Violent Submission: Gendered Automobility

Cars in the fullness of their materiality and semiotics offer a critical opportunity to analyze the dynamic of social submission. In the human and nonhuman choreography of the road, some people will be passengers, some will die in crashes, some will live with the most unthinkable injuries, and some will tuck in behind another vehicle after the merge sign while another plows ahead. Cars require submission both by consent and by design. Not only the steel itself but pollution, noise, and concrete inevitably push aside would-be users of would-be public spaces.¹

It would be a mistake, however, to leave these observations to policy makers, since submission implies a working out of power relationships. In American culture, submission, with all of its sexual connotations, seems to be understood as "bad." In looking more closely at the popular culture of automobility, we see this at the level of advertising, where we witness a new level of individuated violence. "As a matter of fact, I do own the road," reads the taglineof a recent sport utility vehicle ad, or a recent Lexus ad illustrates a suburban neighborhood with tanks lined up in the driveways.² These offer just two examples of new entitlements to and takings of the semi-public-corporate street spaces as they are made evident in both rhetoric about driving and in actual vehicle designs. Of course, we all cannot "own the road" and so negotiations take place—from the small driver who purchases a compensatory high-riding truck, to the luxury car driver who peels out of the intersection, to the Mini Cooper driver who decides to buy a new brand of communal "motoring."

In the essay that follows, I aim to better understand how the need for submission has been worked out in American automobility. I do this through a reading of a recent Internet advertising film for BMW. Briefly, the ad is presented as a six-minute film, "Star," directed by Guy Ritchie, and available only—but freely—on the bmwfilms.com Web site.³ This film, according to the write-up on the Web site, pits Madonna against the driver of the BMW (Clive Owen) in a battle of wills. It is the way in which these "wills" are set against each other, however, that is of interest here—for another perspective on the film would hold that the driver merely uses the physics of the car to beat his passenger by driving fast and literally tossing her around the backseat.⁴

"Star" is one of a collection of BMW advertising features. Yet, given the supposedly high creative latitude afforded the directors, it is somewhat surprising that the films themselves follow remarkably stodgy and predictable scripts. The dull storylines may tell us more than we want to know about both the monopoly of a certain type of consumer (wealthy males between ages 35 and 45) on what will count as popular culture as well as this demographic's increasing ability to take as their own a higher percentage of national wealth than ever before. But for this very reason, they provide a concentrated analysis point, for "Star" taps into powerful mythographies. If in one way the film represents a seemingly timeless masculinist, misogynist fantasy stereotype, in capturing that stereotype so unabashedly, a close reading can tell us a great deal about car culture, gender, and technology. The discursive field on which this film depends for its sensibility is framed through many sources: popular films, engineering studies, popular reporting of engineering studies, corporate lobbying, computer games, car chases, and institutions such as law courts. These sources are recursive: just as Ritchie's film relies on them, they rely on the sorts of fantasies purveyed by his film.⁵

Thus, both the film's legibility and its ironic reversals make it an ideal site for better understanding the car as a highly ambiguous gendered space. Its implied simplicity (two people make a journey) belies a deeply gendered heteronormative narrative that underpins American understandings of...