Episode 108: Transcript
Episode: 108: How Science Fiction Sold Us the Automobile
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, and the meaning of existence and what we might have for breakfast three years from now. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, I'm a science fiction writer. My latest book is Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak. It's the second book in a young adult space adventure trilogy.
Annalee: [00:00:22] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest book is called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:32] So today, we're going to talk about the automobile. You know, cars have made our lives better in a bunch of ways. They've created opportunities for mobility for people who might otherwise not have been able to get around at all. But they also come with huge drawbacks, including pollution, congestion, and lots of lots of unnecessary casualties like tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents every year. Millions of people are injured every year.
[00:01:02] But here in the United States, we tend to romanticize the car and treat it like an important part of our identity as people. Science fiction as a genre has played a huge role in making us kind of worship these horseless carriages.
[00:01:15] So in this episode, we're going to talk about how science fiction has taught us to love cars, but also about the stories that have been questioning this unholy romance.
[00:01:28] Also, on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about our fears and hopes for reproductive access now that the Supreme Court seems to be hurtling towards getting rid of Roe v. Wade. And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent, there's no giant corporate behemoth supporting us. Instead, it is supported by you, our listeners through Patreon. [00:01:55] That's correct. If you become a patron, you are helping to make this podcast happen and helping to support us and lift us up. Plus, you get audio extras every other week with every single episode, and you get access to our Discord channel where we just hang out all the time.
Annalee: [00:02:12] We do.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:14] Think about it. All that could be yours for a few bucks a month. Anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right, let's get this show on the road. Poop poop!
[00:02:31] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:02:59] So it makes a lot of intuitive sense to me that science fiction and fantasy would romanticize cars, because they're a shiny new technology. They promised to change everything, they kind of abolish the idea of space by getting you from one place to another really quickly. But how did that happen?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:19] You know, people in general, were a little suspicious of automobiles at first, like in the early days of the automobile, they used to call them stink carriages. Early cars were noisy and obnoxious and not entirely reliable and they were seen as a status symbol that only rich people could afford. So, you know, perhaps the first speculative fiction story that deals with cars a lot is kind of ambivalent about it. It's The Wind in the Willows, the 1908 novel by Kenneth Graham, in which Toad of Toad Hall becomes obsessed with the romance of the motorcar, and in this story, cars are fun and exciting but also destructive and a waste of money. They're both.
Toad: [00:03:57] That is the only way to travel. Whoo hoo! Here today, in next week, tomorrow! Poop poop!
Ratty: [00:04:05] Now, Toad.
Toad: [00:04:07] Poop poop! Poop poop! Poop poop! Poop poop! [Car engine starts.]
Hey hey hey! [Engine firing, horn honking. Wheels squealing.]
Woo! Hey hey! Poop poop! Woohoohoo! Hey hey hey! Poop poop! Poop poop! [Energetic comical oompah oompah music starts. Toad continues screaming hey hey hey and poop poop over the sounds of reckless driving.]
Charlie Jane: [00:04:35] And, you know, I love how Toad is just so excited about his car and it's sort of infectious. You want to drive that motorcar too, even though it's also portrayed as kind of an unhealthy obsession that could bring Toad Hall down. I especially love the way he goes “Poop poop! When he pretends to be a car, which comes from the original book and like every adaptation of it has “Poop poop!” as an important part.
[00:04:57] That clip incidentally comes from the 1983 stop motion animated version of Wind in the Willows. And I just want to add that like, I feel like there's two strands that are showing up here that become important later on. One is cars are cute. They're cute and kind of whimsical and fun. But also they're individualistic.
Annalee: [00:05:16] Yeah, I mean, I remember as a kid going to Disneyland and riding on a ride called Mr. Toads Wild Ride, and it was scary. And the whole point of the ride is that you're getting inside of a car and the car is careening out of control, and you almost hit a bunch of things. And it's very much that it's whimsical, but it is genuinely scary. And when I was a little kid, it was too scary for me. I had to wait until I was like seven before I was really ready for that level of engagement.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:45] Awww.
