Television likes to tell you that it’s easy to fix cars. We’ve all seen a movie where the main character’s quirky heehaw buddy just happens to have an old shitbox in the back yard. What’s more, that shitbox is exactly what they need to advance the plot. This is plainly unrealistic.
For starters, the idea of having a hoard of cars where any of them actually still work is not going to happen. There’s very few movies where the protagonist tries to start a car, the battery is dead, and then they fuck around for awhile trying to get a boost or figure out which shed still has a viable boat battery in it. For the same reason why virtually no action movie shows the heroine taking a bathroom break after having fled the killer robots for several hours, we just assume all that shit happened off-screen.
Still, art can reflect life. At least some films should endeavour to capture every aspect of shitbox ownership, because this culture is important to humanity. Two Lane Blacktop taught a generation about the importance of tire pressure when it comes to hooking up on an unprepared surface. Is it too much to believe that Hollywood could spend a little more effort showing today’s kids how many times you can reuse a rusty brake rotor with a wire wheel and some safety squints?
The next time I go to the theatres, which might be a little while because I just spent all my money on a new battery, I expect to see some of my existence portrayed on screen. At the very least, they could throw in some incidental dialogue about how the evil aliens invading the Earth are doing so because they crave our corroded Datsuns.
