A Narrative Trip to Drive-in Theatres: Nostalgia, Cars and American Graffiti (1973)
We have all been locked down for a couple of months. I don't mind watching films at home, but once something has gone, you miss it more than you thought you would. I have been missing theaters way more than I thought I would. So, my partner and I kept up to date with the news about drive-in theaters: it makes sense that these might open up earlier than a sit-in theater (or just about anything else for that matter, as you just sit in your car...). So, when we heard the news that one of the closest dive-ins (about 45 minutes away) was opening, we reserved a spot and waited (im)patiently, to get out of the house and see something on the big screen. Double feature: Back to the Future (1985) and American Graffiti (1973).
Back to the Future is a movie I have very little attachment too. It made me feel very little, but I enjoyed it. It’s the type of popcorn movie I think many of us expect when we go to the theatre. Which is good, we need that sometimes.
But American Graffiti....
"Lights on polished metal glint as the future streams into Styrofoam cups and cigarette butts fall like bullet casings fired in wars not yet conceived (later wars for the body to fight). What are we doing here, sitting in this gleaming machine? Are you looking forward to something else? (Yes, but I'm glued to the Tuck-N-Roll upholstery...)"
American Graffiti is the rare film that lets you breath an atmosphere. It has this uncanny place in time, an emotional landscape which has thoroughly changed, if not lost (perhaps preserved by modern youth meandering around far more desolate roads listening to far more desolate music), or maybe a time that never really existed (can nostalgia accurately recreate anything other than glowing rosy atmosphere?). The smell of cherry coke, cigarette smoke and gasoline, turns this film into a sort of hallucinatory odyssey into another temporality; the ever persistent musical accompaniment, random shouts/whistles/sputters burn and fade through car windows, as the wind whips sound around the motion of the vehicle. Meaning sped up, thinking widened. American Graffiti has the paradoxical atmosphere of change and stagnation, an atmosphere of feeling on the brink of falling into the future. What did we like about the sixties? Maybe the sounds and the smells of America signaled a bright gleaming (metallic) future (what more could you want?). The whole atmosphere sped ahead of itself, a white T-bird floating ahead of us, leading us to the ideal predicted by the bright music, the new smells, and the quickening sounds. What do we like about the sixties? Nostalgically, maybe we look for a time we saw a white T-bird floating off into the future. The color, the sounds, the smells signaled a future; what do they signal now? A different atmosphere: a different cigarette smoke, a different gasoline. (Is that sugar in your cherry coke?) Where’s that T-bird now?
“Who’s in the car? Was there anyone in the car? Can we know? What is the future? Am I scared? Why are we still sitting in these damn cars?”
So I sat in a drive in and watched this film. In some ways, it’s a simple film about growing up and about trying to relate to friends and social structures. It’s not hard to watch (maybe a bit slow, maybe a bit disjointed, but never hard to watch). But all I could think about was the social situation I found myself in. The time depicted in the film is long gone. Yet the remnants remain. They are perverted, mangled. But they remain here, sitting with me as I watch a movie about cars and love and growing at the edge of the future. We passed that yet we still love it. It’s escape. What’s the drive in, if not a time capsule, a way to escape back to that atmosphere, an atmosphere which has not yet been perverted, an atmosphere is still headed by the white T-bird? I sit in a white Toyota Camry (is this the harbinger of the ideal future?), and watch the past, maybe even live the past, for a moment, while protests swirl somewhere (stage left), while people die of an uncontrollable illness, while some people in a metal tube rocket into a far different (illusory) future (less atmosphere up there). These things sat, in that T-bird, that dream for the future. We didn’t see them but they were there, riding along side that beautiful women (is she a wife? or prostitute? does she love me? can the future love anyone…?). Our atmosphere, which once felt so full of sounds and smells, has congealed. We live the stagnation now. Watching the rosy past will only ever highlight that we live the stagnation now.
American Graffiti: American street art. A life lived for the road, the drive, the street. A life lived for the art of forward momentum. Some crash and burn (better luck next time Ford!) some live to die later. Some feel the pull of the future, some stick in the present-past. Nowadays, "American Graffiti" is illusory. Is there an art to the street? I drove home at 2am and felt the car pull forward. There’s something nostalgic — not my nostalgia though, a social nostalgia: the lost zeitgeist of speed — about the feel of a car pull forward at your slightest touch. Is there an art to this anymore? Or has it become a sort of destructive science, a quickness machine? The ever-present glint of metal no longer reflects rosy serendipitous neon, it reflects blistering fluorescents and the heat of the hateful future sun. American Graffiti is a nostalgia for a time when cars made the social scene (who are any of these people without their car?) and the smell of gasoline had an aesthetic quality, an artful aroma. It's quite on the road now (it's 2am, my co-pilot is asleep, no one to pick up). We have no witty passengers, no quite roadside seat shifting. The Wolf Man isn't even there to help us find out future. There is no art in the silence of the road.
American Graffiti is not a good movie because of it's core nostalgia, or how it holds up. It’s a good movie because it breaths out an atmosphere of the past, one that we can respond to, one we can compare too. My response was a near nostalgic melancholia, for something that I have never experienced. This film played like a requiem for a reality that I feel like I need, but know will never have, a dirge for an impossible fantasy. We read films across time to connect them to our own and American Graffiti is truly transcendent in terms of historical nostalgia-laden cinema.
