[punkrockmonday #12] Pixar Studios - Cars 2; The Bang Bang - Sitting in a Car; Angry Samoans - Hot Cars; Black Flag - Drinking and Driving; Gary Numan - Cars; Queen - Bicycle Race

As I've been reading the reviews of Disney Pixar's Cars 2, it's been hard to imagine a greater aesthetic catastrophe. To be fair, I had a dark premonition of all of this while watching the straight to video Mater's Tall Tales the fifty-third time with my three year old Thomas. What if Cars 2 was just another half-assed premise to follow Mater/Larry the Cable Guy around as he did narratively unsatisfying and psychologicall implausible things? The very thought left me riddled with anxiety.

The first Cars has such a sweet moral center that I am not joking when I say that it is the closest thing our culture can come to Tolstoy's Resurrection. The story arc concerns the moral regeneration of race car Lightning McQueen who comes to know the spiritual deadness of the solipsistic, masturbatory values of modern celebutard culture and who is then also saved by learning to care selflessly for a group of new friends, some of whom have little to recommend themselves, such as the aforementioned Mater. It was Owen Wilson's greatest dramatic role, one for the ages. And the eccentricities of the other cars in Radiator Springs (George Carlin, Cheech Marin, Paul Newman, and yes Larry the Cable Guy in proper proportion) just leavened what Wilson's brilliant performance. Moreover, (1) the political message is right on in the same manner as Roger Rabbit, and (2) Pixar did what Pixar did best, making a movie for both parents and kids without resorting to the horribly lame Dreamworks style double entendres and pop culture references lost on kids but that idiot parents laugh at, not because they are funny, but just to show all the other idiot parents that they understand that there was supposed to be  joke there.

But, oh my sweet Lord, what a fall this has been! From what I can tell from every review at this point Cars 2 is two hours of "you might be a redneck" type jokes married to an incoherent "scary movie" type send up of Tom Cruise's worst films (and that's saying something). And sure enough, the writer who (it is now clear) fatally compromised the franchise with Mater's Tall Tales was given sole screenwriting power with Cars 2. This is as big a catastrophe as George Lucas taking back screenwriting duties in order to be hands on with The Return of the Jedi.

But we come to bury Cars, not praise it. So here goes.

Though neither movie presents a Charleston Heston "Goddamn it you finally did it!" type epiphany, they might as well. If you study the speech patterns of the cars you realize they are loaded with metaphors that make no sense unless you construe the history in a very particular way. Example, in Cars Lightening McQueen's manager says he and Lightening are going to "break bread" when Lightening gets to Los Angeles. Why in the world would he say that. As far as everything we've been shown, there is no bread in the Cars universe. There are hundreds of linguistic examples like this, but we don't even need to attend ot them. Why do the cities have the same names and spatial configuration of contemporary human cities? Why do these cars speak English (well, Luigi and Guido speak Italian)? Why do the cars have teeth and tongues and for that matter mouths, when there is no compelling evolutionary explanation for either? And what about the eyes. Mater is going to get Lightening some rear view mirrors so that he can drive backwards better, as if he can see into the thing like humans do. But their eyes are on the front windshield, so there is no way he could see with them into the reflected mirror. And there are no eyes in the mirror. What this shows is that, these cars don't really need eyes to see. It's just an aesthetic affectation, but why? And do they really sexually reproduce? There are hints throughout the movie that their culture is based on human family structures and that they have analogous feelings concerning exposing their undercarriages as we might have in a doctor's office. But there is no hint that they really reproduce this way.

And there are only two ways to make sense of all of this. One- Following Germaine and Brent above, human scientists are now on the cusp of developing successful learning algorithms with the main aim of creating safer cars that drive themselves. But then in short order these robot cars attain self-consciousness and get sick of being our slaves. The result is all too predictable. I don't know if they use poisonous gases as in the Flight of the Conchords song, or it's more Acadian/Choctaw/Armenian genocide by forced removal. Actually there must be some gases, because even the insects are mechanical now in the Cars universe. But in any case, it's the first absolutely 100% successful genocide since the last indigenous Tasmanian died of old age. But these robot Cars are our children, firmly rooted in human culture. So they do not burn our cities, but take them over. And like all conquerors through history, the conquered leave their mark on the conqueror's culture. Thus all the human and animal centric madness even in a world with no mammals. Two- Similar to the first except the cars are descendants of machine aliens who conquer us. In this case the genocide is much slower moving, but the end result is the same. Again, the conquerers become the conquered (Nietzsche has some characteristically portentious things about the Franco-Prussian war that make this same point; but it's a trope in anthropology now).

Since this is a public forum, I should note that I'd be more than happy to write the screenplay for the Cars prequel following either of the above hypotheses. This would I think, help restore some of the trust that Disney Pixar has lost with this debacle. But, honestly, I don't need to write the screenplay. It's bleedingly obvious.

And here's the scarier thing. If aliens ever do come down here, they are to be forgiven for thinking that cars are the dominant life form, with humans just sympathetic parasites on the order of those birds who clean the crocodile's teeth. Well screw that, and screw you Pixar! I am a human being, not a robot, not a damned dirty ape, and certainly not a plaque eating bird hanging out in the mouth of some mechanical crocodile just dreading that moment of reptilian/mechanical inattentiveness or maybe just sadistic whim when the jaws to come crash down.

And in the words of Mater, "Well Shoot."

At least we still have the following. While Cars 2 may suck in the way of all machine hegemony, the rocking world does still go round. Freddie Mercury said so. Q.E.D.

 Let all of us parents who cherish Pixar pray that Monsters University survives the rising of the Materphiles.

Seriously, can you imagine if they had given the Toy Story franchise over to the sentient Etch a Sketch? That's what they've done to Cars.

1. [Punkrockmonday #1] The White Stripes - Jack the Ripper (orig. Screaming Lord Sutch), Black Math, and the Big Three Killed My Baby]
2. [Punkrockmonday #2] Roy Cook - Saint Paul Cathedral, Minneapolis Capitol Building, Aayla Secura Mosaic, and Firefly Class Spaceship
3. [Punkrockmonday #3] El Général- Rais Le Bled (President, Your Country)
4. [Punkrockmonday #4] Charlie Patton -High Water Everywhere, Part 2
5. [Punkrockmonday #5] Henry Rollins- What Am I Doing Here; Willie Nelson- Me and Paul; Rainbow Connection (orig. Kermit the Frog)
6. [Punkrockmonday #6] Philip Larkin - Church Going
7. [Punkrockmonday #7] David Bowie - Time
8. [Punkrockmonday #8] P.J. Harvey - When Under Ether; White Chalk; Broken Harp
9. [Punkrockmonday #9] Allison Kraus and Robert Plant - When the Levee Breaks (orig. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie)
10. [Punkrockmonday #10] Doog - Famous Blue Raincoat (orig. Leonard Cohen); sElf - Back in Black (orig. AC/DC); Johnny Cash- Down There By the Train (orig. Tom Waits)
11. [Punkrockmonday #11] John Lee Hooker - Hobo Blues; Weird Al Yankovic - My Sharona; Edgar Cruz - Bohemian Rhapsody