Twelve Theses about Car Chases, Gender and History -- Part 2

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Seven: In my last installment of these Twelve Theses, I pointed to the physiognomic aspect of car chases. We tend to think of these sequences in terms of wide shots, but of course those wide shots are usually intercut with close ups of the actors either actually driving or miming driving. And the tone of the scene is often set by these brief inserts. Crunching metal and screeching tires are largely agnostic on whether they are funny or scary, how intense and how violent. And that has often meant, ever since Steve McQueen, a bad case of grim-face: the driver’s face scrunched into a determined mask, eyes squinting in a mix of panic and determination. I pointed out that this is an expression that Hollywood doesn’t tend to love on its leading ladies. The fondness for having women race motorbikes rather than a car might well be just as much about avoiding the full frontal gaze, the kind of physiognomic fixation on the wrinkled, crumpled, worried, tight face that the visual vocabulary of a car chase seems to call for. The camera can’t fixate on a motorbike rider’s face the same it does on a driver’s. And helmets do their part in keeping a biker’s face hidden.

So when women start participating as drivers in car chases in Hollywood films with some frequency, a new physiognomy has to be introduced to them. When Angelina Jolie enters the picture, and starts driving with the boys (specifically I’m thinking here of the Gone in 60 Seconds remake starring Nicholas Cage, which was released in 2000), she tends to do so with a kind of unhinged, gleeful, almost horny expression.

Same with Famke Jansen in GoldenEye (1995), who gives perfect crazy eye while tearing down a Monte Carlo highway in her Ferrari F355 GTS.

Hollywood has thus recently expanded the gendered vocabulary of the chase scene. There’s the freaked out ingénue of yore, and there’s the driver who’s getting perhaps a little too much enjoyment out of going fast and smashing into things. In either case, it’s not about grimface: it’s about either sheer panic, or a perverse glee. Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 chase movie Death Proof concludes with a loving homage to classic car chases — three women chase the bad guy, Stunt Man Mike (played by Snake Plisken himself, Kurt Russell) through the countryside. Driving a 1971 Challenger (i.e. the car from Vanishing Point), the trio keeps rear-ending Russell’s character — a psychopath who uses his “death proof” car to kill women — while cackling with escalating glee to “tap that ass”.

It’s a pretty thrilling, albeit kind of troubling, chase sequence. The implication is that in cheering for the three drivers to give Stuntman Mike his comeuppance, we’re sort of cheering on a sexual assault. And given that Tarantino clearly wants this scene to read as revisionist, it raises the question of what Tarantino (a fan of chase sequences) thinks the subtext of traditional chase sequences has been. But when women take the wheel, this is often the case: car chasing remains an excuse for dick-swinging, except that the dick in this case is a female phallus. Car chases remain domination contests, and they celebrate momentary anarchy only insofar as that anarchy will allow someone to lay down the law.

Eight: Car chase scenes warn about surveillance, but their visual vocabulary is ultimately a celebration of surveillance. Most of the 1970s and 1980s car chases forego the helicopter shot, but from a certain point on it became essentially de rigeur. It’s worth thinking through the aesthetics of a helicopter shot — before drones, it was in essence a way of saying “look at what this is costing us, look at what we can afford”. It in some way stands in for itself. It is of course also a way of anchoring the police in the action in a very different way: the classic Beverly Hills Cop-style chase crushes cop cars without a second thought. Law enforcement is usually quite comical and ineffectual. But when there’s a helicopter shot filming, it usually recapitulates the perspective of an in-movie helicopter — often enough a police or other law enforcement helicopter. Police helicopters become the kind of all-seeing gaze that telegraphs that — whatever fun we’re having right now making cop cars slam into each other — the Law will in the end win out. It sees what you’re doing. They fuse the filmmaking apparatus — i.e. what we’re able to see as viewers — with the power structure the movie sets up, and it to some extent identifies the two.

