"Someday This Will All Be Ours": Automobile Consciousness and the American Film

"SOMEDAY THIS WILL ALL BE OURS": AUTOMOBILE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE AMERICAN FILM BY KEN HEY Kenneth R. Hey teaches in the New School ofLiberal Arts at Brooklyn College, C. U.N. Y. His course entitled Twentieth Century Arts is described as a cultural history course in whichfeaturefilms are used extensively. Autamobility and the roads that have opened its path have passed through periods ofpraise and condemnation all within a single century, a credit not only to the speed generated by the machines themselves but to the rapid changes in popular tastes and perceptions as well. The industry and its complement of lobbyists only twenty years ago were "good for the country," but now they seem only to tender economic welfare for the OPEC nations of the world. But the consciousness of these two symbols of American "progress" and the reactions to their presence have continually interested the American cinematographer who has tried to interpret elemental relations in the immediate culture. James J. Flink in an article entitled "Three Stages of American Automobile Consciousness,"( 1 ) has attempted to interpret historically this changing phenomenon as it affected the minds of the people who used or were used by the automobile. All three stages have been included in the work of certain directors whose ideas of changing culture have involved the automobile. Each ofthese stages has been accompanied by a parallel concept of the road as symbol. Flink's first stage of consciousness was marked by a "rapid development ofan artitudinal and institutional context that made the domination of American civilization by the automobile inevitable." This transitional period has repeatedly served as subject matter for the director Sam Peckinpah, whose main characters are constantly caught between their own way of life and the newer "civilized" manner of living which is beginning to engulfthem. The Wild Bunch (1969) told the story of a group of such men who, while in the compound of an unsavory Mexican general, are confronted with his open air automobile, a sight that occupies the Bunch for some time. One oftheir own members, having lied to the general, is disgraced by being dragged behind the machine, while inside, the general's drunken revelry continues) the Bunch, all members of a preindustrial moral structure can only watch in surprise and disgust. The allegory ofthe twentieth century is clear. However, it is The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1969) that best represents Peckinpah's concern about the imminent industrialization and mechanization of Amencan culture. The movie concentrates on the dissolution of frontier morals and cultural values, embodied in the character ofCable Hogue, and on their replacement by the morally vacillating, hedonistic society of urban and industrial culture, personified variously by the preacher, Hildie, and the horseless carriage from San Francisco. Hogue is not the genteel 17 intellectual of the 1 9th century, whose demise is discussed by Henry May in The End of American Innocence, he is rather the rugged, practical individual whose naturalness is inexorably marched toward its end to the strains of the movie's theme song, "Tomorrow is the Song I Sing." Progress, urbanism, and the machine are bound to get him. And they do. Hogue has avoided the city, has pondered the reasons for the horseless carriage that passed him by, and has interpreted "progress" to be nothing more than nailing down the dinner plates for his roadside stand to make easier the washing chores. But if he would not accept the eminent domain of urban life, then it would just have to rout him from his desert oasis. Hildie, his domestic partner, who left him once for the fancier life of San Francisco, returns to his wasteland shack in her chauffeur-driven limousine. When the machine, having been left to stand on its own, becomes a downhill runaway, Hogue and the steaming pile of metal meet face to face. But his frontier frame is no match for the powerful force ofhistory, and he is flattened in the sand. After his "crushing" defeat, Hogue seems to choose death and willfully passes into history under the glow ofa funeral oration given by the new hero and flexible moralist, the preacher. With Peckinpah's concern for the automobile comes an equal...