American Dreams: Stories of Millennial Car Culture

by Steven Phillips

B.A. in Psychology, May 2013, Austin College

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

August 31, 2017

Thesis directed by

Susan Sterner Program Head for New Media Photojournalism

© Copyright 2017 by Steven Phillips All rights reserved

ii Abstract

American Dreams: Stories of Millennial Car Culture

This is a multimedia project that uses photos, videos, and an essay to profile two young men - German Coello and Corey McKenzie - involved in two very different types of car culture: stanced Hondas and Volvo rally cars, respectively. The project explores the automotive subculture and racing can have a profound impact on young people in terms of finding personal identity, and building positive and supportive relationships and communities. American Dreams relates stories beyond cars about finding your place in a new country after immigration and finding joy in Appalachian Maryland.

iii Table of Contents

Abstract ...... iii

Chapter 1: The American Automobile on Culture and Landscape ...... 1

Section 1: Consumption and Identity ...... 4

Section 2: Driving Expansion ...... 9

Section 3: Cars in American Culture and Entertainment ...... 12

Section 4: Cars = Family ...... 17

Chapter 2: A Review of Cars and Documentary Media ...... 25

Bibliography ...... 42

Appendices ...... 46

Appendix A: Still Images ...... 47

Appendix B: Project Website ...... 52

Appendix C: Community Engagement ...... 89

iv

Chapter 1: The American Automobile on Culture and Landscape

There’s something enthralling about cars when you’re a kid. Some kids grow out of the obsession with toy trucks and Hot Wheels and move on to other hobbies. But, ask any self-proclaimed “car-person,” and they’ll tell you it all started when they were kids.

My hometown, Houston, is the 8 th largest in the United States measured in square miles. It is the quintessential picture of urban sprawl, spreading 40 miles in every direction from the city center. It is flat, hot, and sweaty. If New York is the Concrete

Jungle, Houston is the Concrete Desert. Cars are essential, and they’ve always been a central part of my life. So many of my earliest memories revolve around cars. One of my earliest memories (perhaps when I was two, according to my mom) is just an image of building a Hot Wheels track with my dad in the living room of our suburban home before we moved in to the city. Then there was the time, when I was four, that my younger brother and I fought in the back seat of my mom’s car, while she was driving.

Someone (surely my brother, not me) lobbed a juice-box over the front seat, bouncing off my mom’s head. She pulled over immediately – coincidentally in to the parking lot of our favorite chain of Donuts, and I exclaimed, “Ooo, donuts!” before receiving a

“reward” that was most certainly not donuts. I once stuck a piece of half-chewed

LaffyTaffy in between the cloth seats and left it there for days, where it hardened into a radioactive green colored husk; won’t forget that smell, or having to clean it out. The smell of sour apple candy still reminds me of the tan cloth interior. Some of my favorite memories, though, are of going to Texas World Speedway in College Station, Texas, and watching amateur races there with my dad and brother. It was always loud, and hot, but

1 I’ll never forget the drivers letting us kids sit in their race cars and dad always talking to them about what it might cost to rent one and never doing it. Every time we left we begged him to rev the engine like the racecars we just watched before backing out of the parking space. I regularly annoyed my parents by pretending to drive and playing with the radio volume knobs while the car was parked in the driveway. The next time they started the car, the volume would be so loud it would make them jump.

I remember staring at and sitting in and smiling at my first car for a good thirty minutes before starting the engine just to hear it; and I remember the bloodcurdling screams from my then girlfriend when we were struck by a red light runner just three months later. The car was totaled; my eyes welled up watching the tow crew scrape it on to the flatbed. I’ve had my current car for nearly ten years, and have gone through all sorts of life milestones with it. I’ve autocrossed it, fooled around in it, been shot at in it, slept in it, graduated high school and college in it. It doesn’t have a name, but it’s as much a part of my life as a pet would have been – and it will always be part of my identity.

Both of my parents had more than a casual interest in cars, but my dad much more so than my mom. My dad introduced me to racing, and my mom always thought it was important to drive and appreciate cars that had enough get-up-and-go to get out of their own way. Karting with my dad and my younger brother was a weekend staple. He thought it was important for both of us to start learning car-control at a very young age.

It wasn’t too long after I started in a kart at 11 that I was lapping faster than almost every other adult that frequented the track. It was a struggle to hide my disappointment when the Red Bull Driver Search program visited one of the tracks we went to and my dad

2 didn’t let me participate. I believed in my talent, and I believed that was the start of the motorsports ladder, but life moves on and I was content to continue racing casually against my dad and my brother. At 16 my dad introduced me to autocross, and I was hooked. Each car completes a cone course individually, and whoever sets the fastest time wins. If you hit a cone it’s a two-second time penalty. It was a place for me to find and learn the limits of my car, and as my dad always stressed, practice car-control. And like in the karts, I was quick, frequently beating much faster cars than my small Mazda hatchback. My farmer’s tan from spending all day in the sun and stickers on the windshield signaled that my car passed autocross tech and was allowed to compete.

These were the badges of honor I displayed with pride.

My parents owned a series of Saabs until they divorced and my dad discovered

BMWs, but my mom gets credit for the coolest one: the Saab Viggen – Saab’s performance hatchback named after the Saab fighter jet. She adored that bright blue,

Swedish mobile – and so did I. That car ferried me around from late elementary school until I eventually learned how to drive in it. I can still remember the way the leather smelled, the finicky clutch that you had to put to the floor to put the car in gear, and most of all, the way the steering wheel would try to rip from your hands when you put the loud pedal to the floor. Once I had my own car, I modified it, making it look, sound, and behave according to my perfect vision for it. I nearly got arrested for street racing at 18, and frequently cruised up and down Westheimer Road with Project M, the Mazda club I hung out with. I still have their stickers on my car. There are a lot of memories attached to them, and despite thinking that they look a little immature as I’ve gotten older, I’ve left them where they are – they remind me where I’ve come from. Growing up, and

3 especially as a teenager, my relationship with cars was a snapshot of the 20 th Century

American experience.

The car has been an American staple since the turn of the century, and has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of modern America. We owe much of our modern car culture and modern sociocultural habits to the genius of Henry Ford and the inventions he created.

Section 1: Consumption and Identity

In order to talk about cars and the culture they have engendered, it is important to understand the sociology and philosophy of object consumption and how that consumption creates culture and identity. First, as sociologist Roger Silverstone notes in his 1994 book, “Television and Everyday Life,” “consumption stimulates production.”

This is the basic economic understanding that demand for a product determines the amount of the product sold. In his 2011 Saturday Evening Post article, “Celebrating

America’s 125-Year Love Affair With Cars,” author William Jeanes writes that the story of the American automobile and mass production began when two businessmen, Ransom

E. Olds and Henry Ford both recognized a market need. According to Jeanes, Olds was able to put 5,000 Oldsmobiles on the road in 1904 using the first ever assembly line of his own design, while Henry Ford, having recognized the growing market need, streamlined

Olds’ invention, creating a hyper efficient production tool for the Model T, and, in turn, meeting market demand, and then some. As Jeanes notes, “By 1916 some 55 percent of the world’s automobiles were Model T’s, a record that was never equaled. By the time

Model T production ceased in 1927, more than 15 million of the cars had been sold.”

4 This stimulated the market growth for the car, created a business model for competitors to emulate and compete with, and created a new social economy around car ownership.

