The Experiential Thrill of Driving in Films

Radio On, directed by Chris Petit, 1979
 
From the moment I saw its title, a new book, Drive, had me buckled into the front seat ready to hit the freeway. It’s written by Iain Borden, professor of architecture and urban culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, and its subtitle is Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes. Borden clearly adores cars, though as a serious architectural thinker he can hardly make light of the manifold objections, and he mounts an only slightly sheepish defense of the value of the driver’s experience. For me, that’s by the by. What I like about the book is the way that Borden, who must spend as much time Gorilla-glued to the screen as he does on the road, grounds his investigation in scenes of driving in films because, as he says, “cinema, more than any other representational form, provides the most direct sense of what it actually feels like to drive.”

As he continues: “movies help us understand the experiential thrill of modernity not only through aesthetic experiences of space — through effects of framing, signs, mobility and so forth — but in transcending the rational and disciplined qualities of driving and moving into a realm of the comparatively irrational, into matters of non-codified thought, instinct and everyday behaviours.” What we see on the screen is experienced again in memory and imagination at the wheel. The windscreen’s resemblance as a framing device to the widescreen film image, turning the road ahead and the surrounding scene into a kind of cinema, is often noted.

Borden says he watched over 450 films in the course of his research, and he mentions a bibliographic database of more than 100,000 references. The engagingly catholic selection sifted for automotive epiphanies runs from Claude Friese-Greene’s The Open Road (1925) to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), from Jacques Tati’s Trafic (1971) to Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), from Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979) to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). The book’s first image, from Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia (1993), prompted me to revisit that macabre American road trip undertaken in an old 1963 Lincoln Continental in search of notorious serial killer locations. David Duchovny’s character is writing a book about the subject and, as it turns out, receives some unwanted help from one of his passengers played by Brad Pitt. “Driving here is both the site of an unfolding personal event and a witness to a wider social malaise,” notes Borden wryly. It sure is.

Collateral, directed by Michael Mann, 2004

The book gains greatly from around 100 carefully chosen stills, which visualize the arguments while conjuring the experiential, irrational, “non-codified” dimension of driving: the road surface rushing by in Wild Strawberries (I went back and watched it again); New York dissolving through the cab window in Taxi Driver; the political dimensions of the tableau-like car crash scene in Pierrot le fou; the rapturous moment in The Passenger when Maria Schneider stands in the back seat of a Mercury Comet with her arms outstretched, looking at the road disappearing behind her. I’m happy with an everyday existence largely free from car use. But the films, which probe our deepest motivations and pleasures as we speed along the highway, are irresistible.


See also:
Collapsing Bulkheads: The Covers of Crash
The Covers of J.G. Ballard’s Crash: An Update
We Found It at the Movies: Part 1