“Pontiac GTO. A device for shrinking time and distance.”
– Pontiac sales brochure, 1964.
Rob Cohen’s film xXx (2002) is a reworking of the classic James Bond-style spy
flick. xXx is hard core; everything in the film has been modified to the extreme.1 The
main character xXx, a.k.a. Xander Cage (played by Vin Diesel), drives a 1967
Pontiac GTO. The Pontiac GTO is a muscle car and within enthusiast circles the
early model GTO is known as the ‘Goat’. The use of the Goat in the film situates
both the film and the car at the intersection between popular culture and the
automotive industry. I am calling this the ‘automotive cultural industry.’ The
automotive cultural industry is the specific constellation of commodity producers
and immaterial labourers operating within the cultural economy that emerges in
the overlap of the automotive industry and popular culture.2 Filmic product
placement, such as in xXx, is a primary example of the way the automotive cultural
industry produces the car as a cultural commodity. In addition to film, motorsport
is a key cultural institution in the circulation of images that constitutes the
automotive cultural economy. Drag racing and circuit racing are the two obvious
examples of where the image of the car is sometimes more important than who
actually wins races.3 Automotive manufacturers and the cultural industries work
together to produce cars and related auto-paraphernalia as cultural commodities.
The Pontiac ‘Goat’ GTO has an attraction for enthusiasts because it is regarded
as the first example of a ‘muscle car’. The ‘muscle car’ is an interesting cultural
phenomenon for it is the first post-Fordist cultural commodity of the automotive
cultural industry. The ‘Goat’ is associated with the three cultural categories that
define a ‘muscle car’ – age (youthfulness), gender (masculine) and ethnicity (US
‘domestic’). The 1967 Goat GTO works in the film xXx because of the homologous
relation between the muscular character of xXx and these three intersecting
cultural categories. The use of the Goat in xXx is telling in light of the recent failure
of GM Pontiac to market the Australian-designed GM Holden Monaro under the
resurrected Pontiac GTO name.4 Would the new 2004 model GTO have worked in
the film xXx as the main character’s car? As I shall argue, the simple answer is,
“No.”
To begin unravelling why the new Pontiac GTO fails the xXx muscle car
test it is necessary to interrogate how the 2004 GTO has been produced as a
cultural commodity within the automotive cultural industry. I shall first
interrogate the history of the Pontiac GTO, a.k.a. the ‘Goat,’ and its status as a
muscle car icon; this will enable me to set up a brief introduction to the new GTO.
The comparative locations of the old GTO and the new GTO in the automotive
cultural economy can be mapped according to their respective involvements in
motorsport and product placement or use in films. The director of xXx, Rob Cohen,
seems to have an uncanny ability to mediate between the automotive industry and
popular culture, and has thus emerged as a central figure in the automotive
cultural industry. This is signalled by the popularity of a series of films he has been
involved in and which include The Fast and the Furious franchise, xXx and the
made-for-television The Last Ride (2004). I shall use his films to situate the new and
old GTO. Both the old and new models of the GTO have been used extensively in
motorsport. It is the motorsport involvement of the new GTO versus that of the old
GTO that clearly demonstrates the failure of Pontiac in constructing a coherent
image of the GTO that is acceptable to enthusiasts and the markets they represent.
As such, my last act shall involve outlining exactly what Pontiac got wrong in
attempting to produce and ‘sell’ the image of the new GTO to two very different
enthusiast markets – the ‘classic muscle car’ market and the ‘import’ market.
Muscle, Grunt, and the Goat
Judith Roof, in a recent essay on James Bond, writes that “Bond’s most potent
accessory is usually his car.” Bond’s car is not so much a phallic extension (pace
pop-Freudian accounts) than an “extension of his stylistic mastery.”5 Bond’s
sophistication involves a double relation to style; he is a master of style – the
tuxedo, the drink, the way of talking, the ‘Bondisms’ – and his way of being in the
world demands a stylistic mastery over the dramatic ecologies of adventure that
populate the now-clichéd Bond narrative. On the other hand, the character of xXx
has an equally effective, but different stylistic mastery. xXx’s negotiation of the
dangerous circumstances in which he finds himself draws on an affirmative
machismo organised around an extreme disregard for normative conceptions of
risk. Bond deals with problems in a graceful performance of quick thinking
rationality and masculine physical prowess; xXx deals with problems through an
extremely muscular performance of grace. This is also expressed through xXx’s
most potent accessory, his car, which must enable him to perform his ‘extremely
muscular’ stylistic mastery.6 In the director’s commentary on the DVD version of
the film, Cohen introduces the car and its relationship to the character of xXx thus:
Here is one of the stars of the picture – the ’67 Pontiac GTO. […] It is a hell of a
car for a hell of a man. Xander [xXx] does not belong in a rice rocket. He
deserves to be in a muscle car.