Sociologist Roger Silverstone in his book Television and Everyday Life asserts,

“commodification is to be understood as a social process.” Tangibly, this process is most visible in the formation of culture. Applying sociologists Tracy Shildrick and Robert

MacDonald’s writings on youth subculture: cars, the sale of, and the engagement with, therefore become a culture around which people can gather casually, or seriously: casually, in the basic ownership and use of the car and the systems that it created

(highways, traffic laws, drive-thru retail, etc.); and more seriously in the myriad sub- cultures of customization and racing that car-enthusiasts use to define their personal identities.

According to Silverstone, as soon as products enter the market a “hierarchy of value” is created. The market dictates one product as having more or less value than another. This value hierarchy organizes things like taste and style, and also defines the social-economic class within which consumers and owners operate. Most importantly, for any social value to be understood, the objects themselves must be visibly displayed by their owners and consumers - shown-off, in other words. Says Silverstone, “We speak through our commodities, about ourselves and to each other, making claims for status and for difference… In consumption we communicate.” Our purchases communicate our interests and things that we wish others to know about ourselves. In the modern world of social media this could mean broadcasting to our followers about the products we use and the media we consume: both endorsements and negative reviews. Purchases are proclamations that one values a thing and that reciprocally that thing defines them in a

5 social order and as potentially distinguishing one from their peers. Owners of exotic sports cars parade them loudly through city centers in order to distinguish themselves from the general population and assert socio-economic dominance. French sociologist

Jean Baudrillard would agree with Silverstone in that, “Objects are categories of objects that, quite tyrannically, induce categories of persons.”

These social categories help to define what and why we value certain items over others. According to Silverstone, “New technologies (or technologies that are claiming novelty) are likely to be bought, by some, for their status as objects (and by those for whom such status displays are important). Others will buy them for their functionality and for what they provide by virtue of their distinctive mediation.” Those higher in socio- economic standing choose then to buy certain brands of exotic and luxury automobiles specifically to flaunt wealth and higher status, or to engage in novel vehicular activities that otherwise would not be available without that standing, such as motor racing. Those for whom their socio-economic status does not allow flamboyant purchases will therefore purchase automobiles with practicality in mind; the daily cost-benefit ratio is more important. A family that can’t afford million-dollar vehicles will find more value in something that cheaply and reliably performs the tasks they ask of it. This understanding of consumption helps to describe why car purchases ballooned in the 1920s and continued to do so throughout the century. Henry Ford’s assembly line created a cheap car that allowed the general population social and literal mobility, and boutique manufacturers allowed those that wished to display higher value objects than Ford’s

Model T to do so.

6 To further understand the sociocultural impact of car consumption, it is important to note Silverstone’s six part model of the Dynamics of Consumption: commodification, imagination, appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion.

Commodification represents need for a product, or the reasons why a product is being produced; as well as the material and means of production that define something as a product. Second, imagination, Silverstone posits, is “the mobilization of fantasy in pursuit of identity”. The consumer imagines how a product would benefit them socially and enhance their identity before they purchase it. Third, once a consumer does purchase a product, they’ve then appropriated it, assigning importance to the object because it is theirs. The fourth dynamic, says Silverstone, objectification, is the act of displaying that newly purchased object, “and in turn reveals the classificatory principles that inform a household’s sense of itself and its place in the world.” This is when identity as it relates to the object starts to become more concrete, and less fantasy than when imagined. In the fifth dynamic, incorporation, the products “become functional in ways somewhat removed from the intentions of designers or marketers.” In modern car culture, this dynamic is best exhibited in the way that enthusiasts modify their cars and assign them new roles: passenger cars stripped of their interiors and taken to the track, pick-up trucks lifted and taken extreme off-roading. And finally, conversion is when a product has been converted into visible status, and a person’s place in the social order is defined by it.

Says Silverstone, “The household defines and claims for itself and its members a status.”

Identity, for example, forms when someone drives a new Ferrari around the block in order to engage with “the outside world” and solidify his or her imagined social status.

7 According to Jean Baudrillard, “individuals actualize themselves in consumption.” Consumption is a fundamental way to understand oneself and find meaning and self-fulfillment. Ultimately it is the need to claim an identity and meaning that drives production, which in turn fuels consumption and sustains a kind of cultural feedback loop. As Baudrillard noted, “From year to year, consumer choices are focused en masse on the latest model which is uniformly the best.” It’s a cynical take on Western consumerism, but especially in the case of the automobile, it’s true and has driven innovation for decades – it describes every new model year. Cars are faster, safer, and more efficient than they’ve ever been, but only because of the importance of having the newest and best thing, as in Silverstone’s example of consuming new technologies. If cars satisfied basic utility needs, then we would have been happy with what we had, continues Baudrillard. But having something that provides utility isn’t enough. We buy cars to say something about who we are. The connection between individualism, identity and cars )and other products) is so important, that we often personify those objects and think of them through the structure of a relationship, one that is just as important as the ones we have with other humans.

The 2009 documentary feature film Love the Beast , directed by Eric Bana, at several points cuts to interviews with car reviewer Jeremy Clarkson; late-night host Jay

Leno, well-known for his vast car collection; and Dr. Phil, who all describe the powerful bond that humans can form with their machines. Jay Leno refuses to sell a single car in his collection, and claims to drive and keep each one of the over 150 vehicles in working order. “I’ve had a relationship with all my cars,” he says, “I can’t sell anything – God, no!” Jeremy Clarkson insists adamantly that you can have a relationship with a car

8 through it’s faults and characteristics unique to that individual, “When something has foibles and won’t handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes, and that’s how you build a relationship with a car that other people don’t get.” After Bana crashes his beloved Beast in the climax of the film, Dr. Phil explains why it means so much to Bana and his friends, “It is a symbol of your history. It is a thread of continuity from whence you came to where you are. It’s important. You don’t want to forget who you are.”

Section 2: Driving Expansion

Henry Ford is frequently and incorrectly remembered for inventing the assembly line. William Jeanes notes that Ransom E. Olds is the true inventor, and founder of the

Oldsmobile automobile production company, but Ford did indeed perfect Olds’ invention. Olds’ idea was to have workers perform repetitive actions with parts brought to their work stations – Ford put that system on a conveyor belt and where Olds’ version of the assembly line would have produced a car in roughly 12 hours, Ford’s took 90 minutes. The modified production process made cars cheaper to produce and therefore easier to get in to the hands of the average consumer at the time. According to the Ford

Motor Company, after opening in 1913, Ford’s Highland Park plant produced 15 million vehicles by 1927 - half the world was driving Fords.

Before Ford’s modified assembly line, cars were a luxury unobtainable by most and made bespoke for the super rich. Ford Motor Company credits itself with creating the mobile middle class by way of cheap vehicles combined with Ford’s willingness to pay his workers wages such that they could afford the product they produced. And to an

9 extent, it isn’t wrong. The American economy survived the Great Depression, and came back even stronger after World War II in part because other industries had adopted the efficiency of the moving assembly line.

American author Tom Wolfe has observed that by the 1950’s the American economy was so strong that even teenagers were buying cars themselves, an idea wildly out of reach for most of today’s Millennials. Men in particular were being heavily marketed to, and it worked – the 1950’s American dream became a white picket fence in the suburbs, a beautiful wife in the Kitchen, two kids, and a General Motors or Ford in the driveway – the quintessential American family values. The car came to define the families’ and individuals’ social status more than ever. The more expensive the vehicle, the more successful a person appeared.