This fusion is clearly informed by the fact that, by the 1990s, audiences had become habituated to watching car chases play out on TV — in footage usually captured by traffic helicopters. The first chase broadcast live on TV was apparently in January 1992 — not surprisingly, it was in LA. That was a mere two years before the “Bronco Chase” — OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings trying to outrun various media and cops on an LA freeway — seared two things into Americans’ visual imaginary: that a car trying to outrun an eye in the sky is visually very compelling, and that it’s ultimately futile.

The reason I am highlighting live footage rather than edited footage (which existed earlier) is the following: sure, on some level the two kinds of car chases — real and staged — compete with one another, forcing the staged ones to become crazier and more spectacular. But in another way I think the real live car chase highlights the Achilles’ heel of cinematic car chases: they are (and I say this as a fan) kind of boring. They go on forever, you know how they end, there’s a lot of lazy existenz in between point A and point B; a lot of pointless revving and looping, and how many times can you cross the median before it gets a little rote? Weirdly enough, I think the competition from real-life (live) car chase footage has affected not so much the look of car chases, but the way they sound.

Nine: Because let’s talk about the music. When I showed Bullitt to my students recently, they voiced disappointment at the disappearance of the score. If you recall, the famous chase sequence that launched a thousand similar sequences has a long set up, during which a fantastic cue from Lalo Schifrin plays, a groovy contemporary jazz number. Then the tires start screeching and the instrumentals drop out completely. This is true for a lot of the classic 70s car chases. Even the James Bond-movies, which used the iconic theme to establish brand continuity over their ever-rotating roster of leading men after You Only Live Twice (1967) are sparing in their use of it when a car chase is afoot. And in the case of Bond, there’s a preference (I think! I’ll do a separate entry on Bond soon!) for orchestral arrangements of the film’s title song when Bond races the bad guys across Louisiana, Bangkok, or Greece. Meaning,

When there is non-diegetic music during a chase sequence in this era, the cues are usually pop music and used in a parodic manner — for instance, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in Blues Brothers (1980). This is particularly prevalent in action comedies — basically all of Burt Reynolds’ output in the 1970s, from W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975) via Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Hooper (1978), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), to The Cannonball Run (1981), Stroker Ace (1983). Non-diegetic orchestral music is basically absent in all of these — unless you count an occasional banjo.

Just look at the films produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson in the 1980s versus those the duo produced in the 1990s. The moment there’s a chase afoot in any of the Beverly Hills Cop movies, there’s a needle drop on the soundtrack — usually not even ones written specifically for the movie (such as the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” in the first installment (1984) and “Be There” for the second (1987)). But in their 1990s output — above all the two Michael Bay movies Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996), as well as Con Air (1997), Enemy of the State (1998) and the aforementioned remake of Gone in 60 Seconds — car chases are suddenly awash in music.

The music historian James Buhler writes about Hollywood soundtracks, and he focuses in particular how movies give us a sense of world, universe, mythology through the way they sound. James pointed out to me that the kind of thumping score we find in late 90s action scenes reflects a change in the job of the composer: Hans Zimmer and others from the Media Ventures orbit began to have music editors build music for action scenes from materials, instead of through-composing them. This is in part, Jim told me, “because there was so much re-editing and not enough time during post production to compose to picture.” I think you can hear the results of this rather clearly in this chase sequence from 1997’s Nicole Kidman/George Clooney starrer The Peacemaker (dir. Mimi Leder).

I’m no sound engineer, but to my ears (and I recall this being the case even when watching the movie in the theater, which for some reason I did) the mix here feels very off. The soundtrack (by Hans Zimmer doing his Hans Zimmer thing) is clearly meant to be blasted at top volume, but … the film can’t really do that, given that Kidman and Clooney have to talk over it, and given that the film still wants the realism of screeching tires and crunching metal. The stuff that doesn’t really work in this scene I think points to the fact that car chase scenes are not moments where all the different kinds of filmmaking magic work harmoniously side by side. It’s one where the film has to prefer one to the others. In this specific scene that means that the machismo of the soundtrack is weirdly attenuated — like listening to the dude-iest of dude rock wafting over from another person’s headphones.