Annalee: [00:05:45] So it seems like Mr. Toad and his poop poop car. It's kind of… it’s cute, but it's kind of a negative portrait of the car. So when do we see science fiction really falling in love with cars?
Charlie Jane: [00:06:03] Yeah, I think it's around the time of World War II. I mean, you get the Model T around the same time that Wind in the Willows comes out. You get the Model T and that starts to take off. And the car companies start actively working to shut down public transit and the federal government, after World War II, starts pouring vast sums into building highways. But it's after World War II that you really see cars start to be seen as a crucial aspect of being an American.
[00:06:26] And I feel like a turning point is the early 1940s. Batman first gets his super car, the Batmobile. That's kind of introduced as a thing a year or two after Batman starts. And that becomes a big part of the Batman identity. And then, the late 1950s James Bond also starts driving fancy cars that are loaded with gadgets, beginning with the 1959 novel Goldfinger in which he gets an Aston Martin with a bunch of like fancy shit.
Goldfinger Clip: [00:06:54] Now pay attention, please. Windscreen, bulletproof as are the side and the rear windows. Revolving number plates, naturally. Valid all countries.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:07] And you know, you get to a certain point in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, every hero has to have a cool car, even Spider-Man, who could just get around by swinging webs. He had the Spider-mobile. Doctor Who had the Whomobile. And eventually James Bond gets a car that can turn into a submarine.
Annalee: [00:07:26] I mean, in the ‘70s I was watching the Krofft Supershow because I loved the show Wonderbug which kind of a take-off on a lot of these things, sort of making fun of the idea of a supercar. But you know, the thing about the car in America is that it's really connected to our myth of rugged individualism. And we talked about this in our episode about rugged individualism. So why do you think cars are so important to this American idea of the rugged individual?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:54] It's definitely directly connected. And you know, part of what's revolutionary about the car is that you don't need other people to help you get where you're going other than gas station attendants, and mechanics and so on and so forth. But you can get in a car and just drive off somewhere, as opposed to a train where it's communal transit, or even a horse and buggy. Often, a bunch of people are riding together because it's complicated and expensive and you need someone to drive the horse and buggy and it's like a whole thing.
[00:08:24] But the car is directly tied into all these American myths about the tough guy who can go where he wants and be accountable to nobody. And I always think about the opening credits of the 1960s kind of paranoid survivalist show The Prisoner, where Patrick McGoohan who's playing like a spy who's trying to get out of the spy game. He drives his little sports car really, really, really fast along secluded country roads. And this symbolizes his relentless pursuit of individuality and his rejection of conformity.
[00:09:01] It's that whole sort of James Dean thing. Nobody can tell you what to do, because you can just get in your car and drive off into the sunset.
Annalee: [00:09:06] I'm going to bring up another important car touchstone from this era a little bit later, the early ‘80s. There's this song by the very important Canadian band Rush, and it's called “Red Barchetta.” It came out in 1981. It's considered one of their classic sort of prog rock songs. And it's a science fiction story about this future world where cars are outlawed, but one lucky kid gets to drive his uncle's secret sports car and it's like all of this sort of elegiac singing about the freedom of being in this car plus the like, awesome guitar and drums and stuff. So it was just so great.
[00:09:46] But of course, the thing is, is that cars are also really necessary for everyday life. Where I grew up in Southern California, and where a lot of people live now out in the suburbs or in rural areas, cars are just the only way you can get around because there's not a lot of public transit. So you need a car not just to have freedom but to go to the supermarket. And that means that in some places, there's a lot of traffic, car crashes, pollution. So, people may love cars, but at the same time, I think a great American pastime now is to complain about cars, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:23] Yeah. And that's part of what you see after World War II is that we build all these suburbs, and that becomes part of the American Dream. And you can't do any of that without the car. And eventually, you get into a situation where people, yeah, are stuck living in these kinds of sprawly areas where they need a car to get around. But getting around with a car becomes increasingly unpleasant.
