The XXX Test Glen Fuller “Pontiac GTO. A device for shrinking time and distance.” – Pontiac sales brochure, 1964. Rob Cohen’s film xXx (2002) is a reworking of the classic James Bond-style spy flick. xXx is hard core; everything in the film has been modified to the extreme.1 The main character xXx, a.k.a. Xander Cage (played by Vin Diesel), drives a 1967 Pontiac GTO. The Pontiac GTO is a muscle car and within enthusiast circles the early model GTO is known as the ‘Goat’. The use of the Goat in the film situates both the film and the car at the intersection between popular culture and the automotive industry. I am calling this the ‘automotive cultural industry.’ The automotive cultural industry is the specific constellation of commodity producers and immaterial labourers operating within the cultural economy that emerges in the overlap of the automotive industry and popular culture.2 Filmic product placement, such as in xXx, is a primary example of the way the automotive cultural industry produces the car as a cultural commodity. In addition to film, motorsport is a key cultural institution in the circulation of images that constitutes the automotive cultural economy. Drag racing and circuit racing are the two obvious examples of where the image of the car is sometimes more important than who actually wins races.3 Automotive manufacturers and the cultural industries work together to produce cars and related auto-paraphernalia as cultural commodities. The Pontiac ‘Goat’ GTO has an attraction for enthusiasts because it is regarded as the first example of a ‘muscle car’. The ‘muscle car’ is an interesting cultural phenomenon for it is the first post-Fordist cultural commodity of the automotive cultural industry. The ‘Goat’ is associated with the three cultural categories that define a ‘muscle car’ – age (youthfulness), gender (masculine) and ethnicity (US ‘domestic’). The 1967 Goat GTO works in the film xXx because of the homologous relation between the muscular character of xXx and these three intersecting cultural categories. The use of the Goat in xXx is telling in light of the recent failure of GM Pontiac to market the Australian-designed GM Holden Monaro under the resurrected Pontiac GTO name.4 Would the new 2004 model GTO have worked in the film xXx as the main character’s car? As I shall argue, the simple answer is, “No.” Philament XXX – December 2005 To begin unravelling why the new Pontiac GTO fails the xXx muscle car test it is necessary to interrogate how the 2004 GTO has been produced as a cultural commodity within the automotive cultural industry. I shall first interrogate the history of the Pontiac GTO, a.k.a. the ‘Goat,’ and its status as a muscle car icon; this will enable me to set up a brief introduction to the new GTO. The comparative locations of the old GTO and the new GTO in the automotive cultural economy can be mapped according to their respective involvements in motorsport and product placement or use in films. The director of xXx, Rob Cohen, seems to have an uncanny ability to mediate between the automotive industry and popular culture, and has thus emerged as a central figure in the automotive cultural industry. This is signalled by the popularity of a series of films he has been involved in and which include The Fast and the Furious franchise, xXx and the made-for-television The Last Ride (2004). I shall use his films to situate the new and old GTO. Both the old and new models of the GTO have been used extensively in motorsport. It is the motorsport involvement of the new GTO versus that of the old GTO that clearly demonstrates the failure of Pontiac in constructing a coherent image of the GTO that is acceptable to enthusiasts and the markets they represent. As such, my last act shall involve outlining exactly what Pontiac got wrong in attempting to produce and ‘sell’ the image of the new GTO to two very different enthusiast markets – the ‘classic muscle car’ market and the ‘import’ market. Muscle, Grunt, and the Goat Judith Roof, in a recent essay on James Bond, writes that “Bond’s most potent accessory is usually his car.” Bond’s car is not so much a phallic extension (pace pop-Freudian accounts) than an “extension of his stylistic mastery.”5 Bond’s sophistication involves a double relation to style; he is a master of style – the tuxedo, the drink, the way of talking, the ‘Bondisms’ – and his way of being in the world demands a stylistic mastery over the dramatic ecologies of adventure that populate the now-clichéd Bond narrative. On the other hand, the character of xXx has an equally effective, but different stylistic mastery. xXx’s negotiation of the dangerous circumstances in which he finds himself draws on an affirmative machismo organised around an extreme disregard for normative conceptions of risk. Bond deals with problems in a graceful performance of quick thinking rationality and