In his 2005 book, “Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape,” Professor Owen Gutfreund notes that by the 1950’s cars had so flooded the American market that companies like General Motors put on traveling shows to show potential consumers visions of “the future” that included massive sprawling suburbs connected by superhighways that swept the countryside with growth and development. GM’s exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City sought to put visitors in the driver’s seat, in an effort to make their fantasy appear more real to consumers. “Visitors rode in Epcot-style cars along a track around 35,000 square-foot panoramic model, simulating a trip across GM’s version of what America would look like in 1960.” These traveling shows put pressure on consumers to buy into eccentric and glamorous visions of what could be: suburbias that sprawled over areas twice the size of

New York City connected to city centers by way of “seven-lane superhighways with one

10 hundred mile-per-hour speed limits” and no reliance on public transportation. These kinds of futurism shows, Gutfreund found, would eventually become a fierce lobbying community for public highways composed of “truckers, farmers, oil companies, state officials, urban officials, developers, road-building contractors, commuters, and auto manufacturers.” Behind firm pressure from the lobbying community, Congress and

President Eisenhower enacted the Federal-Aid Highway Act, creating 41,000 miles of

Interstate Highway System in 1956.

Cars ultimately became so essential as units of transportation and social status that they forever changed the American landscape. The necessity for roads facilitated highways provided by Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act. Highways made downtown hubs accessible from the distant suburbs. Suburbs necessitated nearby grocery chains and shopping malls. According to Art Historian C. Ondine Chavoya, drive-in movies and restaurants go hand in hand with a cruise down the main drag for a Friday night out. As Gutfreund observed, “Cities and towns in all regions of the nation, of all shapes and sizes, were affected as resources were persistently directed to the periphery, away from downtowns and town centers.” Nowhere was the influence of the automobile more evident than in Los Angeles. Noted Professor Chavoya, “While all major world cities are now influenced by automobile traffic and highway patterns, Los Angeles is widely understood to be the product of its cars and freeways.” Denver followed a similar trend, according to Professor Gutfreund, the landscape turning into something of a suburban blur, “…It became difficult to determine where Denver stopped and suburban municipalities started, as ‘wheat fields, ranches, and dairies that once surrounded the

Mile High City are now sprawling subdivisions, with shopping center nuclei.’” The city

11 became so unrecognizable that decades later, Gutfreund writes, that in 1998, “Don’t Los

Angelize Denver” became a popular anti-expansion refrain.

Section 3: Cars in American Culture and Entertainment

Into the 1950’s and ‘60s, cars had begun their transformation of cities and of teenage culture. Much the way smart phones and social media presence command teenage attention and define the struggle for schoolyard popularity today, so did cars then.

Cars were, and still are, such a definitive part of every day life that they fueled pop-culture as well, from books, to film, to music. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road romanticized the road trip in written fiction, and used the car as a drug and sex fueled vehicle in which to explore America’s highways, based on his own experiences from

1947-1950. The novel was well received critically, and in turn inspired a generation of road trippers and authors alike. By contrast, Hunter S. Thompson’s hallucinatory trip through Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 off-road race in Fear and Loathing in Las

Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream uses drugs as a way to escape the consumer culture surrounding the famous race and ruminated on the hedonism of consumer culture kick started by the car. The opening scene of the film adaptation starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro has become iconic for its depiction of road tripping and tripping on hallucinogenics.

In film, cars are even more prolific. According to entertainment journalist Simon

Brew, the ‘60s and ‘70s produced many of what are regarded as some of the best car movies ever. Bullitt, The Italian Job, and Grand Prix dominated at the box office in the

12 ‘60s, and the ‘70s blessed audiences with Mad Max, Smokey and the Bandit, and

Vanishing Point , among others.

George Lucas’ American Graffiti , voted best car movie of all time by Hot Rod magazine’s readers in 2006, is the quintessential rumination on life as a teenager in the

1950’s. It’s a throwback to the car films of the era, when Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable, and

Robert Mitchum were racing their way into Americans’ hearts. The cars are as much characters as the actors themselves, and each has some reflection on the person that drives it, much as they do in real life. The vehicles that all of the lead characters arrive on screen in at the drive-in restaurant all reflect the personality that they show off later in the film: Ron Howard leans coolly against his finned cruiser; Charles Smith arrives awkwardly crashing his moped; Richard Dreyfuss drives a very sensible Citroen 2CV;

Paul Le Mat projects outward masculinity in his bright yellow Ford Coupe hot rod; and

Cindy Williams meets them in her own car, suggesting her own independence. Most of the film takes place in cars, or with cars somewhere in the frame, from the opening sequence to the credits. The film itself is as much a coming of age story as it is a rumination on America’s obsession with the motor vehicle and how different people use them for social purposes – whether that be drag racing for glory or cruising for women and sex. The cars in the film are a way for the characters to be empowered, “In 1972 a lot of people were saying, ‘Gee, it’s great not to be so cool. It’s great to be nervous about asking a girl to go to bed with you.’ Only you’re not supposed to feel that way. Going back to the way it was, I think helped a lot of people sort of get their bearings again with their feelings and their sensibility about the way the world worked,” says Lucas reflecting back on the film.

13 Cars aren’t just vehicles for personal reflection and self-discovery in film, but sold many properties to audiences as the star itself. Iconic cars like the Adam West

Batmobile, the General Lee of Dukes of Hazzard , KITT from Knightrider , and Don

Johnson’s Ferrari on Miami Vice propelled their respective shows for years and inspired generations of car fans. Today, the Fast & Furious franchise remains one of the most profitable Hollywood has ever seen, earning $5 billion worldwide across each of its iterations, according to “The Numbers”, the premiere industry source for detailed movie financial analysis, and the franchise is largely responsible for the boisterous 2000’s import-tuner modifying aesthetic known for bright colors and graphics, and even brighter neon underglow.

Cars are also a way to assert masculinity in music, as noted by YouTube essayist kaptainkristian referencing Kanye West’s song “Mercy”. In it, West not so subtly implies that his Lamborghini gives him sexual ammo with which to steal away another man’s woman. Kristian contrasts that pervasive hyper masculinity and status associated with cars across all genres by pointing out R&B singer Frank Ocean’s emotional attachment to his cars. Visually, car enthusiasts can engage with the rare race cars that appear in his videos, and the simple but elegant BMW M3 on the cover of his album

Nostalgia, Ultra – a car that is currently in the midst of becoming a classic. But Ocean’s lyrics delve deeper in to his relationships with them, “cars are his language,” points out

Kristian. “Instead, Frank’s cars articulate a sense of vulnerability or intimacy, and he also uses them as a conduit for story telling, a sort of visual shorthand for landmark moments throughout his life. His music, like driving alone, is very private and self- reflective, and cars are used as the framing device for his memories.”

14 Tom Wolfe in an essay for Esquire , originally published in 1965, describes a fantastical orgy of teenage culture at a “Teen Fair” in Burbank, near Los Angeles and

Hollywood. Amongst the surf music, dancing, and booths hawking shoes and electric guitars was a traveling car show hosted by Ford to get teens hooked early and establish brand loyalty. At the time, brands like Chevrolet, Plymouth, and Ford were all struggling for dominance over the performance sector, and whichever the kids thought was the

“baddest” prevailed. “Even the kids who aren’t full-time car nuts themselves will be influenced by which car is considered ‘boss’,” writes Wolfe. For the teens, Wolfe found, the wildly colored and stylized Ford hot-rods on display represented “freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color – everything is right there.”

Hot-rodding and the mainstream modification culture it would ultimately spawn began in the early to mid 1940’s, during the Second World War. Because of the shift in industry towards the war effort, cars and the materials needed to produce them were not easily obtained, and the teens that absolutely had to have them went to great lengths to build them. Many started with old shells found in junkyards, cast-offs from the ‘20s and

‘30s. Ford Coupes and Model A’s were especially popular hot-rodding platforms. In

Wolfe’s article, George Barris, a hot-rodder who became famous for his wild designs like the original Batmobile, described a scene where kids built cars without door handles, having to kick them open to get in and out. The way the cars looked was one thing, but the way they went was another – that was where “the real action was.” “Some nights there’d be a thousand kids lining the road to watch, boys and girls,” Barris remembers in the article. Owner of the shop Kustom City, Barris helped to kick start the cruising

15 culture by putting on week long displays on the corners of service stations that included parades at the start of every event.

