Book Review

     Death and desire have always been a part of the human experience. Cars and car crashes are something relatively new. The former themes are deeply-rooted psychological currents that manifested in the Romantic paintings of artists like Caspar David Friedrich while the latter cultural phenomenon emerged as modern technology and its modernist and postmodernist artistic expression. In Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture, Ricarda Vidal uses the car crash motif to demonstrate how the two themes are related.

     Vidal uses the theoretical framework of the Futurist avant-garde art movement, as detailed by Tomasso Marinetti in his manifestos, to illustrate the trajectory of society’s fascination with the automobile. Marinetti conceived of the car as the primary element of the technological utopia he envisioned before Word War I. Cars were to be the vehicle that transform the world into a state of rapid acceleration, a plunge into speed that would never end but perpetually keep going faster until everything ended in death. The Apollonian Futurists were obsessed with hygiene and war. The car was to transcend gender, being both a protective metallic womb and an object of penetration. Despite the automobile’s obvious use as a sexual metaphor, the Futurists were anti-sexuality and sought to eradicate gender. They claimed to be making a clean break from the Romantic artistic tradition with its longing for an imaginary mythical past, its celebration of nature, and its preoccupation with death and decay. But the fact that cars crash and auto-fatalities interrupt the process of never-ending acceleration cocked up the humming motors of Futurist cars. Vidal explores the extent of Futurist theory and how it has emerged until recently.

     She begins by comparing Futurist theory to the ideas of Henry Ford and the Fordist vision of future humanity; in Ford’s mind, the mass production of cars would become a means of social engineering. He believed in mass conformity and limits to individuality; every person was to be an appendage to a motorized vehicle. His dream was one of a cybernetic society that moved smoothly and efficiently like a perpetual motion machine that never breaks down, one that can be easily controlled by a small number of men possessed of superior intelligence.

     From there the car becomes a vehicle for individuality and freedom as we see in the proliferation of road trip movies and the writings of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. The car liberates the individual from the restrictions of what Henry Ford desired. As the Beat Generation’s high speed, spiritual experience on wheels and asphalt became more commonplace, so did the inevitable unwanted consequences of of traffic jams, the car crash, and the disappearance of human empathy in the face of tragic disaster. Vidal takes up the two latter themes in her analysis of Andy Warhol, amongst others, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash and its cinematic counterpart in David Cronenberg’s film.

A major hinge in Ricarda Vidal’s critical analysis comes in the chaper on Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt’s landscape portraits in which the ruins in the Romantic paintings of Friedrich get replaced with the inclusion of wrecked cars in somber, mystical settings. A significant portion of Vidal’s analysis exemplifies the flaws and unintended disasters the Futurists could not envision in their time. Ultimately, without her having saying explicitly saying so, she proves that Marinetti and his movement were shortsighted and myopic.

     Another theme introduced in this book is gender via the installation pieces of Sarah Lucas and the films Thelma and Louise and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. In Vidal’s view, the car has also been a tool of liberation for women. As a hermaphroditic object, simultaneously womb-like and phallic, it provides women with an opportunity to control gender roles. The Futurists believed in the end of binary gender distinctions but this did not connote what it does today; they were all about hyper-masculinity and the car for them was a tool for destroying and eliminating weakness and passivity, in other words, traditional roles associated with women. For the Futurists, the transcendence of gender meant an unadulterated purification of masculinity and phallocentric power. As one of my art history professors said, they exaggerated and reinscribed traditional macho Mediterranean values. They didn’t fight against toxic masculinity, they reveled in it and glorified it. So in Vidal’s analysis, when women take control over gender roles, they become more domineering and equal to men by embracing the sadism and violence traditionally associated with the masculine.

     If these ideas are not troublesome enough, you might want to consider what Ricarda Vidal chose not to say about the Futurist art movement. The Futurists were early supporters of fascism and Tomasso Marinetti formed a futurist political party that later merged with Mussolini’s fascisti. Their preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness entailed their disregard for sexuality and dismissal of the orgasm as an obstacle to never-ending speed and acceleration. Their end game was about progressing faster and faster until the ultimate explosion and transformation into pure energy, in other words death. Their visual idioms glorified misogyny, violence, war, and the conquest of nature. Admittedly, Vidal’s book is not a political tract and the aesthetics of this particular art movement can be understood without the obvious fascist political overtones they encapsulate. But fascism was such a big part of Futurist ideology that it seems a little weak of her not to engage with it at all. Maybe she saw it as a distraction to her main thesis or maybe it might have tainted her work in ways that would have guaranteed her cancellation as a cultural critic. If we keep the fascist aesthetics of Futurism in mind though, it adds another disturbing element to her writing; it might imply that the end goal of technological advancement might be fascism, disaster, and dystopia. In terms of her analysis of gender politics, it might lead to the conclusion that a genderless society could also result in fascism or totalitarian social engineering. To be fair, we also have to remember that Vidal’s selection of art mostly prove the Futurists to be wrong on some levels and she never actually says she likes what the Futurists had to say; her tone on that avant-garde art movement is neutral and non-judgmental, neither celebrating it nor discrediting it.

     On a final note, why is this book, along with most books in the Western intellectual tradition so American and Eurocentric in scope? It covers a geographical region that does not extend any further east than Switzerland and no further south than France. Should intellectuals always be stuck in the assumption that the ideas of the Transatlantic represent all the psychological currents throughout the world? Don’t people in China, Thailand, Nigeria, Cuba, or Uruguay have thoughts about cars? Why not include the culture of automobiling in Saudi Arabia, a country that, despite its ban on alcohol, has one of the highest rates of auto-related fatalities in the world, a country where women only recently were given the right to drive, a place where illegal high speed drifting is popular entertainment, and where rich young kids earn bragging rights based on how many sports cars they have destroyed in wrecks? Are France, the U.K., and America really the only places where car crash culture matters?

     Overall, Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is thought-provoking and has a keen sense of where we started with car technology and where we have ended up. Her artistic critique is arbitrary but serves a definite purpose and despite what is left out the ideas hang together nicely. Maybe someday a similar book will emerge about the all-pervasive presence of computers in our lives. The thriving tech-utopianism of the 1990s has died down as we begin to see the dark side of internet technology. Cyber-crime, trolling, election hacking, the easy distribution of child pornography, sweatshop labor in Asian cellphone factories, more non-biodegradable plastics in our garbage dumps from discarded technology and other atrocities may be the car crashes of the future. Can these cultural disasters be another manifestation of the Romantic ruins of art in times past?

Vidal, Ricarda. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms. Peter Lang, Oxford: 2013.