CARS: Porn for Children

Twenty years ago Pixar Animation Studios revolutionized cinema with the first full length completely computer-generated film. Two decades later and Pixar is still one of the most consistently groundbreaking studios in the business. Leading up to the release of their new film The Good Dinosaur, I will be going through Pixar's entire filmography at the rate of two movies a week. Now Cars.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: John Lasseter, Joe Ranft
Writers: John Lasseter, Joe Ranft, Jorgen Klubien, Dan Fogelman, Kiel Murray, Phil Lorin, Bonnie Hunt, Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson, Don Lake, Steve Purcell, Dan Scanlon
Cast: Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, Larry the Cable Guy, Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, George Carlin, John Ratzenberger, Michael Keaton
Runtime: 117 mins.
2006

I went into this looking forward to Cars. It's not every day you get to experience a new Pixar movie, and this was one of the two I hadn't seen (Cars 2 being the obvious counterpart). I had no high hopes, just a willingness to be lightly entertained.

Instead I disliked Cars from the very first shot. The psych-up voiceover interspersed with blurred shots of cars zooming past the camera and slow pans across the sleek shiny red metal exterior of the main character. It's meant to titillate, to ingratiate. Already, mere seconds into the film, the cars are presented as fetish objects meant to be worshiped and purchased in small plastic form. What better way to sell merchandise to children than to take something they already love, slap a face on it, and stuff its mouth with witty quips? Note that I do not use the term "fetish object" lightly. Maybe you think my post title a bit harsh, but the definition of pornography is a cultural artifact intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings. What's more erotic to a child than the thrill of moving fast, or the noise of a revving engine? Cars is eroticism for children the way James Bond is eroticism for adults. My point is only enhanced by the movie's baldfaced insistence upon cars objectifying other cars, both for their athleticism and their sexual capacity. I'm not even joking, watch this movie again and notice the moments when one car stares at another's ass, or when a car delivers some sexually explicit line of dialogue that confuses you on a purely pragmatic level but also on the meta-emotional level of why is a Pixar movie forcing me to concoct unspeakable images of motor vehicles engaged in coitus???

Ooooooookay, let me slow down and back up a bit. Cars is a nice little kids movie about anthropomorphic racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his quest to become the winner of the Car Cup, or whatever the most important racing event is called. He's a loudmouth hotshot who's in it for the personal glory more than anything. That all changes when an accident on the way to the final event leads him to get lost and accidentally tear up the road leading into a small town called Radiator Springs. As punishment, he must repave the road, which might not give him enough time to get to the big event. He is supervised by town leader Doc Hudson (Paul Newman) and town lady Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt). He is also befriended by hickish tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), who likes to say Dadgum a lot. This small town is small potatoes compared to the glitz and glamour McQueen is used to, but will these salt of the earth townsfolk teach McQueen to appreciate the quieter side of life? They probably will.

The story of Cars is searingly run-of-the-mill. There isn't a narrative beat in this movie that isn't telegraphed eons in advance. It's clear the the film was constructed with the express purpose of not requiring children to strain their brains, which is the exact opposite of Pixar's typical ethos. Cars betrays that ethos in all sorts of ways, not the least of which being that it's an embarrassingly conservative film. This should come as no surprise, considering the enormous red flags of its NASCAR premise and the involvement of Larry the Cable Guy. But if the first scene is when I started disliking Cars, the driving montage set to Rascal Flatts' "Life is a Highway" was the moment I began hating it.

That's all window dressing though. This film truly takes on the mantle of conservatism when you begin to interrogate it on a thematic level, which is actually no easy task. I spent a great deal of the runtime asking myself repeatedly, "What does that mean? What are they trying to say? What's the message here?" The big reveal is that Radiator Springs used to be a thriving little town before the interstate was built, at which point all business dried up. In (yet another montage), the highway is made out to be a boogeyman through a series of painfully obvious images and sentimentalist music cues. So, what, are highways bad then? What about that earlier montage, the "Life is a Highway" one? If life is a highway, does that mean life is bad? Then the movie purports that highways are bad because cars don't drive around for pleasure anymore, they don't stop to see the beauty of the countryside. If pleasure and beauty are the missing factors here, why is everyone in the town so depressed that they can't sell anything? For that is why they are depressed: not because they are lonely, but because they are so ensconced in conservative capitalist ideology that it becomes depressing that their shops don't do business. But why do they need to do business anyway? It seems like they have everything they need to survive, and they all like each other, and none of them has any external aspirations... beyond accruing capital. The buying and selling of goods itself becomes fetishized. At one point in the movie someone mentions they haven't had a paying customer in something like ten years; clearly they don't need to sell goods in order to survive.

