The Big Lebowski’s battered 1973 Gran Torino is emblematic of the crap car trope
In normal years, late August is known as the Silly Season due to the paucity of ‘serious’ news on TV or in print. This usually leads to a preponderance of frivolous items conjured up to take up time and fill in space.
If there’s one thing 2020 hasn’t lacked it’s serious news, but this week there was still time to revisit an eccentric story that’s been idling in the background of media coverage for a couple of years.
…autonomous cars on our streets, the fact is that they’re coming—it being a matter of when, not if.
The Department for Transport’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) announced that it is seeking consultation for the approval of driverless technology on UK motorways possibly as early as next year. Whether or not you welcome the advent of autonomous cars on our streets, the fact is that they’re coming—it being a matter of when, not if.
Now, I’m no expert in the fields of transport or technology, or anything else for that matter, and I’m not about to debate the relative safety merits of driverless cars—though a short turn around London during rush hour might make even its most ardent opponents warm to the idea of artificial intelligence on the roads.
Wacky Races, the TV programme inspired by the old bangers’ bible
One thing I am sure of, though, is that crap cars—and I mean old bangers, beaters, rust buckets, proper rattletraps—will soon be a thing of the past. Why? Well, with low emission zones coming into force in most of the UK’s big cities these vehicles will simply be too expensive to run, nullifying what has always been their most enticing selling point.
Don’t get me wrong, the removal of fume-spewing, back-firingly ancient vehicles from our roads is undoubtedly a good thing, what with fossil fuel consumption being the planet’s great ecocidal menace. But, while there’s much to be gained from their eradication, something will also be lost when that day comes and all the old bangers have been put out to pasture, replaced by silent, smooth-cornered modern monstrosities.
…something will also be lost when that day comes and all the old bangers have been put out to pasture…
These new puritans—the Teslas, Priuses, Smarts—that glide noiselessly among us, might have different designers but, somehow, they all look the same (a demonic mix between a PlayStation controller and a dugong). What they lack in looks, they also lack in character. And their triumph will also mean the end of the crap car trope in TV, film and literature.
What’s the crap car trope? I hear you splutter through the fumes. Well, it’s the very unsensual presence of a litany of bashed-up, useless fictional automobiles throughout the 20th century. Sure, the action heroes have always driven sleek, rocket-propelled supercars but it’s the clanking, failing crappy ones that have elicited more tender devotion, at least from yours truly.
Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante, Western storytelling’s first bad transporter
This trope reached its apogee in the late 80s and early 90s with the rise of the slacker hero but even before then you had failing motors like Dick Dastardly’s Mean Machine from 1960s cartoon Wacky Races, which featured every evil contraption a child sadist could imagine: bat-wing roof, spiked hub caps, drill bonnet.
The Mean Machine couldn’t compete with its rivals fairly so its operators, Dastardly and his emphysemic canine sidekick Muttley, employed weapons and gadgets to try and get their way. But every time they’d use one, it usually ended up, often literally, backfiring. Which will resonate with anyone who’s tried to use Waze before.
Dick Dastardly’s car was the metallic embodiment of his evil at a time when laziness was no virtue.
Dick Dastardly’s car was the metallic embodiment of his evil at a time when laziness was no virtue. Unfortunately, that still applies to this day, but in the 80s and 90s a new kind of modern male hero emerged on our pages and screens: the slacker. These men represented all that was most indolent about the rougher sex. They were usually without female companionship and in need of a sidekick.
Just as Rocinante, Don Quixote’s horse, was a hopeless transporter, and brilliant comic double, in the world’s first modern novel, so the crap cars of slacker comedies became the vehicles for our futile late 20th century quests. They were dirty, dented emotional punching bags, beloved by their owners but hated by everyone else.
Mr Weasley’s old blue Ford Anglia, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Cars like The Dude’s 1973 Ford Grand Torino in The Big Lebowski, whose only value derives from its pile of Creedence Clearwater tapes, and its ability to get Jeff Bridges’ character into all manner of plot-progressing scrapes. Or the titular machine in Dude Where’s My Car? Conspicuous by its absence, it acts as the vehicle for the entire plot of this silly, brilliant stoner movie. Or Homer Simpson’s pink sedan.
Probably my favourite fictional rattletrap is John Self’s Fiasco in Martin Amis’s 1980s novel Money. This “vintage-style coupé with oodles of dash and heft and twang” is the protagonist’s “pride and joy” even though it brings him endless grief, and there’s more than a little irony involved in describing the envious “boys at the garage” covering their faces “when the Fiasco is driven—or pushed or towed or, on one occasion, practically coptered—into their trash-strewn mews.”
These cars weren’t simply A-to-B devices, they were emotional punching bags and comic foils.
Self loves his Fiasco beyond the bitter end. Probably because, it being inanimate, it can’t betray him. But also because its many injuries and imperfections reflect his own. These cars weren’t simply A-to-B devices, they were emotional punching bags and comic foils. They were also fictional manifestations of a time when automobiles were as fallible as their makers.
Modern cars won’t break down in the driving snow or struggle over a speedbump, nor will they provide onlookers with many laughs. Advocates of driverless technology insist it removes the threat of human error, a sometimes endearing but always frustrating trait. The advent of cleaner, safer vehicles will mean less tragedy, but it’ll also mean the end of crap cars. Before they’re gone forever, let’s dim the headlights, look on ye flaking paintwork and smile.