[00:10:42] But I feel like part of what goes on with science fiction, kind of convincing us to love the car, in spite of all these obvious drawbacks is that there's kind of this weird double consciousness. Post-World War II science fiction, and especially once you get into the ‘60s and ‘70s, there's this constant drumbeat of concern, that technology might dehumanize us, and also, there's a lot of concern about the destruction of the environment. But you often see those same stories turning around and celebrating cars as an unalloyed good.
[00:11:16] As an example, the early 1970s Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is obsessed with driving souped up cars. It's a major part of his character. But he also constantly lectures, the viewer about pollution, and about the dangers of letting technology shape our lives. And often in the same breath, he'll be like, I love cars. Also, pollution is bad and technology can be misused and is scary. It's like we couldn't bring ourselves to think of the car as a negative thing. So we just kind of exempted it from all of our technological and ecological concerns.
Annalee: [00:11:51] I'm sorry, I need to like back up a second because I'm still obsessing about the fact that you mentioned earlier that James Bond's car could become a submarine, like, what?
Charlie Jane: [00:11:59] Yes, it's so true. And I used to have that as a toy, actually. So, in the 1977 film, The Spy Who Loved Me James Bond's car turns into a submarine like you do. That submarine car, incidentally, was referred to as Wet Nellie, which I think is like the least macho car name ever. Wet Nellie.
Annalee: [00:12:23] Oh, my God. Wet Nellie is like James Bond’s drag name
Charlie Jane: [00:12:28] It really is oh, my God. Somebody write that fanfic and send it to us, please.
Annalee: [00:12:31] Yes, please. So the point is that in sort of pop culture, suddenly cars are doing all kinds of stuff. It's not just regular car stuff, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:43] Yeah, at a certain point, it's not enough for cars to have missile launchers, or to squirt out oil so that people can't chase you. Or to like have all the other wacky gadgets that James Bond's cars have like an ejector seat. At a certain point, cars have to cross over and start doing things that are utterly fantastical. And the classic example in speculative fiction, of course, is the flying car. And Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, also gave us one of the first flying cars in pop culture in the 1964 novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was later made into a film and again, it's very heavily into the cute aesthetic. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is an adorable, adorable little critter.
[00:13:25] And at the same time, you see the Jetsons kind of zooming around in their own flying cars. And it becomes kind of a unique signifier for the future. In science fiction, especially of that time, but even now, you know you're in a futuristic city when you see cars zooming around in the sky.
Annalee: [00:13:42] Yeah, exactly. And then in the super, super future, it's like Coruscant from Star Wars where—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:48] Right!
Annalee: [00:13:48] There’s like 15,000 layers of flying traffic. I was recently part of an event about the future of transit at the New America Foundation where Pete Buttigieg came and was talking to us. And we were talking about flying cars, especially because they're this kind of retro futurist idea that's become really calcified. Like even though we know, any of us who are reading current technology news, we know that the future of cars is autonomous cars or cars that are running on sustainable fuels. But we still keep clinging to this flying car thing because I think certain visions of the future just become calcified. We just keep turning back to them, even though we know that they're not really a cutting edge vision of the future anymore.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:43] Yeah, that kind of ties back into our love of nostalgia in a way. Futurism and retro futurism become kind of blended and indistinguishable. And the flying car is a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons, including that all of those fatalities that we talked about before would be much worse in a flying car. You can survive a car crash now, I don't know, if you would in a flying car. I don't know, I don't think that the future of transportation should involve cars as an indispensable element, if possible. I think that we should try to get away from that. Because even if you're using more sustainable fuels, it's still going to be very environmentally unfriendly and very resource intensive to have a single car for one person.
