Cadillac, Rolls, Cybertruck
In his 1963 essay ‘Art of the Coke Culture’ (a reference to Coca-Cola, not the white powder) art-critic David Sylvester compares the design logics of two brands of luxury car: the American Cadillac and the British Roll-Royce.
For Sylvester, the American car is science-fictional.
The suspension of American motor cars insulates passengers from any sense of contact with the road. They feel they are floating along weightless, beyond the reach of gravity. There is a strong allusion to spaceships in the appearance of these cars, an allusion underlined in advertisements current a few years ago in which automobiles were divested of their wheels. But the image of the flying car is more than a day-dream: it corresponds to the way we actually feel when travelling in these cars. The spaceship fantasy is appropriate to the reality — is only larger than life and faster. [Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948–1997 (New York : Henry Holt 1997), 214]
Cars are as much about fantasy as about getting around, of course, of we’d all be driving the cheapest utility vehicles. Sylvester thinks the fantasy of the Cadillac is more exciting than the fantasy of the Rolls.
There’s as much fantasy in a Rolls-Royce as in a Cadillac, but it doesn’t ring so true. The design of the Rolls-Royce radiator is intended to evoke the pediment and columns of the Parthenon and also those of all the banks and museums that already evoked the Parthenon. The radiator thereby symbolises permanence, dignity, silence and wealth. In all this it does not lie, for these are indeed attributes of the Rolls or its owners. Nevertheless, the Parthenon was never a machine for riding in. The spaceship look of the Cadillac may give it a glamour that a car hasn’t got, but at least a spaceship is a mechanically propelled vehicle, not a place of worship or an ancient monument. The Rolls-Royce, a masterpiece of technological achievement, plays down the idea of technology where the Cadillac bolsters it up. The Rolls pretends that technology can be integrated into a wine culture: it tries to establish a respectable continuity with the ancient world. Its image relates to an ideal past, the Cadillac’s to an ideal future of moon-bound men. One harks back to a Golden Age, the other says the Golden Age is now. [Sylvester, 214–5]
The science fiction element here particularly interests me, as you might expect it to. Sylvester’s 1960 ‘Golden Age is Now’ has become a nostalgia, a version of the space-ship retro in its charm. Spaceships don’t look like this now, even in the science-fictional imaginary.
I have previously argued that ‘the automobile’ is a crucial vector for science fiction cinema. In this old post I style George Lucas’s Star Wars as a sort of sequel to Ballard’s Crash, making two points, one anodyne, the other more transgressive. The first is that Lucas, who went from making that retro paean to 1950s youth culture and automobiles American Graffiti (1973) to making Star Wars (1977), really loves cars. It was the success of the former (it earned healthily, and was Oscar-nominated) that enabled Lucas to get the money together to make the latter. In the blog I say: ‘American Graffiti is a hymn, really, to the joys of automated youth, how much fun it is to hang out with your mates, and how much that fun is enhanced if you have cars. Star Wars is basically the same movie, with Modesto California swapped-out for The Galaxy and an extra layer of cosmic Good/Evil bolted onto the plotting. Otherwise it’s still about how much fun you can have hanging out with your friends, and how much that fun is enhanced if you have space-cars. Or, in the case of the Millennium Falcon, if you have a beat-up old space-campervan.’ The direct link from Ballard’s Crash, a perverse sexually explicit prose-fugue, or recitative, on car interiors, car crashes, polymorphous promiscuous sexual congress and physical scarring and breakage (and, ultimately, death) to Star Wars isn’t, perhaps, obvious. But as I say:
The key features of Ballard’s vision is not just that it eroticises the excitement of violent and sometimes deadly car-crashes; it’s that it does so in a perversely repetitive and monotonous manner, driving (as it were) on and on at its simple central conceit, punctuating more-or-less drab accounts of characters driving around West London with the orgasmic intensities of car crashes. and the orgasmic intensities of coitus. The neurotic, lady-macbeth-endlessly-washing-her-hands element of this is not accidental; it’s a large part of what Ballard is getting at. Machines are good at repeating the same motions over and over; and Ballard is fascinated not just by the intensities but by the machinic repetitiveness of sex, the obsessive over-and-over-ness of it.
And Star Wars is not just the one movie. It’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) and ten thousand novelisations and fan fictions, and multiple video games, and The Clone Wars (2008–2014) and The Force Awakens (2015) and Rogue One (2016) and The Last Jedi (2017) and Solo (2018) and Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker (2019). It’s the same story, told over and over again with a compulsive urge to return to key fetish objects, light-sabres, droids, spaceships, costumes, and various cathectically-freighted moments and actions. It’s the same pattern endlessly repeated and with only trivial variation, drab exposition and travel interspersed with the death-fixated orgasmic excitement of gigantic explosions, like Ballard driving along the M4 looking for the next explosive, orgasmic crash.
The erotic fixations of the Star Wars story express a notable consistency: the pretty-faced, dark-haired, female lead; the fresh-faced young blonde boy (or his Jungian animus, the intense-faced young dark-haired boy) male lead, the two placed in multiple combinations with one another such that their sexual energy is always mediated by technology — a technology hyperbolically both automatic and mobile and therefore automobilic. We could peg this as a failure in diversity of representation, but it’s not in the nature of erotic fixation to express diversity. It would hardly be a fixation if it did. And there’s no question as to what she looks like, the girl Star Wars wants to fuck:
On and on it goes, detailing fandom’s fetish objects as intently and monotonously as Ballard ever does. More, these movies insist with a perverse intensity that these somatic couplings result in physical injury and mutilation, just like Crash. Really, the longer this series goes on the more struck I am by its apotemnophilic emphasis. So many amputations!
So many prostheses, so many scars worn proudly like Ballard’s erotic cunieform, the marks of the passionate, tech-mediated connection of sexually-attracted individuals:
What’s really remarkable here is the way Ballard’s perverse portrait of repetitive techno-eroticism has been recruited by Lucas and his heirs to power a global franchise worth billions of dollars. Ballard, were he alive, wouldn’t be surprised that there’s such a huge planetwide appetite for all this. From the vanilla perversity of Luke and Leia’s incestuous kiss to the larger scale psycho-sexual intrafamilial pathologies of this intensely repetitive, techno-somatic visual text, we can look past the surface differences and accept how intensely Ballardian Star Wars really is.
To step back from sex for a moment, has car design become more blandly aerodynamic and ergonomic, and moved away from the space-ship vibe? In most cases, yes. I drive a VW Touran, which is basically a mini-bus: because I have a family, and a dog, and on occasion all must be transported from A to B and back again. It does not look like a spaceship. The Tesla Cybertruck does look like a spaceship, but it’s an outlier, and much mocked. More to the point it looks like a Star Trek Federation shuttle.
Science fiction, yes: but retro. And retro is the logic of science fiction now, either explicitly (The Phantom Menace, Asteroid City) or else simply by virtue of the fact that for a text to be recognisably science-fictional it has to look science-fictional, which means resembling a set of visual iconicities established halfway through the last century.