masculine physical prowess; xXx deals with problems through an extremely muscular performance of grace. This is also expressed through xXx’s most potent accessory, his car, which must enable him to perform his ‘extremely muscular’ stylistic mastery.6 In the director’s commentary on the DVD version of the film, Cohen introduces the car and its relationship to the character of xXx thus: 10 Philament XXX – December 2005 Here is one of the stars of the picture – the ’67 Pontiac GTO. […] It is a hell of a car for a hell of a man. Xander [xXx] does not belong in a rice rocket. He deserves to be in a muscle car. (I shall return to the difference between the category of ‘muscle car’ and the derogatory ‘rice rocket’ below.) The Pontiac GTO has an important place within the mythopoiea of US car culture. The Goat is regarded as the first ‘muscle car’ and has accumulated mythological status over the last 40 years because it is the first example of a cultural archetype or ‘model’ that it established. ‘Model’ has a delicious ambiguity in this context. It refers not only to the Goat as an automobile or design-based technological model, but also as a cultural model with particular attributes that are romanticised in sedimented discursive formations continually invoked and rehearsed by enthusiasts.7 On a superficial design-based technological level, a large V8 motor driving the rear wheels in a relatively small body became the model for the muscle car. However, the GTO was closely associated with youth and the masculinities of ‘grunt’. To be a ‘muscle’ car, subsequent cars had to repeat this association with youth and ‘grunt’. Or, in other words, the muscle car was singular within the automotive marketplace. As David Gartman writes: What was new about the muscle car was not just its horsepower but its individuality – it was a new category of car that advertised its difference from run-of-the-mill models. Not social superiority but being a bit different – just like everyone else – was the appeal.8 Gartman is describing the process of transition from the mass-standard of Fordism to the standard variation of post-Fordism that occurred in the auto industry throughout the 1950s and into the 1970s. The muscle car was one of the first of a new type of mass-produced post-Fordist commodities where the sole thing shared is a difference from each other. Initially, the muscle car could be regarded as different from ‘run-of-the-mill’ models; however the general automobile market underwent a transformation where various sub-markets of discerning consumers were created. These sub-markets were not (only) differentiated on a vertical hierarchy of distinction (which existed in the early markets for the first custom-built cars; that is, well before mass-produced cars existed), but a horizontal distribution of differences across the market. These horizontal differences were produced through the immaterial labour of marketers and advertisers.9 An important part of the shift from Fordism is the inverted relation of production to exchange where a commodity is ‘sold’ before it is produced. Muscle cars were sold twice. Firstly, in the ‘public imagination’; this produced the pre- 11 Philament XXX – December 2005 personal, but individually experienced subjectivity of the ‘enthusiast’. In this case, the sociality of the enthusiast is organised around leisure-time activities determined by an enthusiasm for ‘muscle cars’.10 The immaterial labour of advertisers and marketers attempted to drive the production, or at least cultivation, of enthusiast subjectivities. Secondly, the muscle car was actually sold to the enthusiast during the moment of exchange at automotive dealerships. The enthusiast selected whichever ‘tick-box’ options rendered their new muscle car purchase as individual. The individuality of the muscle car was therefore produced and purchased before the actual car was. The ‘individuality’ encouraged by makers of muscle cars places the ‘muscle car’ at the vanguard of post-Fordism; for ‘difference’ becomes a central concern within post-Fordist modes of production. The muscle car captured a difference; not from something, but difference in itself. In the 1960s, the ‘muscle car’ is an expression of a singular difference culturally organised around an affiliation with the raucous rebelliousness of youth and the masculine ‘grunt’ of technological performance represented by the drag racing motorsport. In this regard, as an expression of difference, the ‘muscle car’ is singular. 11 The driving force behind the development of the Goat was Pontiac Head Engineer, John DeLorean.12 DeLorean appropriated the Italian phrase ‘Gran Turismo Omologato’ from Ferrari, which translates roughly into ‘Grand Touring Homologated’. ‘Homologated’ is a term long used by manufacturers to describe a purpose built race car that has been modified for the street and general consumption.