The kids ate this culture up. Hot rod magazines came out of the woodwork by the

‘50s, taking advantage of the new craze. There was a wildness to the new culture – street racing and gambling for pink slips, the car’s title, were prevalent in this culture and became so large police were arresting hundreds of people in a single raid. Teens with jobs in the ‘50s could now afford cars, clothing, and cigarettes, and according to Wolfe created their own social economy with their money and status, totally alien to and rebellious of the adults that parented them. There were two types of car, and either contributed to one’s social status. According to Wolfe, “All teenage car nuts had elements of both in their work – customizing and hot-rodding, form and power – but tended to concentrate on one or the other.” In other words, the fastest or the best looking cars tended to sit people at the top of the social totem pole. In the west, in California, it was hot-rods and low-riders. In the east, on the shores of Florida and the Carolinas, it was the burgeoning sport of NASCAR. Though the local scenes differed in how they approached building a car, if there was a highway, it was viewed as somewhere to race or cruise.

Deeper in LA, on Whittier Boulevard, another trend, counter to the hot-rodding scene was also emerging. Low-riders. The idea is to use a combination of hydraulic suspension and small diameter wheels and tires to put the car as low as possible to the ground. Some ride so low that the frame beneath kicks up sparks. Lowriding is a hugely important part of LA Chicano culture, as it provided an artistic outlet and vehicular identity that was separate and contrary to the hot-rodding and cruising of white America.

16 According to Professor Chavoya, low-riding conformed to “Mexican American standards.”

Chavoya observed that, where white America at the time often could afford to buy new from the dealership, Latinos couldn’t, and a new sort of social hierarchy was born when low-riders “bought cheap or inherited and then customized to the owners satisfaction.” According to Chavoya, “low-riders work within, yet are at odds with, this well-defined routine of announcing social position and aspirations.” In cars that would otherwise be seen as junk in other social standings, low-riders saw potential, and the ability to create something from nothing moves one further up that hierarchy. Chavoya wrote, “Raza customizers have retranslated a national icon of pride, progress, and prosperity – the automobile – into a vernacular form of Chicano style and labor. They are now considered the ‘Picassos of the Boulevards.’” According to Chavoya low-riding at once embraced and rejected American car culture by using the cars as status symbols and personal expression, and by expressing themselves in a way that was fundamentally different to hot rodding by, “defying speed and efficiency”.

Section 4: Cars = Family

Much has been written about Millennials turning their backs on cars. Concerned about the environmental impact of the combustion engine, and increasingly urbanized, with greater access to public transportation and greater economic barriers to car ownership, many Millennials have indeed turned their backs on what was once the quintessential American experience. Journalist Marc Fisher, in a Washington Post article lamenting the death of America’s love affair with cars, asserted that car culture is now

17 only reserved for “old guys.” Echoing Silverstone’s “Dynamics of Consumption”, Fisher argues that millennial teens’ have shifted their emotional investments away from cars, instead choosing to express themselves via their phones. However, for some immigrant

Millennials, a passion for cars, long the cornerstone of American culture, is an on-ramp to a shared American experience.

German Coello is quiet, at first. He speaks softly, with a hint of a Central

American accent, but his eyes are focused, determined – always deliberate in how he speaks and never afraid to speak his mind, but he’s the kind of person who generally doesn’t speak unless spoken to. Still, when asked for his opinion, he is honest and sincere. Get him talking about cars, however, and he lights up. Intense brown eyes soften, and a smile creeps across his face, turning into a huge grin by the time the conversation is in full swing.

Twenty-five years old, and he almost always wears a backwards Yankees cap – his favorite – and sports a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow. The first time we met at Katie’s

Cars & Coffee in Great Falls, Virginia he was quiet and reserved. It wasn’t long, though, before the crowd at Katie’s took an interest in his “stanced out” Honda, and he started to rattle off the litany of modifications to his Civic EP3 hatchback, as if it were a speech he’d practiced a hundred times. In fact, he probably had delivered this particular speech that often.

Katie’s Cars & Coffee is the premiere cars and coffee meet in the Washington,

D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area. Every Saturday the hardcore faithful can be found cruising down the Georgetown Pike off of I-495 towards the titular coffee house and parking lot as early as 5:00 in the morning. It’s a beautiful sunrise drive – the twisting

18 two-lane road covered in thick trees and rolling hills is typically empty, and beautifully paved. Public hooning, or show-boating, and vehicular hooliganism are generally frowned upon in the cars and coffee culture, but it’s hard not to resist a little enthusiasm on the drive.

On a perfect 70-degree sunny Saturday, hundreds of cars from all over the DMV pack the small business lots that encircle Katie’s Coffee House. Every space is filled with car enthusiasts wanting to share their passion with others. The cars on display include some of the most diverse and rare of any of the cars and coffee meets that take place weekly in most major metro areas around the country. Surprising, given that New

York and LA’s scenes are often thought of as more robust. When a rare exotic or new production model comes – most recently the new McLaren 570S – it’s given a prime spot on the main strip. Well-known regulars always park directly in front of the shop, and you know it’s an off day if one or two of the ’32 hot rod Fords are missing.

Enthusiasts find a diverse selection of cars that appeal to every taste. Showroom stock ’32 Fords park next to their hot-rodded counterparts. Ferraris, Lamborghinis,

Mercedes, and Porsches all huddle together in displays of brand loyalty. Classic

American muscle cars rumble through the crowd, often passing their current model year brethren, V8s thumping along. It’s easy to become desensitized to the Ferraris and other exotics if you come every Saturday – unless one is particularly wildly customized, that is.

The kinds of cars that really leave an impression are the ones that ooze character: the ones that have lived, and still wear their history on their fenders. The 356 Porsche racecar that proudly bears it’s dings, dents, and scrapes alongside the badges from all of the historic American racetracks it’s visited. The crusty Lotus Breadvan that made a

19 fleeting pass through a filled-to-capacity parking lot and wasn’t seen again. And especially the ones that reflect their owners – cars tend to be like dogs; they look like their owners, and their owners look like them.

German’s car stands out because it is rare to see stanced cars at events like these.

Aside from a regular Volkswagen Golf riding on an air bag suspension with a tribute to the late Paul Walker and his Fast & Furious character in the rear window

(#RememberTheBuster), and a bright red Subaru GT86 coupe with various company’s sponsor decals, the stance scene is poorly represented and tends to be somewhat looked down upon – similar to the way Danny Lyon’s Bikeriders and Rod Emory’s Outlaw

Porsches, as showcased in the Petrolicious short film “Family Tradition”, were regarded.

Their style is intentionally rebellious and is meant to be taken to extremes, with a “f*** the haters, we’ll build our cars the way we want” mentality. The idea is to “slam” cars as low as they’ll go to the ground - similar to the “low and slow style” of low-riders - and fit the widest wheels possible under the fenders. “Stance” refers to how the car sits on those wheels. They stretch the sidewalls of their tires and run extreme negative camber in order to tuck the lip of the wheel just under the fender. Some will take this to comical extremes, with the wheels and rubber pointed inwards to the point of making only inches of contact with the ground; others take a more subtle approach.