[00:15:20] But anyway, so, flying isn't the only thing that cars start being able to do. By the 1980s, you have cars doing everything, you have the Transformers, which are cars that can turn into fighting robots, right. And those are frickin’ awesome. You also have cars that can think for themselves like Kit, the self-aware car and the Knight Rider TV show that actually can be your best friend, and have a personality of its own, which is kind of what people always wanted from their cars, they always wanted their cars to not just drive them around, but also kind of talk to them and be their best friend, and kind of hang out with them. And then of course, in the Back to the Future series, there's a DeLorean that can travel through time. And also it can fly. So it can just do everything.
Annalee: [00:16:04] So, why do you think there's this shift from cars being just awesome vehicles of our freedom to having like actual superpowers like they can fly, they can actually, they're sentient, they can turn into giant robots like, what motivates that transition?
Charlie Jane: [00:16:24] You can not discount the importance of selling toys, especially in the 1980s. Selling toys was like why a lot of creative decisions got made. And that's certainly where the Transformers came from. Also, it's kind of an extension of the idea that cars are a cool technology. And so the moment you have a cool technology, you want to just imagine it getting cooler. And you know, it kind of builds on that thing we talked about before, where cars are both individualistic and macho, but also cute. And some of these things make cars cuter in the way that you know, Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang did or Herbie the lovebug comes to mind as well.
[00:16:56] Also, I think that when you think about those flying cars in the Jetsons, they're not just like a cool development, they're a way of imagining a future that is just as car centric as the present. And at a certain point, if we want cars to continue to be the center of our lives in the future, we have to imagine them becoming more futuristic.
Annalee: [00:17:18] Yeah, the series Cars comes to mind, too, which is all about these cute sentient cars, although that's present.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:27] Well, is it set in the present? We don't really know.
Annalee: [00:17:30] It's set in some sort of secondary world where cars are sentient beings. And –
Charlie Jane: [00:17:38] There’s an internet theory that Cars takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have all died out. And the cars have just become sentient, and are now living without us, which I kind of love.
Annalee: [00:17:49] I also love that. So, it sounds like what you're saying is that basically, science fiction sold us this idea of the car as essential to the present and now it's trying to convince us that cars are essential to the future, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:05] Yes, it is not enough to be completely dependent on and kind of in love with cars in the here and now. We need every possible future to revolve around cars, too. Because otherwise, you know, we're gonna lose our individuality or our sense of ourselves as having total freedom to go everywhere. So, it's this idea that we will never outgrow the car because the car will continue to grow with us. It'll take to the skies. It'll start talking to us. It'll be our friend.
[00:18:35] And that seems like a good place to take a little break. When we come back, we'll talk about some stories that are maybe a little bit more critical of the cult of cars.
[00:18:43][OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
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[00:19:55] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:19:59] So we already talked about Wind in the Willows, which has a somewhat mixed view of cars. And I feel like if we kind of roll back time and go back to the early 21st century, that maybe Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World is one of the first car-centric science fiction novels. It's all about a future society that worships Fordism. And they all have these T-shaped religious icons in reference to the Model T. They've broken the tops off of all of their crosses so it's explicitly a transition from Christianity to car worship. And specifically a worship of the kind of industrial production model that goes along with cars. And of course, they're now producing people in the same way, because it's a world where people are mass produced as clones for cheap labor.
[00:20:48] And so, this is a novel that is super critical of cars, and even more so the cult of the auto industry. So, I'm wondering, were there other early stories that criticized cars?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:03] Yes, in fact, one of the first science fiction stories about cars is incredibly critical to the point of kind of absurdity. There was a doctor named David H. Keller, who wrote a story in 1928 called, “The Revolt of the Pedestrians, and it was published in Amazing Stories magazine. In Keller’s story, humanity has evolved into two separate groups, you can already see that this is getting kind of ridiculous. So, humanity has evolved into the automobilists, and the pedestrians. The automobilists are people who drive everywhere in their cars, and they have lost the use of their legs, because they no longer walk at all. And here's a good place to point out that the story has a lot of ableist and eugenicist themes, it's definitely of its time and meanwhile, the other group, the pedestrians, are people who, as their name suggests, walk everywhere.
