Generation Robot by Terri Favro

Author:Terri Favro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

Every car chase in the movies versus Johnny Cab (Total Recall, 1990)

In the great car chase movies—The Fast and the Furious, The Blues Brothers, Bullit, The French Connection, The Italian Job, Mad Max—the driver is always the hero (or more often, antihero).

In the sixties, seventies, and eighties, a few movies and TV shows featured fantasy cars that could think, speak, browbeat family members, fight crime, and murder teenaged bullies. My Mother The Car was a 1965 situation comedy in which the car owner’s dead mother was reincarnated as a vintage automobile. In 1982 we saw both Stephen King’s sentient, homicidal Plymouth Fury Christine and K.I.T.T. the intelligent, crime-fighting Pontiac Firebird in the TV show Knight Rider. With the possible exception of K.I.T.T.—who was still very much the sidekick of David Hasselhoff’s hunky character, Michael Knight—none of these semi-robotic cars could be called heroic (although Christine was a great horror movie villain).

Even one of the more memorable self-driving cars in the movies—Total Recall’s Johnny Cab—is portrayed as being driven by a leering marionette. Johnny responds to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s command to “Drive! Drive!” with a maddeningly chipper, “Can you repeat the destination?” Some getaway car! You can’t blame Arnie for ripping Johnny out of the cab and the taking the driving into his own hands.

I’m still waiting for stories starring cars that fall in love, lose their tempers, and turn into fully realized heroes and villains. (Okay, besides Disney’s animated Cars franchise.) One film that comes close is Logan (2017). Set in 2029, the Marvel comic book character, Wolverine, is an aging antihero who makes his living as the driver of an autonomous limousine. The automotive “bad guys” are platoons of driverless transport trucks. Without front cabs, they look like hulking, headless monster robots, rolling along long, lonely highways that are devoid of humanity.16

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