When I first saw the silver Civic hatchback, the wheels and low, aggressive stance stood out immediately. It was the only stanced car, let alone the only Civic that day, and was parked separately in German’s favorite spot, away from the rest of the cars – it had more presence on its own. The wheels were immediately recognizable as a particular set of Enkeis, highly desirable among the show car scene. They barely fit, and were

20 cambered so far inward the rear tires barely made contact with the ground. The hood and rear spoiler were carbon fiber, something that caught my eye as I had had my own brief obsession with the material, evidenced by parts still on my car today.

Cameras hanging off my shoulders, I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and owners always notice strangers poking around their cars and soaking in the details. People who have put the most work in are always happy to have their car photographed – recognition that they’re doing something right, and another medium for which to display their creations. I ask if the car is his, and beaming proudly German happily indulged my questions, questions he no doubt had answered countless times, but was happy to oblige anyone interested and willing to learn. We talked wheel size, tire fitment, and bonded over sharing the same brand of coil-over suspension to lower the car.

Driving and building cars is like therapy for German. “You’re relaxed, you don’t think of anything. It’s like almost being in a dream. When you’re just focused on driving around, checking out places that you don’t know. There’s a thing about working on your own car that makes things a whole lot better. A hundred times better. There’s nothing else I could be doing. It’s like peace.”

Moving to the United States from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, wasn’t easy for

German. His mother left the family when he was four in order to work to bring them from the crime-ridden capitol of Honduras to the United States. Antonio, German’s older brother, followed shortly after. Like many immigrant families, the goal was to send enough money back to Honduras support the family they had left behind, while also raising enough to bring them to the U.S. While German’s mother worked as a cook and dreamt of earning legal status, Antonio finished high school and started his own

21 landscaping business. German remained in Honduras with his grandmother and sisters for six years waiting to join his mother and brother in a new home. “Imagine yourself growing up without your parents. I never met my dad; they separated when I was young.

I don’t have my mom, I don’t have my dad, but I do have my family: my brothers, my sisters, my grandma – they all looked after me, but you still miss your mother and your dad.”

It was imperative that the family escape the crime in Tegucigalpa, “Crime is super bad over there. I’d probably be killed driving my little Civic over there, man. Like this, it would have been stolen in a week,” German said, sweat beading on his brow while he tinkered on his Civic’s alignment afterhours at his place of employment, a Maryland

Honda dealership. Speaking in the back yard of the Maryland house they share with their family, Antonio felt especially responsible for German’s safety and insulation from crime, “that’s why I tried to protect German.”

Despite the hardships they faced, the family always stuck together and stayed positive. “She always had goals, always had her mind set on traveling the world. This was her first choice to live in. She always said, ‘One day I’ll live in America, build my living there.’” And she did. On a cook’s wages, she saved enough money to bring all of

German’s brothers and sisters to the United States, and even managed to bring their cousins, too. Antonio’s business has thrived enough to allow his mother to cut back to one job. Now German does his part, too, helping to support his family by working as an auto mechanic for Honda.

Cars have always been important to German’s identity. He wasn’t too different from many American boys, amassing a huge collection of Mattel Hot Wheels toys as a

22 child. “He had too many cars! We’d buy twenty - twenty five at the same time. One dollar, one dollar fifty each. Those are good memories, taking him to the mall and buying cars,” Antonio remembers fondly, hints of wistfulness in his eyes and smile.

Hatchbacks in particular were always German’s favorite, “I had a little hatchback!

That was my whole thing – I love hatchbacks. I always said I was going to get one, now

I got one.” The Fast and Furious film and Need for Speed video game franchises influenced a whole generation of young car owners, and German was no exception.

Growing up the two brothers would play the video game Need for Speed Underground , in which you have the freedom to customize cars millions of different ways. “Before I even started driving I already had an idea of what route I was gonna go. I always drove the

Honda Civic in Need for Speed .”

That love of creation and car design started German down the quintessentially

American path of pining for a driver’s license and a certain car. “My goal was set. As soon as I turned 16, I was gonna get a job and start saving up for my car. I used to save

$50 out of my paycheck all the time, until two or three years later, that’s when I bought my first car,” a 2000 Acura Integra – a hatchback. When he finally bought the Civic he was in love. And the classic American love for cars was already deeply ingrained.

German embodies the Greased Lightning Americana dream of car ownership. For him, the car represents freedom and escape from problems. Cruising, not going anywhere in particular – just driving for the sake of driving is as important to him as it is to any other American male teenager. And, to him, his car represents a sense of accomplishment: that he’s worked hard to buy something that can take him anywhere, and then he’s gone a step further and injected his own personality into it, making it his

23 own. “Not a lot of people have the opportunity to just say, ‘Oh I want this car, I’ll get it like that,’ you know what I mean? It’s hard.”

Cars are a universal language that can be shared with everyone. Car meets bring together diverse groups of people, united by a common passion. At a car meet, it doesn’t matter what you do for a living, or where you’re from, as long as you speak the universal car language. In this world, it’s easy to connect, to make friends, to establish community.

German didn’t speak much English and knew little of American culture when he arrived in the US from Honduras. He faced barriers of language, race, and class as he left behind the world he had known and worked to adapt to a new home. For him, car ownership doesn’t just represent freedom. It’s a form of self-expression and male bonding that transcends race and class boundaries. Much like in the Fast & Furious films, cars are friendship, and friendship is family. For German, cars helped him find his place.

24 Chapter 2: A Review of Cars and Documentary Media

Documentary car photography and films fulfill a variety of purposes. Many are made by filmmakers and car owners both passionate about cars that wish to share that passion with their peers, and with cultural outsiders. Content creators frequently aim to educate viewers on a type of culture that they may not have known about before. These projects can also prove useful to enthusiasts, seeking to further enrich their cultural knowledge. This chapter will analyze examples across several publishing platforms such as film shorts, photo books, and feature length documentaries. The car meet, in a way, has migrated online through media creation and sharing: YouTube threads and Instagram hashtags. Instead of getting up early to go to a cars and coffee to find interesting cars and people, car film production teams like Petrolicious bring those cars right to your laptop.

Other film projects serve as important works on identity as it relates to car ownership, a la the feature length documentary film Love the Beast, directed by Eric Bana . Finally, they act as tools of cultural preservation and historical documents.

Tamir Moscovici’s short film, Urban Outlaw , is most successful in the opening two minutes of the film in which the titular outlaw, Magnus Walker, is shown in a montage tinkering with one of his many Porsches. The term “outlaw” is interchangeable, as it refers to Magnus’ own personal style as well as the style of Porsches that he builds:

Frankenstein creations that at first glance appear factory original, but are in truth subtly but heavily modified.

The sequence opens with what sounds like a BBC radio clip, telling us about the

“fantastic atmosphere” of a particular recording session with British rock star, Steve

25 Marriott. It’s a clunky moment; it doesn’t make much sense immediately (especially if you are not a fan of deep track British classic rock), and seems as though it’s more of a wink to the audience about how special the interview session is for the filmmaker, Tamir

Moscovici. It’s less of a cheeky intro to a character and more of an unnecessary editing gimmick (Moscovici).

The film fades in on the back of a Porsche shell after the above radio sequence, and cuts to Magnus opening the wide garage door and the audience is shown that the garage is filled with Porsches. Magnus enters shrouded in shadow and mystique, and the edit cleverly matches wide and tight shots with the opening of the door - light falling on dark compositions revealing the detail of a Porsche badge and finally the extent of the garage. It cuts to one of the roughly half-dozen different interview locations used (this one of Magnus standing inside the garage), where Walker describes the “birth” and iconic shape of the Porsche 911. As he does, the camera quickly cuts, matched to the music – roll cages, deck lids, engine components. Cut to a wide shot of Magnus using a wheel stacked on top of another to roll the pair across the shop, cut again to tight matched- action of the tires rolling against each other, and then back to the details and posters around the shop highlighting the Porsche obsession – each cut is matched to “Black

Coffee” by Steve Marriott. Walker’s beard and dreadlocks obscure his face while fitting wheels to one of the cars. He gets in and starts the engine, and as he revs, the camera racks in and out of focus, matching the revs of the engine. The music cuts off when he kills the ignition, and the film dives in to the meat of the interviews. It’s all very stylized and eye-catching. Without saying much, the shop and the person ooze a rock and roll

26 rebellious character with a palpable energy, and it makes for a great profile-piece intro

(Moscovici).