Which is another way of saying, I think, that two things are true about car chase scenes: they’re super fun and very popular; and they very fundamentally don’t work. They have all the internal contradictions and the dream-logic of our car-fixation.

Ten: I recently had occasion to rewatch John Carpenter's (definitely inferior) follow up to Escape from New York, 1996's Escape from LA. It’s another one of these films in which car-based mayhem becomes a way of reflecting on which, if any, urbanites’ lives are worth saving, and whether it isn’t perhaps worth giving up on cities and just make them a thing to drive through real fast.

Anyway, I started thinking about the post-aocalyptic car chase, which has become kind of a sub-subgenre in its own right. Carpenter’s film drops Kurt Russell’s dystopian badass Snake Plisken into a Los Angeles that has become detached from the mainland and become a massive open-air prison and ICE deportation center. Through that wasteland tear a shit ton of motorbikes, some cool vintage cars and a whole lot of pickups.

Obviously it seems a little demented to fact check a science fiction film, but it struck me as interesting what types of cars we have come to expect in this kind of scene. In the dystopian future, it's generally the most muscle-y cars that survive. They guzzle gas, they emit plumes of smoke, their gears grind. Which all suggests that they should have given up the ghost years ago, and Immortan Joe should be runing after Furiosa in a low-mileage Honda Accord, or whatever. I suspect that this design choice expresses a gendered hierarchy, one that the filmmakers may not even be aware of. It's survival of the strongest, where strongest is the most horsepower, coolest-looking clutch, the biggest, baddest muscle car on the block (or stretch of post-nuclear wasteland, as the case may be). The kind of car a dude would like, with a Will Arnett voiceover in the TV ad. Just as the strongest, butches people survive the apocalypse, only those cars culturally coded (and really advertised) as strongest and butchest survive.

These are, after a fashion, still car commercials. And so postapocalyptic chase movies are the swolest of cars mashing into each other, further butchified by spikes and skulls and rust and hubcaps. The post-apocalyptic car chase has the aesthetic of a hot-rodding event. 1960s reporting and fiction about hot rodding, gearhead and biker subculture often made it sound like these kids already lived in a wasteland (“They hunt in packs — like wolves on wheels!” the trailer for the 1966 Roger Corman film The Wild Angels declares). And the idea that biker and motor gangs are a little feral already is pretty widespread. After all, especially since Mad Max (1979), the assumption in many “fall of civilization”-narratives in Hollywood seems to be that after some catastrophic event, people would stop showing up to work as cops or at the hospital, but that they would still show up to their Thursday night hang at the Hell’s Angels.

I’m actually not entirely sure: if there were an apocalypse tomorrow, what's the car you’d want to get a hold of to guarantee mobility for the longest period of time? It clearly wouldn’t be the monster trucks of Mad Max: Fury Road.

On the other hand, in George Miller’s dystopia this is clearly set up as a joke: these people kill for “guzzolene” while running enginges that consume absolutely insane quantities of it. The violence of their world (like that in our own, which it is meant to parody) is self-sustaining. In general, the post-apocalyptic car chase parodies our own car culture, but often enough buys into its overall logic. In Carpenter's film, Snake Plisken's LA merely heightens a divide in his (and our) LA -- that there are those with cars, and those without. And that the ones without live in a world made for and dominated by those with. And in Death Race 2000, Roger Corman’s 1975 cheapie about a Hunger Games-style race across America put on by a fascist president for life, drivers get extra points for running over civilians, including the audience of their race. The movie isn’t very good, but in some way it has the most interesting take on spectatorship and car chases: the car chase invites you to project yourself into the driver’s seat; but really you are at best in the police or aerial unit helicopter; and at worst under the wheels.