We’ve looked at the road as a fantasy of freedom, and the driver as a fantasy of masculinity, but what about the cars themselves? What can we learn from looking at the cars that achieve their own level of fame?
America has a large collection of famous fictional automobiles, from the hot to the homey to the horrifying. We could talk about the clever satire of the Flintstones’ Footmobile, or the wholesome joy of the Partridge Family bus, or the problematic iconography of the General Lee. But I’d like to focus on three vehicles that, in their contexts, say as much about what America fears as what it fetishizes. These gothic cars have helped shape the way America engages with the dark side of automobility.
The Batmobile
“It’s the car, right? Chicks love the car.” One of the most memorable lines in the otherwise poorly received Batman Forever (1995) calls attention to the ways the Caped Crusader is inseparable from the car he drives. From the original TV series’ Lincoln Futura to…whatever this is, the Batmobile has changed with every new iteration of the character, but it has always said something important about the kind of hero each franchise has centred on.
Take, for example, the most recent live-action installation – The Batman (2022). For much of the film, the Batmobile is most notable in its absence: this Batman (played by Robert Pattinson) prefers his motorcycle, emphasizing his traumatized isolation while also rejecting the bad-boy allure that the above quotation calls attention to. When he is riding with Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), each on their own bike, they form an image of two people who need each other but can’t quite seem to embrace interdependence.
When it appears, though, the car stands out. The film’s production designer, James Chinlund, has said he wanted this Batmobile to look like Bruce Wayne had built it himself, which reinforces his isolation, but how the car gets used adds more. At the climax of Batman’s car chase with the Penguin, the Batmobile looks like it’s lost, along with its driver, only for it to emerge from the fire and keep going. This Batman may be alone against the world, but through it all, he is surviving. And he is coming for you. His car’s rugged minimalism and DIY origin are well suited to a character who calls himself “Vengeance.”
Christine
Chinlund also mentions his Batmobile’s link to a car that’s a different kind of famous: Stephen King’s iconic monster car Christine. The title character of his 1983 novel, Christine shares with the Batmobile the idea that a person can bond with their car by building it themselves. What does it mean, then, that Christine’s way of “bonding” is to seduce her owner and take over his personality? What does this chilling example of man meeting machine say about the American fetish for classic cars?
King thinks of monster car stories as an expression of anxiety about our reliance on a technology that can so easily become deadly. An instrument of such power that also provides protection for the person who wields it fits neatly into the mind as a potential murder weapon. That King makes the car female suggests something equally important about the ways women get commodified and demonized. When Christine is out for blood, she’s a terrifying symbol of patriarchy’s craving for control and failure to maintain it.
I admit, though, to being more fascinated by Christine’s antiquity than her deadliness, or even her monstrous femininity. Christine’s a classic – decked out in cherry red and twenty years old by the novel’s opening. Her owner Arnie’s obsession with her also takes him back in time as he drives through a version of his hometown that no longer exists. Arnie’s fetish is, at least in part, an expression of nostalgia for an experience of automobility that isn’t available to him anymore. Christine, among other things, commemorates the end of an era that sees the automobile as a toy rather than a tool, or worse, a trap.
Baby
The nostalgia that underpins Christine is similarly important to the CW series Supernatural. Dean Winchester, one of the show’s two brother protagonists, embodies this nostalgia, with his dated masculinity and his fondness for classic rock. But most of all, his nostalgia shows in his attachment to the black 1967 Chevrolet Impala his father gave him. He calls her Baby, and his love for her is inseparable from the love he has for the job his father also gave him – hunting monsters all over small-town America.
But, as enthusiastic as he is about the Lone Ranger life, he’s also the brother who most longs for a traditional home and family. The series splits the difference between these two desires by making Baby a home. As the brothers travel across the country, the car increasingly becomes the site for behaviours often associated with domesticity: sleeping, eating, sharing feelings (so many feelings). In an episode appropriately titled “Baby,” Dean and his brother, Sam, travel a multi-day distance for a job. The whole episode is filmed from inside the car, emphasizing the dual role Baby plays as both home and workplace.
This duality, in turn, becomes part of the show’s wider project, expressing anxiety about the fragility of the American home and nuclear family. While the show calls into question the possibility of a stable home safe from monstrous dangers, it simultaneously showcases a version of home capable of surviving anything (the car even goes to heaven with Dean when he dies – twice). This home, though, is one designed for – and built by – straight, white, men. With its nostalgic fondness for traditional masculinity and American muscle, the show reinforces a view of American identity that is equally dated.
The three cars I’ve just discussed are only a few of the fascinating cars whose own personalities have made their marks alongside their human counterparts. What’s more, each of these cars was built and rebuilt by the men who drive them, linking them with a culture that idealizes an individual, intimate relationship with automobility. American pop culture often speaks in the language of the automobile. Cars, and classic cars especially, are as American as apple pie, though I’m not sure apple pie could as easily kill you.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
