Since this week’s Sound of Young America is all about what’s wrong with this country, and Pixar just released its latest flick “Cars,” I thought I’d reprint this remarkable piece of invective from the normally quite temperate Matt Belknap of aspecialthing.com and AST Radio. Is Matt on-target or off the rails? You decide.
—
There are so many problems that grow out of one central issue (that issue being: in a world without people, where cars are people, why would cars still look like cars, since cars were designed by and for people?).
1. Early in the movie, we see a field of crops, and throughout we see tractors in fields. WHAT CROPS ARE THEY HARVESTING, AND FOR WHOM ARE THEY HARVESTING THEM?! This would’ve made more sense if they had been oil fields (oil and gas are the soda and food of these car creatures), but of course oil has negative connotations, so they couldn’t “go there.”
2. If I’m not mistaken, we also see “flowers” being watered, but on closer inspection the flowers look like taillights or something — in other words, they’re mecha-organic, just like the cars themselves apparently are (I could be wrong about this, but if they’re real flowers that creates other problems similar to the crop question). So if flowers are taillights, then WHY ARE THERE REAL TREES? WHY ARE THERE WATERFALLS? WHAT IS THIS WORLD THAT LOOKS LIKE OURS*, EXCEPT CAR-PEOPLE LIVE THERE?
*Even more infuriatingly, natural rock formations look like classic cars, radiators, engine blocks, etc. WHAT?!
3. There are a couple of references to Jimi Hendrix after we hear his National Anthem… WAS HENDRIX A CAR, AND IF SO WHAT KIND, AND HOW DID HE PLAY GUITAR WITH WHEELS INSTEAD OF HANDS?! HOW IS ANY MUSIC CREATED?
4. We see fans wearing colorful afro wigs in the stands at different races. WAIT, SO EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE NO PEOPLE, THERE IS STILL THE CONCEPT OF A HAIRDO CALLED THE AFRO?! IS THIS SOMEHOW CONNECTED TO THE EXISTENCE OF JIMI HENDRIX IN THIS WORLD?
5. Mack, the truck that drives Lightning around, communicates with Lightning over a video com-link that shows his face. But his “face” is the front of the truck, not inside the cab (the cab is his head), so where is the camera?
6. Romance is heavily suggested in the story, specifically between Lightning and the Porsche. But we’re never told if cars procreate or if they’re built somewhere, which to me is a pretty important question. If they don’t procreate, why would the concept of love exist? If they do, how the FUCK does that work? Is it like the album cover for Aerosmith’s “Pump?” Do baby cars come out of the mother car’s tailpipe?
Every other Pixar movie has airtight internal logic. Usually, the anthropomorphized things are already living creatures (fish, bugs, monsters), so we have no trouble understanding that they could speak and have consciousness. in “Toy Story,” the toys having a secret life grows logically out of the fact that children imbue their toys with personalities, and the toys are usually representations of living things anyway (cowboys, spacemen, pigs, dogs). But Toy Story takes place in our world, with a twist (the toys being alive). Cars never even begins to explain itself. Instead, it’s built on the hope that people will go, “Ooh, cool! Shiny cars!” and not question anything (the same willful ignorance that allowed George Bush to get elected twice and go to war against a country without credible evidence). Given their past work, I hold Pixar to a higher standard in this regard, which is why I was so disappointed with this film. It’s just lazy. It’s bad, lazy storytelling, and up until now Pixar seemed to understand how important good storytelling is to a successful film. This makes me question that, because they seemed to just say, “We like cars, NASCAR is hugely popular, we can make a billion dollars very easily here by trading on our name and pairing it with a cultural phenomenon,” and that all came before any concern for telling a good, solid story. The story elements — not just the concept but the characters, the locations, the plot — all feel like afterthought compared to the clear mission to make a shiny, flashy movie about race cars for kids and NASCAR fans.