MODALITY, CRANKING IT OVER, AND THE FILM STALKER

Many of the same joys of walking that are lost when you drive are also lost when you ride. But many more - especially when compared to cars - are preserved.

In order to avoid writing the eighteen millionth slop-pile of psuedointellectual paragraphs about freedom, The Wind In My Hair or On My Legs, The Open Road, etc. - none of which are what I'm talking about - and write a more novel form of psuedointellectual paragraph, I have to fall back on one of my favorite types of sources: an essay I heavily skimmed on the computer once and have never been able to find again.

The essay -- that I never read in its entirety -- was on the opening of the movie Stalker. It focuses on the way the three protagonists relate to their beat-up UAZ truck in an early scene where they sneak into the Zone past military checkpoints. It would be very easy to conceive of this scene using the language of the rarefied field (never more rarefied or developed than in the late seventies of Stalker's release) of the Car Chase Scene. Unitized 'moments' of action - big money shots (a hyphen could be placed on either side of 'money' here) of tight turns or hard braking dubbed over with screeching tires. Cuts from exterior stunts to interior rear-projection shots of the inhabitants reacting. Cunning illusions of speed - likely numerically-conveyed with a lingering shot on a speedometer.

The net outcome is that a car in a movie - and, as shall be discussed in a moment, real life - becomes a 'sub-world', a nested type of existence. There is usually - usually - a hard deliniation between the way the car exists in the world and the way the passengers exist in the car, and this is reflected in the way scenes with cars are structured. Either you are watching the car do something, or you are watching the passengers do something inside the car. You see the car take a turn - cut - you see the passengers slide around inside. If there are points where the divide between these nested levels of existence occur, they are big set-piece moments (and very commonly take the form of gunfire - one set of passengers shooting at the car of another).

In a similar way the car becomes a 'nested' way to move through the world. The car is inside a lane, you are inside the car. A car is very much the 'unit' by which roads are designed and operate. A lane is built wide enough to hold one car with some margin. Because of this, driving on sane roads in a sane manner quickly feels less like moving through the world and more like the occupation of a series of predefined slots, connected by predefined manuevers. Your car is one unit large; your car is one of these lanes.

Driving in steady highway traffic, for example: you continue down your lane at an even speed, scrupulously maintaining the right spacing from the car in front of you -- the white lines on the ground to each side and the trained-in following distance overlaid ahead on your vision carving out a rectilinear envelope of space you, the experienced driver, hold position in -- not following it as it moves down a static highway, but keeping motionless in its center as you and the envelope form a unit that stays still as the world whips past. A lane change becomes a fixed-action pattern -- signals on, two beeps of the flasher filling a mental capacitator that lets you know you've taken it slow enough, head craning to your right shoulder to check the slow lane, followed only fractions of a second later by the eye-on-the-ball-type guided movement of your hands on the steering wheel to begin moving the car, at a rate gentle enough that you can -- just as automatically -- jerk the steering wheel back in the other direction when and if your eyes, looking through the always-shrinking gap between the B and C pillars, catch glimpse of a right-lane bandit roaring up behind you. By the time your thoughts catch up -- assuming emergency hasn't galvanized your attention -- you're safely halfway over the line.

Your car is in the world, and you are in the car. You gain a layer of abstraction from the outside world in the same way the rear-projection set of a bloated early-70s land-yacht interior gains a layer of abstraction from the exterior shots of a French Connection or The Driver.