One of the most interesting moments in the film is when Walker describes moving to LA from England, starting a clothing business, and how designing clothes informed his car design process – all while hammering out an interior piece for a car in the clothing shop. These kinds of moments say more about him than waxing poetic about

Porsches. It’s clear to the viewer that Magnus Walker is an outlaw, but the film never adequately explains why (Moscovici).

Unfortunately, while Urban Outlaw excels in the visual department, it ultimately lacks meaningful story or character development. At thirty minutes long, it would be understandable for non-car enthusiasts to quickly lose interest. As beautiful as all of the driving sequences are with vibrant Los Angeles dusks and California State Route 1 coastline colors, they do become repetitive. The driving sequences are long quiet moments where nothing is really happening. These moments are great when the goal is to let the audience ponder something profound a character has said, but for the most part the filmmaker fails to coax that out of Magnus. Car people could easily listen to Walker drone on about Porsches and the history of the 911 model, but it’s the humans behind the cars that make them so interesting, and that’s what will keep the typical audience hooked.

Filmmaker Moscovici briefly scratches the surface of Walker’s personal history, but never delves much deeper. We know that he once lived in Sheffield, England, and that he was fearful of becoming “stuck”, but beyond that we aren’t really told what kinds of hardships he escaped in England. And the audience is left wondering, “What is he like

27 outside his home and shop? How does his personal history inform his approach to life?”

(Moscovici).

The car enthusiast film collective, Petrolicious, does a better job of describing what it means to be a Porsche outlaw - modifying cars in ways that Porsche purists found abhorrent - in their short, Family Tradition . The roughly eight-minute short details the life of one specific outlaw Porsche that Rod Emory and his family built together.

Visually, Family Tradition is adequate. The camera-work is not outstanding, but it accomplishes its goal well enough in describing the cars and composing interviews.

It’s full of panning detail shots and ordinarily composed car-portrait shots against the setting sun. The shots of three cars in formation in the opening minute are especially attention grabbing for enthusiasts, the target audience, but more for the cars themselves than any sort of spectacular camera play. The short does a nice job of using on-board cameras to highlight specific parts of the car Rod talks about – we get to hear the concept behind the part and then see it in motion. A glaring issue with the footage is one shot in particular that has a pronounced splotch of sensor dust between the high contrast orange and blue of rock and sky. It’s not as evident that the piece was cut to the music – it doesn’t have as much energy as Urban Outlaw . There are moments where the white balance for a scene isn’t quite perfect, and the interview shots appear flat, giving the short an amateurish quality, but that won’t stop enthusiasts from engaging in this piece of

American Porsche history and learning more about what makes the heavily modified cars special (Petrolicious).

The film is also successful using archival family photos to help fill in background information, something that is sorely missing from Urban Outlaw and other Petrolicious

28 films. It’s important for viewers to grasp the history of the families and the cars they worked on together in order to better connect with the film. Non-car enthusiasts get interested in car stories when they are driven by compelling narratives about the people involved. Rod’s relationship with his grandfather, whom he considers one of “the greatest car builders of all time”, is much more interesting to viewers than listing off the technical specs of the car. Building things with family, learning from grandparents – that is a much more real and relatable story than just listing off the parts on the car. It should be front and center in order to keep the audience engaged after the first minute or two.

Beyond that, Family Tradition buries the lede – the opening few minutes play like a laundry list of technical specifications. The most interesting part of the piece is halfway through, when Rod starts talking about what it means to be an Outlaw. “While everyone else was pulling lint out of their air cleaners, my dad and I were painting numbers on the sides and putting nerf bars on them, and lowering them, and polishing the drums, and doing trick wheels. All of his friends would call us the outlaws and that was the birth of the name ‘356 Outlaws’, and how ‘Outlaw’ stuck to Porsche,” (Petrolicious). Rod doesn’t mention it in the video (and that failure lies with the interviewer for not drawing it out of him, or perhaps the editor for not including it), but the Emory family 356

Outlaws were notorious for being too heavily modified bastardizations of the pristine

Porsche 356 - so much so that they were frequently forbidden from entering Porsche related events and were forced to park on the outskirts until the modification style gained wider popularity, as Damon Lavrinc notes in an article on the car-enthusiast site Jalopnik.

Baas Creative’s Reboot Buggy is a six minute short film that follows Michigan based auto designer Joey Ruiter’s desire to do something different with a car: to let it take

29 on a personality wholly of its own, “A car today is for us: it’s got ports for our music, it’s comfortable, but what does it do for itself? So in this project the car wanted some things for itself. The motor was for the car’s sake, not for the human’s sake. The wheelbase was for the car’s sake. So I designed this car early on without a user.”

The short does an excellent job of building the mystique of Ruiter’s character and strange vehicle. Composition, color balance choices, and design aspects of the car create an atmosphere bordering on science fiction. It’s a short film at five minutes, and the car isn’t revealed until halfway in at 2:43, when it’s finally seen being driven in anger in the desert. For much of those two minutes and forty seconds the bulk of the car is hidden from sight, only seen in glimpses. The viewer is allowed to see wheels and tires going on, some suspension components, a piece of engine and exhaust – all of which is matched with what’s being discussed in the interview. When it’s time to reveal the car, the audience is shown a rear shot of the trailer being closed, which hard cuts to the trailer ramp coming back down again in a new location. The camera cuts to a slow motion side- profile of the trailer, and exhaust pours out. The audio cuts out except for the faint sound of the motor starting, and it seems as though the machine is breathing, alive. It’s a moment reminiscent of the tension built in the 1993 film The Sandlot , when Benny and the Beast finally meet. So too do the viewer and Reboot Buggy finally meet (Baas

Creative).

Ruiter tells the audience, “Driving this thing is unlike anything I’ve ever driven before,” as smoke pours like breath from the trailer and the camera cuts to a wall of sand flying towards the camera – the filmmakers maintain tension by withholding the shot. A tire sweeps across the screen in a tight shot and dust pours from left to right of frame in a

30 dramatic slow motion wave. The partial resolution creates more tension. Finally, after two slow motion shots further teasing the audience, the full reveal spools out. The tension resolves in a neatly composed landscape of the buggy doing donuts in the foreground (Baas Creative).

There is a strange moment when the car hits a GoPro being used for filming that doesn’t fit with the rest of the visuals, but it does add a moment of levity, and is a clear end and transition from the action montage to the final interview monologue.

Additionally, for such a strange car intended to be driven on public roads, the short misses opportunities to show how ordinary people react to the car. The audience deserves to see Ruiter try to valet the car as he hinted at early in the film (Baas Creative).

Technically, the visuals are sound. The story is an exploration of a design concept and passion for creation and driving. It’s a trip from the origin of a strange idea to the realization of it. In that sense, it is a successful profile piece – an idea profile.

However, there’s nothing truly groundbreaking here besides a novel idea. The film is so abstract; it doesn’t explicitly mention the builder’s name - it’s found in the short description (Baas Creative).

