Newsletter: Flying Cars
In America, a car is freedom, but a flying car is the FUTURE of freedom. Or so we thought.
[editor’s note: Rewind Video co-host Bob is on a secret store mission, and is unable to contribute to the Newsletter this week.
He will be back in due time, but for now, Rob is handling all Newsletter duties, as well as coordinating said mission from deep within Rewind Video Headquarters.
In this edition, he thinks a little deeper about the movies he put on our Staff Recommendation Shelf, and even wonders what all these flying cars mean to the world around them and us.
Find the podcast HERE.]
A flying car is not a spaceship. Or a plane. Or a helicopter.
If the automobile represents individual freedom — the ability to move about as one pleases, to travel to distant outposts, a personal living space on wheels — the flying car is the next evolutionary step.
In a flying car, we're no longer constrained by the two-dimensional grid of the roadbound; we're free to move in any direction we please.
And yet, we can't shake the car. The idea of it has been burned too permanently into our minds.
In reality, personal flying devices would not need the size, shape, or personality of cars, which are already wildly inefficient modes of transport.
It's almost impossible to justify the cost, and expenditure of energy, it takes to move a several-thousand pound box around town in order to, say, pick up some groceries, even when that box is traveling at street level.
To launch that same box into the air every time we have an errand to run would put the average American's annual energy consumption in line with an Apollo mission to the moon.
But we're not looking for practicality in our movies — or in real life for that matter. We want coolness, and cars are cool.
A jetpack would be a much better choice if we're flying short distances, but there aren't a whole lot of movies with jetpacks. Because jetpacks are for nerds.
You can't roll your windows down in a jetpack. A newly washed jetpack probably wouldn't gain much attention. There's no room in a jetpack for you and your friends to fly around listening to music.
So while the age in which we believed flying cars were both attainable and practical may have passed, the idea of the flying car remains.
Like the ground-based automobiles on which they're based, the flying car is probably an idea best left in the rearview mirror, but it's too big a part of our identity — cars as freedom, flying cars as the future of freedom — to ever truly let go of.
REPO MAN
1984 • 92 min • dir. Alex Cox
Repo Man, maybe more than any movie of its time or since, understood what it meant to live as a street-level outcast in Reagan's America.
The 80's has always seemed, to a hind-sighted observer, like the most brain-dead decade of post-WWII America. The culture was in late-stage coke-party delirium, and the politics was the whiskey-drunk chaperone in charge of driving everyone home.
It was the decade that America started taking its first big steps away from being a country, and toward being a market. Our experiences were flattening; our consumer choices were expanding, while at the same time homogenized; corporate interests explicitly made part of the national agenda.
But the underground offers a different view of the world, and the outcasts were starting to get a fuller picture of how things operate; how weird, fucked-up, and chaotic everything was.
That's why it makes almost perfect sense for a glowing car to arrive, a car so hot that it obliterates anyone who gets close — anyone except the Chosen.
Chosen for what? nobody knows. But it's going to fly away — very far away — from this place, and for a lot of us, that's enough.
BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II
1989 • 108 min • dir. Robert Zemeckis
It's time as a culture that we all admit to ourselves that this movie is a flaming mess.
Yes, it's filled with a lot of awesome stuff. Self-tying shoes, self-sizing jackets, hydrating pizza, TV-powered restaurants; and of course the star of the show, hoverboards.
"A flying skateboard" might seem like the lamest elevator pitch in movie history, but BTTF2 seems to exist only to get us from one hoverboard scene to the next, and on that level it's absolutely spectacular.
The rest is just filler, and is treated as such. There's no story, no character arcs, no point to the whole plot except to get to the end.
The movie never even tries to figure out what to do with Jennifer, so instead she's literally knocked unconscious and thrown under some boxes. (Does awake-asleep-awake-asleep-awake count as a character arc?)
I can't help but think that maybe this is all the flying car's fault. While we're being distracted by the toys, the first 40 minutes are spent cleaning up the mess they made for themselves at the end of Part I.
It's a pretty bitchin' way to end a movie, to be honest, with our two heroes blasting off into the future in a flying DeLorean, but they packed a much heavier load into that car than they bargained for.
It's one thing, as storytellers, to put Jennifer in that car, and then to set up that she and Marty are married; and ALSO that they have kids, which are in some sort of danger or something — but to saddle yourself with all of that, and to not have any sort of plan to get out, that's madness.
And, by the way, what's the rush to get to the future anyway? It's a TIME MACHINE. Couldn't this be handled in the morning?
So we get what we get, with the Flying Time Car blasting off with a trunkful of problems to 2015, with Jennifer destined to a future filled with alley naps.
THE BLUES BROTHERS
1980 • 133 min • dir. John Landis
The Blues Brothers is probably not the first movie to spring to mind when you think of flying cars. The Bluesmobile doesn't fly in a traditional sense — certainly not long distances.
Its mode of propulsion is either a mystery, or it's simply launching itself into the air using a normal car engine, which would be a sort of mystery itself.
The fact that the Bluesmobile is a decommissioned police car is used to explain all sorts of wild vehicle behavior, but the hundreds (?) of other, in-service police cars in the movie aren't able to come anywhere near its capabilities.
Considering the in-air, short-range, acrobatic maneuvers that the car is able to execute, it's not at all unreasonable to suggest that maybe it's not using traditional propulsion.
Maybe there's something to this "mission from God" thing after all.