So as soon as Lightning McQueen has a change of heart about these backwoods misfits (which happens maybe 75 minutes into Cars's bloated runtime), he inspires them to fix up their shops and take pride in their appearance. He helps them glam the town up, which is mostly adding a bunch of neon, and when night falls he and his love interest (yuck) drive through the neon lit streets and comment awestruck on how the town has attained its former glory. At which point I exclaimed, "They're admiring the beauty of advertisements!!!!" Fitting as it is for a film that functions as a glorified self-fetishizing commercial for cars to use the narrative to glamorize the craft of advertising, it still struck me as a particularly sinister turn. Not only is it manipulative, but it jars directly with the previous praise of the region's beautiful natural landscape, which by the way, this movie has no business glorifying the natural beauty of the midwest's untouched landscape in the first place because every character in this movie is a motor vehicle that is spewing emissions into a soon-to-be-ruined atmosphere. Though I guess in the uberconservative Cars universe global warming probably isn't on anyone's radar, or just doesn't exist. Or maybe that's why all the humans are dead. The cars evolved into sentient life forms who care nothing about rendering the earth toxic and uninhabitable for human beings. Radiator Springs is probably constructed over a mass grave.

By the way, after Lightning McQueen helps return the town to its former glory, the media finds him and whisks him away, at which point the entire town becomes depressed again because all of the lessons they learned are lies, for they didn't really care about their town's appearance so much as they liked to have a really cool racecar around, further playing into this movie's rampant fixation with individualism.

The movie ends with a message about helping others but it's all fraudulent.

It's not funny either. I laughed at the movie far more than I laughed with the movie, which is something I never expected from Pixar, a company normally so savvy that they preclude all potential derision by nailing down resonance in all the ways that count. The signature Pixar sight gags have been reduced to base observations such as "Cars need oil," and, "Cars are shiny." The jokes are exactly what you expect, especially when they go ahead and do the same exact joke twice in a row. Here's a hypothetical writer's room conversation, courtesy of the friend I watched part of Cars with:

"Okay, we have time here for another joke."
"This is Cars. I can't think of another joke."

Then, to top it all off, a quick mid-movie IMDB search* led me to realize that Cars was the late great Paul Newman's final film before he died. This scrapheap of a childpleasing amalgamation of shiny visuals and car fart jokes was how Hollywood bid adieu to a cinematic legend. I suppose actors have gone out on worst films, but that knowledge only exacerbated my bitterness towards the movie.

*You know a movie is rotting away at my attention span if I can't wait until it's finished to go on IMDB.

I feel the need to say something nice about Cars because I'm doing quite a bit of vitriol-spewing at something that isn't, on a level of craft, a technically bad movie. Yet the niceness does not come. I didn't even like any of the characters we were stuck with for two hours. John Ratzenberger's 18-wheeler was okay I guess, until a painful gag during the interminable end credits scenes** which has him calling attention to his voice's recurrence throughout Pixar's canon in the most groanworthy of ways.

**In addition to this extended gag, and a handful of unnecessary narrative appendages, the end credits sequence also features a slow motion clip array of all the noteworthy scenes of the movie that we just got done watching. As if it is instantly forcing the sort of nostalgia that would cause an audience to, I don't know... memorialize their viewing with the purchase of various items of official movie merchandise??

Even the main character, typically a forte of Pixar's, was an unlikable dick. Pardon my language, but it is deserved. I don't like Lightning McQueen, and now that I know how much of an asshole he is, seeing his big flat red face on backpacks and diapers everywhere is only going to make me angry. The mean egocentric protagonist learning to appreciate the people around him is a cliched and not particularly effective narrative turn, but it has worked wonders in certain movies. Not so here, as Lightning McQueen remains generally insufferable until somewhere around the 100 minute mark, at which point the suspension of disbelief that these people would want to be around him at all has long since been shattered.

But it's a pretty movie. Nice work Pixar, as always.

1 / 5  BLOBS

The Short: One Man Band

I waited until I was finished with my Cars review to watch One Man Band and I am pleased to report that I feel much better now. This is the story of a bored and bereft one man band who finds a spark of creativity in a battle with another one man band for the coin of a little girl. The aesthetic is delightful, as is Michael Giacchino's borderline rock and roll take on Medieval music.

The best part of the film, though, is the little girl who serves as the audience for these two ubercompetitive buffoons. Her arc is unexpected, extremely satisfying, and perfectly communicated using only facial expressions and physical gestures. She's a better character than Cars.

4/5