[00:21:53] One of the story’s main characters is the daughter of a wealthy automobilist. And she is an evolutionary throwback. She has legs that work. She can walk, and all the other girls make fun of her. She's kind of persecuted for being able to walk. And she's kind of the underdog that we feel sorry for, I guess. But the actual hero of the story is a pedestrian named Abraham Miller, who has a family member who was injured in a car accident years ago. And so, he vows revenge, and he finds a way to kill all of the automobilists and restore humanity to our true destiny walking around on our own two legs.
Annalee: [00:22:34] Wow, it sounds like a much more violent and terrible version of the movie Wall-E, where, you have all these humans who've been living in space for so long that they also have lost the use of their legs because they go around on these sort of automated little buggies in their spaceship.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:52] Yeah, and again, there's a lot of ableism and a lot of other stuff going on there. And that's a thing that we should acknowledge, that some critiques of the automobile kind of shade over into… Like, automobiles are important for disabled people. And they also provide access to a lot of people who are denied access. And there's a lot of class issues that go into this that we have to acknowledge.
[00:23:14] But what's interesting about “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” is that in that story, the people who reject cars, the pedestrians, are the rugged individualists. Whereas the car people, weirdly, are depicted as socialists who want everything to be run according to their principles. So, it's the opposite of the meme that became dominant after World War II, where having a car makes you a rugged individual and probably wanting to take public transit makes you a socialist.
[00:23:38] But at a certain point, during America's so-called love affair with the car, people do start to push back. There were countless anti-car protests in American cities in the 1950s and 1960s. These usually happened after a child was killed by a reckless driver, and they were often driven by women and people of color, some of whom didn't have access to cars to the same degree. Some cities had freeway revolts against the initiative led by Robert Moses to carve up cities with these freeways that basically would ruin their quality of life and make neighborhoods unlivable.
[00:24:09] And around that time, you start to see more kinds of satirical movies that deal with cars as actual instruments of murder like Death Race 2000, which, Annalee, I feel like you are the expert on this film.
Annalee: [00:24:24] I love being called to the table as an expert on Death Race 2000. This movie has been remade more recently—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:30] With Jason Statham!
Annalee: [00:24:33] But with the original—right, who is perfect for this role. But the original is this really classic cult movie from 1975, directed by Paul Bartel, who's also a kind of classic cult director. And it's this really dark satire that is absolutely a precursor to stories like The Hunger Games or The Purge. So they're set in this far future of the year 2000 when you—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:57] The future.
Annalee: [00:24:57] Right, the distant future, the year 2000. So in that far future, the US government has gone fascist and they keep people in line partly through this popular entertainment, kind of a reality show, reality game show called Transcontinental Road Race. And basically, drivers compete in this crazy auto race across the country. And they trick out their cars with all kinds of deadly things. Each driver has a kind of wrestler persona. So, one of them is Frankenstein and they all have these little angry car names. And they win partly by winning the race, but they also rack up points by killing pedestrians and other vehicles. And so, killing a pregnant mom gives you more points than just killing some random dude. I feel like this movie influenced things like Grand Theft Auto like it's just this hyper violent representation.
[00:26:01] And it's definitely a critique of car culture. And also, it's sort of rugged individualism taken to its worst extreme.
Death Race Clip: [00:26:06] The year 2000. America is a vast speedway. People line the streets to witness the greatest drivers on Earth in a race from sea to shining sea.
This is a death race.
You finish first, or not at all. Death Race 2000. Every car a deadly weapon, every spectator a potential point.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:32] And meanwhile, I feel like around that same time, you start to see more horror movies about murderous cars like Stephen King, he had Christine and he also had Maximum Overdrive, both of which are about cars coming to life and killing people. And then of course, there's the ultimate classic, Blood Car. And why do you think that we start to see so many horror movies about cars slaughtering people?
