Carquake! Oil shock! Rust belt!

A lot of cars get destroyed in 1970's film.

If late Sixties and early Seventies road movies like Easy Rider or Two Lane Blacktop portray life “on the road" as a kind of heroic continuation of the frontier spirit, as the decade progresses road movies become competitive orgies of destruction: if body counts are the index of quality in militarized spectacular cinema in the Eighties then pile- ups serve the same function in the late Seventies, culminating John Landis' The Blues Brothers a film which works to both retrench a Karaoke Fifties as the new cool (it’s not long now till action hero actor Bruce Willis from TV's retro detective comedy Moonlighting will be at number one in the charts with his versions of Respect Yourself and Under the Boardwalk) and to provide the crowning glory of seventies’ car crash movies.

The car, great symbol of personal freedom and central engine of post war growth and industry starts to lose some of its lustre in the 70s, firstly because America begins to loses its status as the biggest car-manufacturer in the world, secondly because the price of oil shoots up. One of the earliest songs to deal with what is commonly referred to as “The Oil Shock” and the inflationary environment of the 70s is Warren Zevon’s’ typically half-decent  Mohammed's radio. The lyrics run thus: “Everybody's desperate, trying to make ends meet/ work all day and still can't afford the price of gasoline or meat".

One way to think  about this (and to slightly extend De Lillo's riff in the novel White Noise) is that  it's a form of conspicuous destruction, America's car industry is failing but it doesn't care, in fact it wilfully smashes them up in a spirit of fun and adventure, transmuting economic defeat into spectacularized destructothons, creative destruction celebrated as a mass-entertainment. Here it might be appropriate to mention a key concept of the theorist Richard Grusin, premediation. By premediation Grusin means the ways in which the media attempts to shape audiences attitudes toward the near future by representing them in the media so that once they do occur there is a sense of inevitably around them and that attitudes and conventional wisdoms and narratives about the unfolding events have in some ways been pre-set. An excellent example of this was given in a long blogpost by the British film-maker Adam Curtis

“In 1987 the BBC made a wonderful fly on the wall documentary about Golan and Globus. It's called The Last Moguls and it is a brilliant peek into the world of movie deals and trash remakes of the 80s, and this is a good excuse to show some extracts.

I love the section about the making of Delta Force where Chuck Norris in an interview explains how the film tries to show what America's response to Arab terrorism should be in the future:

"I think terrorism is going to get greater all over the world, and I think it's time we started doing something about it right now rather than waiting till it gets a lot worse."

The aim of the film, Norris says, is to show America how to do this retaliation - through what he calls "positive violence". As opposed to "negative violence" - which is what the terrorists do.”

Just as with the re-emergence of the soldier, in a sense then all the Carquake movies of the Seventies are an attempt to deal with the trauma of deindustrialization and premediate the accelerated decline of those industries in the Eighties.