Drive 'em Crazy
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 23, 2002
The first overlap between cars and the world of art and ideas probably came about when Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Laurel and Hardy team decided that automobile accidents were funny. Not that people of that era associated films with art or ideas. Like cars themselves, movies were just a fad.
Nonetheless the automobile quickly became a reliable extra. It could instantly and cheaply add colour and movement (or, in the early days, black-and-white and movement). It could also help define a character more quickly and precisely than a whole swathe of dialogue: an audience knew that what could be expected from a man who jumped out of a beaten-up Ford was completely different to that from one who leapt from a racy European sportster or a big black English limousine.
The car played a big part in 1930s Hollywood dramas, added cuteness and light relief to Ealing comedies, provided action for Elvis's celluloid atrocities and techno-wizardry to the film exploits of James Bond and countless other spies.
The car chase at first a plot punctuation grew to the point where it was the plot which was the punctuation. Bullitt is often described as a classic, but who can remember anything about it other than the sliding, skidding, leaping vehicles?
A prolific director of B-grade movies once proclaimed, ``Breasts are the cheapest special effects." If not the second cheapest special effect, fast cars are certainly among the most popular particularly when one is pursuing another.
The 1982 film The Junkman destroyed more than 150 cars, while the car chase or truck chase helped launch the career of one Steven Spielberg (Duel, 1971).
Mad Max flicks made an art form of mutant machinery. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Great Race traded on the early glamour of the automobile age (Chitty Chitty was reborn this week as an all-singing, all-dancing West End musical).
Motor sport, however, has always fared badly on film. Tom Cruise's NASCAR pic Days of Thunder was lamentable, same for any number of old motor racing biopics. The word to correctly describe Sly Stallone's recent Driven is yet to be invented.
The simplest explanation for the motor-sport-makes-for-bad-movies rule is that the real thing is available and pretty damn good, so Hollywood isn't required. Then again, you could say that about sex.
Cars and song provide a much busier stall at this particular festival. For a quarter of a century the two were perfectly intertwined as Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen and others based songs and even entire albums around two- and four-wheeled creations.
It ended about the time of the second British musical invasion of the United States, when punks and new-wavers more likely to be bicycle riders than car drivers took over US charts and fashions. But it was not before Bruce sang of charging ``through mansions of glory in suicide machines", Chuck of a ``coffee-coloured Cadillac", and Janis Joplin of her desire for a Mercedes-Benz. In 1979, Marianne Faithfull had a hit articulating as good a wish as any: to ``ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair".
Cars old and new, road and racing, stationary and moving make a great subject for photography. But when it comes to painting, the results are usually pretty literal or ugly and unnecessary (Warhol's highway accident panels come to mind).
One noticeable exception: Ed ``Big Daddy" Roth, an early-era drag racer and hot-rodder. Roth's designs featured on a million T-shirts and wall posters, and he was described as the ``Dali of kar kulture" in Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (itself one of few crossovers between cars and literature).
From the early 1960s Roth developed his fusion of pop art, automotive culture and wild cartooning. His character Rat Fink (a drooling, fly-ridden rodent who drove monstrously modified cars with huge tyres and engines) influenced Mambo and many other modern designers.
Roth produced deviant creations in three dimensions, too, hand-building fibreglass cars with asymmetric body design, wild bug eyes, bubble tops, outrageous metalflake paint jobs and massive exposed chrome-plated engines.
The oil shock of the early 1970s made the whole thing look like an anachronism. Roth fell from favour then found religion before his unlikely cover artwork for the 1982 Birthday Party album Junkyard either provoked or coincided with a strong Rat Fink revival.
All that said, the strongest cross-over between cars and art is not in the way they are represented, but in the way they are. Nothing as complex as a modern car is the subject of as much ascetic design work.
That designers can comply with thousands of highly restrictive international design and safety regulations, plus strict engineering criteria governing every aspect of a car's structure and performance, and still make them look different and interesting is a remarkable achievement in art and science.
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald
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