(I shall return to the difference between the category of ‘muscle car’ and the
derogatory ‘rice rocket’ below.) The Pontiac GTO has an important place within
the mythopoiea of US car culture. The Goat is regarded as the first ‘muscle car’ and
has accumulated mythological status over the last 40 years because it is the first
example of a cultural archetype or ‘model’ that it established. ‘Model’ has a
delicious ambiguity in this context. It refers not only to the Goat as an automobile
or design-based technological model, but also as a cultural model with particular
attributes that are romanticised in sedimented discursive formations continually
invoked and rehearsed by enthusiasts.7
On a superficial design-based technological level, a large V8 motor driving the
rear wheels in a relatively small body became the model for the muscle car.
However, the GTO was closely associated with youth and the masculinities of
‘grunt’. To be a ‘muscle’ car, subsequent cars had to repeat this association with
youth and ‘grunt’. Or, in other words, the muscle car was singular within the
automotive marketplace. As David Gartman writes:
What was new about the muscle car was not just its horsepower but its
individuality – it was a new category of car that advertised its difference from
run-of-the-mill models. Not social superiority but being a bit different – just
like everyone else – was the appeal.8
Gartman is describing the process of transition from the mass-standard of
Fordism to the standard variation of post-Fordism that occurred in the auto
industry throughout the 1950s and into the 1970s. The muscle car was one of the
first of a new type of mass-produced post-Fordist commodities where the sole
thing shared is a difference from each other. Initially, the muscle car could be
regarded as different from ‘run-of-the-mill’ models; however the general
automobile market underwent a transformation where various sub-markets of
discerning consumers were created. These sub-markets were not (only)
differentiated on a vertical hierarchy of distinction (which existed in the early
markets for the first custom-built cars; that is, well before mass-produced cars
existed), but a horizontal distribution of differences across the market. These
horizontal differences were produced through the immaterial labour of marketers
and advertisers.9
An important part of the shift from Fordism is the inverted relation of
production to exchange where a commodity is ‘sold’ before it is produced. Muscle
cars were sold twice. Firstly, in the ‘public imagination’; this produced the pre-
personal, but individually experienced subjectivity of the ‘enthusiast’. In this case,
the sociality of the enthusiast is organised around leisure-time activities
determined by an enthusiasm for ‘muscle cars’.10 The immaterial labour of
advertisers and marketers attempted to drive the production, or at least cultivation,
of enthusiast subjectivities. Secondly, the muscle car was actually sold to the
enthusiast during the moment of exchange at automotive dealerships. The
enthusiast selected whichever ‘tick-box’ options rendered their new muscle car
purchase as individual. The individuality of the muscle car was therefore produced
and purchased before the actual car was.
The ‘individuality’ encouraged by makers of muscle cars places the
‘muscle car’ at the vanguard of post-Fordism; for ‘difference’ becomes a central
concern within post-Fordist modes of production. The muscle car captured a
difference; not from something, but difference in itself. In the 1960s, the ‘muscle car’
is an expression of a singular difference culturally organised around an affiliation
with the raucous rebelliousness of youth and the masculine ‘grunt’ of technological
performance represented by the drag racing motorsport. In this regard, as an
expression of difference, the ‘muscle car’ is singular. 11
The driving force behind the development of the Goat was Pontiac Head
Engineer, John DeLorean.12 DeLorean appropriated the Italian phrase ‘Gran
Turismo Omologato’ from Ferrari, which translates roughly into ‘Grand Touring
Homologated’. ‘Homologated’ is a term long used by manufacturers to describe a
purpose built race car that has been modified for the street and general
consumption. Ferrari did not respond to GM using the three letter ‘GTO’ acronym
for its muscle car, maybe because it was obvious to both enthusiasts and the
general public that there was a clear distinction between a European-built sports
car and the US version of ‘performance’ in the form of the muscle car. Although
Pontiac and Ferrari both had automobile models named the ‘GTO’ which existed
within the same basic discursive logic of automobile performance technologies,
they pertained to radically different discursive models of ‘performance’. This
difference between the muscular performance of the US-based muscle car and the
sophisticated performance of the non-US sports car is important in understanding
the failure of the new GTO.