Stephen Brooks’ Una Familia // Lowrider , is a five-minute short profiling one man continuing his “family’s tradition” in the low-riding culture of East L.A. The cinematography is very good, and the strongest aspect of the film. The sweeping cinematic opening panoramas of East L.A. set the mood, and the cuts are matched to the particular areas Albert De Alba, the main character and low-rider owner, is talking about at the outset of the film. Brooks teases the viewer with two shots of one of the cars during the opening minute while De Alba remembers cruising with his family; and when

31 he says, “that’s when [his dad] fell in love with low-riding,” the music swells, the edit cuts from the L.A. establishing shots and the screen fills with steadicam shots of the car.

Dramatic rap music plays and the low-rider bounces down the boulevard. There are some odd choices in the post-production, however: a handful of shots are heavily blurred and distorted, most egregiously the opening portrait shot of De Alba. While the suspension bouncing shots are eye catching at first, the repetition becomes tiresome as the shots progress (Brooks).

Where Una Familia // Lowrider falls short is describing low-riding culture. The director is well known within the car community for making beautiful shorts about drifting, and generally caters to audiences already engaged with car culture. The film opens as a fresh insight on immigration and finding a place to fit in in a new country, but then the narrative morphs into a profile about the cars themselves. Car people want to know about the work and parts that go in to creating a low-rider; for that audience that choice makes sense. But for viewers who don’t know as much about the culture around cars, the film may come up short. The audience never sees the actual organized cruises down Whittier Boulevard, in L.A. There is a sense that there is a lot of personality behind the De Alba family, but it is never developed in the film. The layers developing the cruising culture and the Alba family are not fully developed, and the whole short suffers for it. It’s eye candy, but ultimately lacks substance (Brooks).

Another of Brooks’ films Older n’ Faster // The California Look delves in to the description of California VW Beetle culture, how it formed, and how it’s continued today. The narrator (who I believe to be Ron Fleming, one of the pioneers of the Beetle aftermarket modification community, the short is not explicit) discusses in detail his

32 transition from drag racing mustangs in the ‘60s to drag racing Volkswagen Beetles instead. He and his VW peers birthed the “California Look” that remains popular among the Beetle modifying community today. The interview does a good job of telling the viewer what kinds of people (laid back surfer Californians) took part and how they interacted with each other, whether through appreciation of each other’s unique customizations or through ladder-style drag and street racing, where in order to advance to the top one must progress a series of faster and faster cars. If one beats the 10 th fastest, then they can race the 9 th fastest, and so on (Brooks).

Visually, the film shares a lot in style with Una Familia // Lowrider – Brooks certainly has a style that is easily picked out. Heavy use of late afternoon light and warm yellow tones carry over from one short to the next. In some shots Brooks uses a grainy post-processing filter in order to make them seem older. It almost works in some shots, too – but then contemporary clothing or cars appear in the background. A major difference between the two films is the overuse of handheld shaky cam footage, something that was absent from Una Familia // Lowrider and sticks out as a major dichotomy between the smoother tracking shots that are cut between each other. In

California Look , these shaky handheld shots are shot with a wide open aperture, forcing the operator to use a lot of rack focusing and deliberate camera movement to get the subject in focus. It seems like another gimmick to appear like archival home video footage, but it doesn’t always work – when the eye wants to linger on something the camera starts zooming off to something else. It’s a frenetic, high-energy style of filming that doesn’t fit the chilled out vibes of the California Volkswagen surfer dudes being documented (Brooks).

33 Another issue is that what’s happening on screen doesn’t always match what’s being talked about in the interview, creating a sense of frustration for the viewer. When

Fleming is speaking about drag racing, the viewer should be shown drag racing. When

Fleming is talking about the kind of people involved and what they looked like, the audience again should be shown video portraits, or some archival footage of these people from back in the ‘60s, not a modern California skate park disingenuously made to look grainy and old (Brooks).

There is a lot of potential here, but it feels like another short that was shot in a day. The audience isn’t even shown the Beetles that were built for performance in motion until the very end, and by that point it’s too late to have kept the attention of someone not already interested in cars and Volkswagens in particular (Brooks).

Where Stephen Brooks’ films fall a little flat, Luke Huxham’s Underground

Hero: Love to Hate Me really shines. Underground Hero isn’t so much about the car, exactly what wheels are on it, or the spec-sheet of all the modifications done to it. It’s about the lifestyle, and the short’s greatest success is how it exudes character.

The seven-minute short is a profile piece on Shinichi Moroboshi, a professional

“delinquent” living in Tokyo, Japan. Clever matched action editing skills are immediately apparent within the opening shots, when Moroboshi describes his love for

“flashy Lamborghinis” and a Lamborghini literally flashing its wildly placed lights appears (Huxham).

The shots and cuts are well coordinated, such that it feels almost like a Hollywood film and not a documentary. Moroboshi drives to a bosozoku (Japanese for motorcycle gang) motorcycle meet, hangs out for a bit, and leaves with the gang to carry on to a club

34 in the Kabukicho neighborhood, Tokyo’s seedy red-light district populated by prostitutes and Yakuza gangsters. Moroboshi speaks only briefly for the opening three minutes - the strong and descriptive visuals carry the narrative. The opening motorcycle gang scene is so well crafted that interview audio just isn’t necessary – the audience is along for the ride and learns everything about the people Moroboshi surrounds himself with and how respected he is in his own community from the visuals and video portraits. With the amount of neon on the vehicles and in the city, the short has a very ‘80s feel to it, supported by the thumping synth soundtrack in the background (Huxham).

When Moroboshi arrives at the club, it’s as if he’s brought the audience with him and it’s time to sit down and have a chat. The interview set up is casual, but well-lit. A woman sits to his left, and it feels like something out of the Fast and the Furious movies, when gang leaders at parties are flanked by women. Almost everything he talks about is backed up by matched action: “being badass” and swinging a bat, “big returns” and the diamond watch. The audience isn’t shown the “gray area” he claims to conduct his business in, but they don’t need to see it in order to understand that Moroboshi is probably involved in gang activity (Huxham).

Danny Lyons’ seminal photobook The Bikeriders captures American highways from the perspective of those riding them and describes “the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic, or, on occasion, into oblivion” (Lyon vii). The photos and words, collected over a four-year period in Chicago from 1963-1967, are a documentation of modern American outlaws, counter-culture, and the open road.

35 The photobook opens with a portrait of Frank Jenner, a rider in Indiana, his chin resting in his hand and a mischievous smile spreading across his face – as if he’s cracked a dirty joke and is waiting for a response. Leading off with the portrait reinforces that this is primarily a story about people and personalities. The field meet and racing scenes that continue the first chapter of the book are a fascinating visual and historical account, but the real strength of the work lies in the portraits and profiles of the Chicago Outlaws.

The motorcycles are vehicles for their huge personalities – that the bikes also function as extensions of themselves is primary to their worldviews. It’s not a story about the technical aspects of the motorcycles or how they’ve been customized – it’s a story about the people riding them. In fact, it takes four pages until the audience is even introduced to a motorcycle: a beautiful shot of riders on the open road. There is a sense of speed: their jackets full of wind and one of the bikes coughing exhaust. The diagonal composition of the riders across the frame makes it a great jacket-cover image (Lyon).

The second half of the photobook moves the viewer from the fields, roads, and garages and in to their homes and clubhouses; from a global perspective to a more intimate one. The audience shares their space and lives with them, just as Lyon did himself. It feels as though the audience participates in their antics with them.