“We drive with guilt dripping from FM radio. We drive with a sort of perverse passion — a subtle middle finger to the world. They drove without a care in the world other than what they could be, and how they could get there. We drive towards nothing: aimless coagulated atmospheric nothing sticks us in a purgatorial present that we cannot escape from. We feel a looming future.”
Back to the Future is a movie I have very little attachment too. It made me feel very little, but I enjoyed it. It’s the type of popcorn movie I think many of us expect when we go to the theatre. Which is good, we need that sometimes.
But American Graffiti....
"Lights on polished metal glint as the future streams into Styrofoam cups and cigarette butts fall like bullet casings fired in wars not yet conceived (later wars for the body to fight). What are we doing here, sitting in this gleaming machine? Are you looking forward to something else? (Yes, but I'm glued to the Tuck-N-Roll upholstery...)"
American Graffiti is the rare film that lets you breath an atmosphere. It has this uncanny place in time, an emotional landscape which has thoroughly changed, if not lost (perhaps preserved by modern youth meandering around far more desolate roads listening to far more desolate music), or maybe a time that never really existed (can nostalgia accurately recreate anything other than glowing rosy atmosphere?). The smell of cherry coke, cigarette smoke and gasoline, turns this film into a sort of hallucinatory odyssey into another temporality; the ever persistent musical accompaniment, random shouts/whistles/sputters burn and fade through car windows, as the wind whips sound around the motion of the vehicle. Meaning sped up, thinking widened. American Graffiti has the paradoxical atmosphere of change and stagnation, an atmosphere of feeling on the brink of falling into the future. What did we like about the sixties? Maybe the sounds and the smells of America signaled a bright gleaming (metallic) future (what more could you want?). The whole atmosphere sped ahead of itself, a white T-bird floating ahead of us, leading us to the ideal predicted by the bright music, the new smells, and the quickening sounds. What do we like about the sixties? Nostalgically, maybe we look for a time we saw a white T-bird floating off into the future. The color, the sounds, the smells signaled a future; what do they signal now? A different atmosphere: a different cigarette smoke, a different gasoline. (Is that sugar in your cherry coke?) Where’s that T-bird now?
“Who’s in the car? Was there anyone in the car? Can we know? What is the future? Am I scared? Why are we still sitting in these damn cars?”
So I sat in a drive in and watched this film. In some ways, it’s a simple film about growing up and about trying to relate to friends and social structures. It’s not hard to watch (maybe a bit slow, maybe a bit disjointed, but never hard to watch). But all I could think about was the social situation I found myself in. The time depicted in the film is long gone. Yet the remnants remain. They are perverted, mangled. But they remain here, sitting with me as I watch a movie about cars and love and growing at the edge of the future. We passed that yet we still love it. It’s escape. What’s the drive in, if not a time capsule, a way to escape back to that atmosphere, an atmosphere which has not yet been perverted, an atmosphere is still headed by the white T-bird? I sit in a white Toyota Camry (is this the harbinger of the ideal future?), and watch the past, maybe even live the past, for a moment, while protests swirl somewhere (stage left), while people die of an uncontrollable illness, while some people in a metal tube rocket into a far different (illusory) future (less atmosphere up there). These things sat, in that T-bird, that dream for the future. We didn’t see them but they were there, riding along side that beautiful women (is she a wife? or prostitute? does she love me? can the future love anyone…?). Our atmosphere, which once felt so full of sounds and smells, has congealed. We live the stagnation now. Watching the rosy past will only ever highlight that we live the stagnation now.
American Graffiti: American street art. A life lived for the road, the drive, the street. A life lived for the art of forward momentum. Some crash and burn (better luck next time Ford!) some live to die later. Some feel the pull of the future, some stick in the present-past. Nowadays, "American Graffiti" is illusory. Is there an art to the street? I drove home at 2am and felt the car pull forward. There’s something nostalgic — not my nostalgia though, a social nostalgia: the lost zeitgeist of speed — about the feel of a car pull forward at your slightest touch. Is there an art to this anymore? Or has it become a sort of destructive science, a quickness machine? The ever-present glint of metal no longer reflects rosy serendipitous neon, it reflects blistering fluorescents and the heat of the hateful future sun. American Graffiti is a nostalgia for a time when cars made the social scene (who are any of these people without their car?) and the smell of gasoline had an aesthetic quality, an artful aroma. It's quite on the road now (it's 2am, my co-pilot is asleep, no one to pick up). We have no witty passengers, no quite roadside seat shifting. The Wolf Man isn't even there to help us find out future. There is no art in the silence of the road.
American Graffiti is not a good movie because of it's core nostalgia, or how it holds up. It’s a good movie because it breaths out an atmosphere of the past, one that we can respond to, one we can compare too. My response was a near nostalgic melancholia, for something that I have never experienced. This film played like a requiem for a reality that I feel like I need, but know will never have, a dirge for an impossible fantasy. We read films across time to connect them to our own and American Graffiti is truly transcendent in terms of historical nostalgia-laden cinema.
“We drive with guilt dripping from FM radio. We drive with a sort of perverse passion — a subtle middle finger to the world. They drove without a care in the world other than what they could be, and how they could get there. We drive towards nothing: aimless coagulated atmospheric nothing sticks us in a purgatorial present that we cannot escape from. We feel a looming future.”
Comments
Post a Comment