Annalee: [00:26:52] I mean, obviously, it's partly what we've already been discussing about how cars are really deadly. And I think there's a big problem of where to place blame when somebody is killed in a car crash. Sometimes, it's really obvious, like say, it's a drunk driver, but a lot of times, it's sort of a systemic problem. Like maybe the driver isn't paying attention, but there’s no intentionality behind hurting anyone. They're not murdering. It's just, it's the car itself, or it feels like it's the car itself, that's to blame.
[00:27:24] And so I think you get a lot of fantasies, like Christine, where you can blame the car, instead of blaming a system that promotes driving, and that's very satisfying, to have something concrete that we can blame.
[00:27:38] But one of the reasons I fucking love this indie flick called Blood Car, which you should all go out and watch right away is that it's directly about fossil fuels. It's this super bonkers satire were set in the future. And it's post-peak oil. There's pretty much no fuel available to people. What is there is very expensive, so people have cars, but they can't really drive them. And so there's an environmental activist who is trying to invent a form of sustainable fuel that can be used in cars. So, he accidentally one day cuts himself and his blood gets into this goop that he's making. He puts it into the gas tank and the car runs great. So, he's basically discovered that human blood is a form of green energy. And you just, you have to watch the movie to see where it goes from there because it just sort of starts with automobile vampirism. And then it just goes even crazier.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:41] Yeah. And meanwhile, we mentioned how a Doctor Who in the 1970s was all like cars are great, cars are great. And he had the Whomobile and everything.
[00:28:50] Later, during the David Tennant era, you get two separate stories that are highly critical of the automobile. First of all, there's “Gridlock,” which is directly dealing with traffic problems. People are stuck in an endless traffic jam that just goes on for years and years.
Doctor Who Clip: [00:29:09] Who the Hell are you?
Sorry, motorway foot patrol. I’m doing a survey. How are you enjoying the motorway?
Well, don't very much. Junction five’s been closed for three years.
Thank you, your comments have been noted. Have a nice day!
Charlie Jane: [00:29:21]And then, of course, the Doctor figures out a solution. And this is very much in the mold of other Doctor Who stories that offer social commentary through a fantastical lens, showing how utterly weird it is that we all accept the necessity of sitting in traffic for hours and hours of our lives.
[00:29:40] And then later there's another story that's like a two-parter called “The Sontaran Stratagem.” I think that's at least one of the parts is called, where self-driving cars murder people and these cars are supposedly low emission, but then they emit deadly gases that choke you to death and it's just sort of basically saying that things like self-driving cars and low emission cars and cars that are more environmentally friendly are still gonna end up killing us.
Annalee: [00:30:06] Right, like Blood Car, right? And I feel like there's other recent science fiction stories where you see self-driving cars killing people like in the show Upload, where that's kind of the basis of the plot, is that this guy has died in a crash with a self-driving car,
Charlie Jane: [00:30:21] Right. And the self-driving car was hacked or something. And I feel like it almost became a cliché. For a while there, I would be watching TV and there would always be a bit where someone is in a self-driving car and it goes out of control, and then it crashes and the person dies, then the car says, “You have arrived at your destination.” And it’s like [Gasps].
Annalee: [00:30:41] Fast and the Furious, of course, whichever number it was in the series, Charlize Theron is like a super hacker who takes over all the self-driving cars, and they become a murderous army of self-driving cars,
Charlie Jane: [00:30:53] Man. It’s just. It’s a [crosstalk].
Annalee: [00:30:55] It never stops.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:59] But there's also a whole other strain of science fiction that we kind of talked before about the suburbs and about sprawl. This is a thing that science fiction has criticized over and over again. And you have William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, which is about urban sprawl, and about, I mean, at least it kind of touches on urban sprawl and the notion of like, you know, sprawl as a byproduct of our car culture. And then of course, the Judge Dredd comics and films often deal with. They have these mega cities that are explicitly sprawly. And they’re just impossible to get around. Everything is basically LA, only worse.
