Bunny is a Rider
third eye lisa investigates the phenomenology of driving
St. Louis, jewel of the Midwest, land of a thousand shitty highways— is a city full of people who refuse to learn the rules of the road.
It’s literally me, I refuse to learn the rules of the road. But I’m not alone nor am I the worst offender.
Witnessing atrocities, of the banal and of the more obscene variety which toe the line between comedy and serious danger, is not an uncommon occurrence when traversing this city by motor vehicle.
The act of driving involves spreading one’s awareness pretty damn thin. A testament to the human mind’s sensibilities or perhaps, the lack thereof .
For me, a person who finds comfort in overstimulation, driving feels somewhat meditative.
The car becomes an extension of my own body.
The need to protect it and the need to move compound to create an altered state of being.
Driving creates an experience of disembodied reality, akin to that of playing a video game.
Before we proceed, let’s get one thing cleared up; I have little to no interest in the semantics of the cars themselves, it is the experience of driving that fascinates me.
The question of how operating a moving machine can produce an ecstatic state of being, consumes me.
The world ecstatic, in this case, refers to: “an experience of mystic self-transcendence”
And down the rabbit hole we go…
Halfway down this rabbit hole, my poor broken brain expresses the need to put “things” in “categories”
So I have taken it upon myself to define a new genre within “art” which will henceforth be known as:
Surrealist Pre-Dystopian Post-Freudian Machine as Body Horror
A mouthful, I know.
Surrealist Pre Dystopian Post Freudian Machine as Body Horror: Works of art that privilege the experience of driving as escapism, where machines become representational of our deepest urges: to flee, to dream, to transform reality.
A Short and Amendable list of my Surrealist Pre Dystopian Post Freudian Machine as Body Horror Favorites:
Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia Album Art
Dua Lipa's iconic 2020 album cover makes a very solid case for her universally appealing and danceable pop music as a vehicle for escaping the mundane horrors of everyday life during a global pandemic and late stage capitalism. We feel nostalgic for better/simpler times, the only way to capture those feelings is through sonic time travel.
Caroline Polacheck’s Bunny is a Rider
Driving symbolizes freedom, the ability to escape, to take control of one’s destiny. These are feelings we all crave, feelings this song manages to capture, even if only for moments. How fitting that Bunny was named song of thee most horrible year by P*tchf*rk. Polacheck herself says it best, “Bunny is a Rider is an independence fantasy”. Once again, music transports us.
Ma (dir. Tate Taylor) (2019)
As Olivia Craighead for Gawker puts it in her fantastic piece, “Ma” Reconsidered:
“It’s hard not to root for Ma when she runs over her teenage bully with her car, killing her instantly, and then turning on the radio to hear the jubilant tones of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September.” This scene alone was more profound than any scene from The Help, more raw than Sofia’s “All my life I had to fight” monologue in The Color Purple, and more empowering than Bernadine setting the car on fire in Waiting to Exhale.”
In my favorite movie of 2019, machines are vehicles for revenge fantasy. Ma’s casual violence represent the subconscious urges that lie within all of us (taken to the extreme, of course), urges that can only play out with no repercussions through a simulated reality held together by the medium of cinema.
Titane (dir. Julie Ducournau) (2021)
Finally, a cinematic dedication to the anthropomorphization and yassification of machines.
TW: SPOILERS. A French woman literally fucks a car and gets pregnant. The idea of machines producing sentient life forms is both horrifying and thrilling indeed. The base and superstructure have been turned all the way out, Marx and Engels and those other dudes are shaking.
Joyride by Tony Seltzer and Eartheater
No one could possibly make a more earnest argument for the inclusion of this song in the Surrealist Pre Dystopian Post Freudian Machine as Body Horror canon than Genius contributor matchamatcha:
“the song is about a hypothetical game one plays in reality where you give such good road head that you inadvertently commit grand theft auto via dick and the goal is to get the guy to crash his car”
White Ferrari by Frank Ocean
One of those songs with the capacity to make time stand still. Frank’s White Ferrari takes us on a forlorn journey through his mind, spinning car motifs into a melodic rumination on the veracity of our memories and the feelings that transcend any sense of linearity. The past is relentless. Even the fastest car won’t let us escape it…
It is often thought that machines and the human capacity to love stand at opposite ends of an imaginary spectrum.
Surrealist Pre Dystopian Post Freudian Machine as Body Horror tells us that yayus, machines are dehumanizing (one means of forgetting who we are)
But why does that need to be a bad thing?
Who are we anyway?
Perhaps it's a beautiful thing not to know, because it leaves the road (as metaphor and slay) wide open for the possibilities of what could be.
This is all reminding me (of course it is) of a quote from a book I just read: The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
The quote was originally referring to the idea that love and cruelty exist as opposites, but I am taking it out of context and replacing cruelty with machines.
“It’s acknowledgement that they [love and machines] can exist within one another, rather than at opposite ends of the spectrum, or locked in an oppositional embrace. That there might be an alchemical, rather than a conflictual relationship between them. That the possibility of transformation is always alive, and always ours.”
Maybe that’s why, in his searing annihilation of wwwhite America (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised), Gil Scott Heron insists that the revolution will—in fact “put you in the driver’s seat”
Quickly, before I go, I must recognize that this pseudo essay/ rant does not include any mention of the phenomena known as motion sickness. That’s because motion sickness has little to do with cars themselves and more to do with our own perception of being in motion, which, in my humble opinion, is another story for another day.
Safe travels,
Thirdeyelisa
P.S. All comma splices were intentional. I am praying on the downfall of english grammar.
epic piece