The images close with Renegade’s funeral, one of the members of the Chicago club, and the final photo is of a Lousiville Outlaw crossing the Ohio river. The wind is in his hair, and he looks over his shoulder crossing the bridge. It feels as though he’s left something behind: Renegade, or maybe “normal” society. By the end, Lyon humanizes the bikers such that they don’t feel like gangsters, and a sense of understanding and empathy is engendered in the viewer. However, they are certainly part of an edgier

36 counter-culture that attacks the open road and life with gusto, an American motoring culture ideal. There is a freedom that the Bikeriders crave that the motorcycles afford them (Lyon).

Another photobook, Martin Bogren’s Tractor Boys , is less successful at conveying that freedom. Photographed in Sweden from 2011 through 2012, Bogren attempted to describe the wild culture of the titular tractor boys, a group of teens with souped up Volvos and a volatile mix of pent up hormones, angst, and boredom.

Shot with grainy, contrasty film, and often using slow shutterspeeds, it is frequently difficult for the viewer to orientate themselves in the scene. The images are so dark, and the landscape photos so blurry, it is hard to establish any sense of place. The out of focus portraits make it difficult to connect with their adolescent faces. The lack of any context makes it hard to care about them as well – the audience has no idea what they are doing when they aren’t ripping around the same empty parking lots in Volvos, or why they so desperately need to blow off steam. The story feels incomplete (Bogren).

The feature length documentary Love the Beast , produced and directed by

Hollywood star Eric Bana, chronicles his relationship with cars from childhood to present, and recounts the history of the car that he lovingly refers to as “The Beast” using interviews, family archival footage, and cinema-verité style documentary filmmaking.

Much of the first half describes Bana’s introduction to cars and his teenage love affair with his Beast, a 1974 Ford Falcon, a muscle car unique to the Australian and New

Zealand markets.

Surrounded by big block V8s and huge land yacht muscle cars growing up in a

Melbourne suburb next to an airport, Bana had an innate love for cars, but Australian

37 touring car racing and the original Mad Max cemented his desire for the Ford Falcon at nine years old. In the ‘70s every kid in the suburbs made sure to watch the races, and when Ford cemented a one-two finish in the Falcon in Australia’s biggest race at one of the most grueling tracks in the world, Mount Panorama, it was “better than Neil

Armstrong – the moment was etched in your mind” (Bana, 2009). It was important to families and the kids that idolized the racers and their cars that you came home in what was being raced on TV – the cars that won on Sundays were the most desirable. And when Mad Max came out and Mel Gibson’s highly customized V8 Interceptor rumbled on to the screen, that’s when he knew he had to have a Falcon to use as a creative outlet

(Bana).

When Bana brought The Beast home when he was 15 years old, he and his friends described it as “their campfire. It was what we gathered around, an excuse to come together.” The car, they admit, was a mess, but Bana saw something in it and together they spent their entire youths working on the car. “It kept us out of trouble and in our parents’ garage.” Remembering the car’s first iteration, Jack, one of Bana’s friends, describes the car as having always been about the relationship with the other teens, a relationship that kept them together working on the car for 24 years. “It’s about keeping the bond and that feeling of youth… The coupe always makes you feel like you’re 16 again,” (Bana).

The film at several points cuts to interviews with famous car reviewer Jeremy

Clarkson; late-night host Jay Leno, well-known for his vast car collection; and Dr. Phil; who all describe the powerful bond that humans can form with their machines. Jay Leno refuses to sell a single car in his collection, and claims to drive and keep each one of the

38 over 150 vehicles in working order. “I’ve had a relationship with all my cars,” he says, “I can’t sell anything – God, no!” Jeremy Clarkson insists adamantly that you can have a relationship with a car through it’s faults and characteristics unique to that individual,

“When something has foibles and won’t handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes, and that’s how you build a relationship with a car that other people don’t get.” After Bana crashes his beloved Beast in the climax of the film, Dr. Phil explains why it means so much to Bana and his friends, “It is a symbol of your history. It is a thread of continuity from whence you came to where you are. It’s important. You don’t want to forget who you are,” (Bana).

Where Bana’s Love the Beast shows how cars can bring people together, the New

York Times’ Op-Doc “Drive-In Jesus”, by Lauren DeFilippo, describes a strange dichotomy at church where the car both brings people together and keeps them apart.

The ten-minute short uses a verité style to establish the scene in Florida and describe a drive-in church in the city of Daytona Beach. The only narration is that of the sermon being given as the camera moves from car to car. Combined with an ambient synthesizer soundtrack, it’s a surreal experience. The churchgoers all sit silently in their cars, staring straight ahead towards the pulpit. From the preacher’s perspective, his congregation is an emotionless, unblinking gaggle of headlights. The only interaction they seem to have is when he asks the congregation if anyone has a Roomba, to which he gets some enthusiastic honks. But for a place normally associated with community, the church, it is strange to watch church-goers not interact with each other. Some play games on their phones, others listen diligently, and still others play with the pets they brought along. A man in a golf cart travels to each car to collect donations, instead of passing an offering

39 collection down a pew. When the service is over, each car files out, their occupants not having spoken a word to each other.

Errol Morris’ wacky documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is a meditation on the psychology of identity and what it means to be human. The feature length documentary follows four passionate, eccentric individuals and their respective fields: a circus lion and tiger tamer, a mole rat expert, a robotics scientist, and a topiary gardener.

Immediately they endear themselves to the viewer, all displaying a gleeful excitement for their niche fields.

The tone of the film is strange and fantastical. The music and helter-skelter camera work develop a screwball atmosphere, and the ideas presented meander as much as the camera does. It’s an hallucinatory experience, but despite all of this, the stream of consciousness works. The ideas make sense, and the viewer is rewarded by finding connections in people that have never met before, and seemingly share almost nothing in common (Morris).

At their most basic, each interwoven vignette is about building or creating something. The lion tamer choreographs a segment in a circus show, the gardener creates and maintains elaborate creatures out of trees and shrubs, the mole rat expert designs an exhibit for the animals in a zoo, and the robotics scientist designs a bug-like robot. Once the stream of consciousness begins to weave together, however, all of them seem to work in forms of trial and error, especially the gardener: “Cut and wait. Cut and wait.” They build for the sake of building and then watch what happens. “Maybe a lot of what humans are doing could be explained this way. When I think about it I can see myself as

40 thousands of little agents...If you analyze it too much, life becomes meaningless,” says the robot scientist (Morris).

There is a recurring theme of the four trying to humanize the subjects of their fields as a way to describe and relate to them, or to find aspects of humanity in their work as an introspective look at human psychology. The lion tamer describes his animals as being “like people”, and “always scheming,” and the mole rat expert asserts that his exhibit’s audience is “constantly trying to find themselves in another social animal.” The robot scientist just wants to “understand life by building something that is life-like,”

(Morris).

At times laugh out loud funny, and at other times dark and brooding, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an important understanding of what it means to be passionate about something, and how that passion informs personal identity and worldview (Morris).

In order to create meaningful content for car enthusiasts and laypersons alike, it is important that media relate to personal identity and passion, and humanize the objects that subjects and characters care for so much. Additionally, in order for one to create the most meaningful work possible, and so as not to be redundant, it is important to understand and review the catalogue of readily available and popular media.

41

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45 Appendices

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Appendix A: Still Images

The following four images were installed as 20x30in prints during the 2016 NEXT thesis exhibition, from April 20 – May 15.

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Appendix B: Project Website

The following images are screen-captured reproductions of the American Dreams multimedia website including an essay, still images, and video on pages 67 and 68.

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88 Appendix C: Community Engagement

Community engagement is being scheduled for Fall 2017 collaborating with the Katie’s Cars & Coffee car meet-up to showcase stills and video media from the project. The following image was produced at a Katie’s Cars & Coffee event on May 20, 2017.

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