Annalee: [00:31:34] Yeah, and of course, you have things like the original Mad Max films, which are about a world that's running out of oil due to an over-reliance on cars. And at the same time, those films, including Fury Road, absolutely glorify cars and trucks and motorcycles.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:55] Yeah, so basically, on the one hand, after World War II, and increasingly in the ‘50s, and ‘60s and into the ‘70s, you see pop culture starting to insist that cars are amazing and wonderful. And they're both adorable and macho, at the same time. And driving a car makes you a really cool person.
[00:32:12] But at the same time, you start to see a bit of a backlash from science fiction, and especially from horror. A handful of creators are making stories that kind of point out all of the drawbacks of the automobile, including all of the ways that cars kind of mess with our quality of life, including killing us, but also just making the air unbreathable and just everything.
[00:32:34] It’s notable that when we talked about pro car stories, we were talking about James Bond and Batman, and you know, Transformers. And when we talk about anti-car stories, it's a lot of obscure horror movies, a lot of random episodes of TV shows, and a lot of short stories that nobody even remembers. They're either very silly and weird and fantastical, or kind of obscure and little known.
Annalee: [00:32:57] Yeah, I mean, what do you think it would take for a story that's critical of the automobile to become as popular as Transformers?
Charlie Jane: [00:33:07] I think that there would need to be kind of a larger backlash against cars in general, which, in turn, would maybe require there to be better options, better alternatives to driving your own cars. We we need better public transit, which would need, in turn, for us to invest money in public transit. And we're not going to get more money for public transit unless pop culture is kind of pointing out all the ways in which our dependence on cars is a bad thing.
[00:33:32] So, we're kind of trapped in a vicious circle here. And I've been thinking about this a lot. I think that the way to break out of the vicious circle is not just to try to make more pop culture that questions or dependence on cars, but also to have more pop culture and more storytelling, which kind of imagines other kinds of transit and other ways that we could get around that might be more environmentally friendly, more sustainable, and just nicer than cars. And I feel like you've been doing this in some of your recent work. But I feel like a lot of really interesting stuff right now is trying to imagine better cities and better ways of getting between cities that is just better for our quality of life.
Annalee: [00:34:13] Yeah, like let's stop imagining flying cars and make public transit sexy. What’s next for transit? There has to be something in between the flying car and the transporter that we can romanticize. We’re not going to get transporters quite yet, but we can get something else that's glamorous, and futuristic.
[00:34:36] So I'll see you there in that future?
Charlie Jane: [00:34:37] Yeah, maybe Thomas the Tank Engine is what we really, that's the hero we really need. Just a really cute, heroic train. That kind of double nature of cars that they're both cute and macho is really hard to fight against because they get us from both sides. They’re adorable. They have little faces. Their headlights are like eyes, and they're just like cute little critters.
[00:34:58] I think that the other thing is if we could get more cute robots that aren't cars, that would really help because they could steal some of the thunder of cars. Like just cute robot friends.
Annalee: [00:35:08] I'm into it.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:08] I think that's a good place to leave us. More cute robot friends, please.
[00:35:13] So that's the end of our show. Thank you so much for listening. It means the galaxy to us. And if you just randomly stumbled upon this podcast, we're available wherever podcasts are found. And if you like us, we really appreciate it if you could leave a review in Apple podcasts or other places where podcasts are reviewed. And if you really, really like us, we have a Patreon, like we mentioned before, and you can support us on there at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're also on Twitter at @OOACpod. And we totally respond to your tweets if you tweet at us about the podcast.
[00:35:49] So thank you so much to our heroic and brilliant and just like indefatigable producer, Veronica Simonetti, who just makes this show so much better. And thanks so much to Chris Palmer for our amazing music. And thanks again for listening. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord and you'll get an audio extra next week. Everybody else we'll be back in two weeks with another new episode. And you know, stay robotic. Bye!
Annalee: [00:36:11] Bye!
[00:36:11] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]