. When Eliza takes photographs as they drive around the desolate streets of Salford, unlike similar scenes in Blow-Up which suggest creative engagement, this one serves simply to underline the socio-economic North–South divide of 1960s Britain, which Bubbles’s driving of a Rolls still further expresses.

Thomas using the radio-telephone messaging service in his Rolls-Royce. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966).

As The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner suggests, another principal promise of the car has been increasing opportunity for sexual encounter. Although earlier horse-drawn buggies undoubtedly provided occasions for romance, in the twentieth century the car soon gave its users, and teenagers in particular, greater scope for passionate liaisons and other night-time fun.⁸ As John Steinbeck wrote in Cannery Row, ‘most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords’, while early films such as A Change of Heart and Sunshine Sue (D. W. Griffth, 1910) portray the car as a device for the sophisticated to seduce the innocent.⁹ But employing the car for passionate purposes can also lead to more positive emotions and heartfelt desires. One inventive take on 1950s teenage life is Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1988), set like Rebel Without a Cause and American Graffti in the US of the 1950s. Finding himself transported into the ultra-conventional, black-and-white world of the fictional television town Pleasantville, Bud takes Margaret for a drive in a 1952 Buick Roadmaster. They and the other residents of Pleasantville now have their senses gradually awakened by music, fruits, rain and dawning sexuality, slowly moving from a local world of innocent family routines and naive emotions into a more modern and colourful realm of love, bodies, passions and new ideas – what Bud describes in court as the right to be ‘silly, or sexy, or dangerous’.

The association of driving with passion is particularly strong in many films of the 1950s and ’60s, and even appears in the dystopian setting of Godard’s Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, 1965). Here, the controlling Alpha 60 computer has banned free thought, love and emotion, and those few recidivists displaying such individualist traits are summarily executed. Yet even in Alphaville the promise of freedom can emerge, most dramatically at the movie’s end when Natacha, riding in Caution’s 1965 Ford Mustang as he leaves the city, manages to utter ‘je vous aime’ – I love you. The ultimate freedom of self-expression and emotion thus takes place in the liberatory space of the car and the highway. This should not be taken to be a particularly unusually setting for the declaration of love, for by 1967 around 40 per cent of marriage proposals in the U.S. were taking place in automobiles.¹⁰ Sometimes love, with the aid of a car, can be found in the most unlikely of places.

Men and Women Drivers

Most of the films noted above identify their drivers as men, and indeed the connection between car ownership, driving and masculinity is one of the central themes of urban cinema. In particular, opportunist male lotharios frequently use cars to meet or escape female lovers. To cite but a few examples, in Jean Epstein’s masterly La Glace à trois faces (1927), a wealthy businessman, rather than face up to his three different dates, takes his sports car from an ultra-modern garage and speeds to the fashionable beaches of Deauville, while in the original Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966), Alfie relies on a 1957 Vauxhall Velox to conduct his affairs. Alternatively, masculinity as self-confident autonomy is evident in Thunder Road (Arthur Ripley, 1958), where war veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) maintains a reputation for robust bravado by delivering moonshine in modified Fords; as the theme song ‘The Ballad of Thunder Road’ describes, ‘the mountain boy took roads that even angels feared to tread’.¹¹ Alternatively, in White Lightning (Joseph Sargent, 1973) Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds) announces his release from prison by noisily steering a Ford Custom around small-town Bogan County and then, in an astutely crafted scene shot from the driver’s viewpoint, engaging in a menacing confrontation with Sheriff J. C. Connors.

If male identity is frequently linked to car driving, then so too is female identity, and sometimes to even greater extent. While some motoring commentators have argued that technological and physiological demands rendered early driving a predominantly male preserve, in fact from the 1910s onwards car manufacturers from Ford to Cadillac actively targeted female consumers through advertisements in Good Housekeeping, Vogue and the Ladies’ Home Journal. By the late 1920s manufacturers had realized that women (and, by substitution, men) desired overtly stylish cars that could supply some kind of psychological compensation for the rationalized, undignified and brutal nature of the modern workplace.¹² Above all, however, it is not the consumption of automobiles as objects but, as philosopher Loren E. Lomasky has argued, the correlation of the actual act of driving with the capacity for autonomy and self-direction that is most important here.¹³ As Kate Dixon, a modern British mother and driver, asserted when filmed by the BBC in the 1990s, ‘I want to be an independent person, I want to enjoy the driving I do, I want to enjoy myself.’¹⁴ This kind of attitude affords women more relaxed family ties and increased opportunities for work, leisure, romance and general sociability.¹⁵ In film, this is first reflected in early movies such as Man Ray’s 16-minute cinépoème Emak-Bakia (1926), where Kiki of Montparnasse expertly propels an elegant two-seater sports car while wearing enigmatic goggles with masklike eyes for lenses. This sense of driving where a strong and adventurous female style is conjoined with determined separation from domesticity was repeated many times over the next 40 years, as with two films from 1955: To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock), where Francie propels a Sunbeam Alpine around challenging Mediterranean roads, and The Fast and the Furious (John Ireland and Edward Sampson) in which Connie handles a speedy Jaguar XK120 in a purposefully energetic manner. ‘I’d appreciate’, Connie demands at one point to an assailant, ‘you returning my car and my freedom’. During the 1960s, a decade when Ford was actively selling the sports ‘pony car’ Mustang to independent young women, such depictions became even more commonplace, ra...