Dromoscopy, or The Ecstasy of Enormities

“For the driver, to look is to live.”

—French Highway Patrol

Figure 1.

Postcard, “The Freeway Near the Civic Center - Los Angeles, California”

Movement drives the event. In making transparency active, speed metamorphoses appearances. In the accelerated enterprise of travel, a simulation takes place which renews the project of trompe-l’oeil. The depth of the landscape rises to the surface like an oilspot on the surface of a painting. Inanimate objects exhume themselves from the horizon and come bit by bit to impregnate the sheen of the windshield. Perspective comes alive. The vanishing point becomes a point of assault projecting its arrows and rays on the voyager-voyeur. The goal of the chase becomes a hearth which hurls its rays at the astonished observer, fascinated by the landscapes’ advance. This axis that generates an apparent movement suddenly becomes concrete in the speed of the engine, but this concreteness is one that is completely relative to the moment, since the object which precipitates itself on the film of the windshield will just as quickly be forgotten as perceived: put back in the prop room, it will disappear out the rear window.

Figure 2.

“Man Dig Those Crazy L.A. Freeways.”

Let’s disabuse ourselves: we are before a veritable “seventh art,” that of the dashboard. The opposite extreme from stroboscopy, which permits one to observe objects animated by a rapid movement as if they were in repose, this dromoscopy allows to one to see inanimate objects as if they were animated by a violent movement.

To climb into a car is at once to step on board and to cross a border ² (the sidewalk’s edge, for example). But it’s also for the agent of this displacement to position himself before a sort of easel composed of the windshield and the dashboard showing the instrumentation. Arranged before the eyes of the driver this instrument panel forms a totality: the agent of displacement will by turns observe the approach of objects which will not fail to hit the windshield (images —but also insects, gravel, feathered creatures) and also diverse movements which will animate the gauges and counters. In this driving fascination begins a double game of lining up the inside and the outside of the car. With the help of the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal, the author-composer of the trip will in effect arrange a series of speed pictures, which will playfully sneak up on the transparent screen of the windshield. With the monotonous unfolding of roadside scenes, each object perceived in an advancing depth of field already identifies itself at that instant with a deferred crash. On the centerstage of the driver’s seat, the driver, by rolling dodges, will pursue and flee at the same time, these precipitations being too unreal for their suicidal character to slow the driver’s advance.

In fact, the dromoscopic simulation hides the violent compression of driving. Its dissimulation assures and reassures the driver in his drive. If in its aero-dynamism the vehicle of the trip is only the embryo of a constantly deferred becoming, by improvements decreasing wind resistance the vehicle is also the figure of a generalized desertion, a larva of speed the development of which one will not perceive except in the emergence of a better shape permitting still greater speed. It is the same with the dromoscopic play provided by the staging of the motor. Each dashboard is nothing but a moment in the mise-en-scene of the windscreen. ² The rushes of landscape are nothing but a cinematic hallucination which is the opposite of stroboscopy. In dromoscopy the fixity of the presence of objects ceases, seducing the voyeur-voyager. In the rapidity of this displacement, the voyeur-voyager finds himself in a situation which is the opposite of that of the habitué of darkened cinemas: it’s the traveler who is projected. Both actor and spectator in the drama of projection, in the moment of flight the...