The introduction of the GTO ‘Goat’ option, followed by a stand-alone model
shortly after, would shift the ‘horsepower war’ between the big three Detroit
manufacturers (Ford, GM, Chrysler) to a new level. Until the arrival of the Goat,
the horsepower war had been fought amongst the ‘full size’ vehicles. From the
mid-1960s through to the start of the 1970s car yards were flooded with factory-
built muscle cars from the ‘big three’. These massively overpowered monsters of
automobility could be driven straight from the showroom floor to the drag strip.
The ‘Goat’ signalled the beginning of the factory-produced muscle car era.13
The Goat’s mythological status is linked to its success in drag racing circles.
The link between the auto industry, production models and motorsport is crucial
and is best represented by the old saying, ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday’. Some
automotive pundits believe that successful motorsport ventures reflect well on an
automotive brand within certain markets and thus help shift vehicles off the
showroom floor. As Robert Post notes, there is an ambiguity around the word
‘performance’ when it comes to drag racing. He likens the technological
performance of dragsters to the theatrical performance.14 Yet, there is another
performative role of early drag racing at the intersection of engineering and
entertainment. The winning performances of certain cars at the track connected the
ostensibly technical details of a car’s technological performance to the image of the
desirable muscle car. Horsepower figures and the technology that produced such
figures ceased to be esoteric technical facts and became the basic discursive and
symbolic material of ‘muscle car’ enthusiast culture.15
There are two parts to the Goat’s association with drag racing. Firstly, it
dominated the ‘stock racing classes’ of drag racing, sanctioned by the National Hot
Rod Association (NHRA).16 Arguably more important is the Goat’s popularity
within the unofficial cultural institution of street drag racing. It is rumoured that
DeLorean and Jim Wangers from Pontiac’s advertising division took prototypes of
the Goat to Detroit’s legendary Woodward Avenue to test the vehicles in street
races. In fact, Woodward Avenue gained national notoriety in the US after
Wangers featured the Goat cruising Woodward Avenue in one of the car’s print
campaigns. In general, Pontiac ran a youth-oriented promotional campaign that
even included a ‘manufactured’ hit record, “Little GTO.”17
Drag racing is a sport based around maximum acceleration, traction and
timing - it is all about maximising useable ‘grunt.’ More ‘grunt’ is signified by
lower elapsed times - that is, the time taken to complete a quarter mile race. Of
course, ‘grunt’ has heavy masculine overtones. The connection between ‘grunt’
and masculinity is represented by the popularity of the V8 motor in hot rodding,
customising and street machining subcultures for more than 70 years. The V8 is a
cultural artefact that links masculinity to automobility through the sometimes-
violent throb of the V8’s affectivities.18 From the loping idle of a ‘cammed’ V8 to
the high pitched wail of a ‘supercharged’ V8, the V8 is not just a technology, but an
instrument for cultural expression. Drag racing is a cultural institution for the
expression of ‘grunt’ and the V8 has by far been the favoured motor for powering
drag racing cars.
Drifting, ‘Rice’ and the New GTO
There were never any ‘copies’ of the Pontiac GTO, only other examples of
the muscle car singularity either along the GTO genealogy or across the
marketplace. Here ‘copy’ is meant as a neo-Platonic representation of the essence
of a transcendental ‘muscle car-ness’.19 For example, if a particular car was said to
be a copy, then the car would be close representation of the original. However, the
major car manufacturers did not copy the GTO in this sense; they offered further
differential iterations of the muscle car singularity. To produce a muscle car in the
1960s or 1970s, as various manufacturers did, was to differentially repeat the
muscle car singularity defined by three elements: a captured difference or
variation, youthfulness, and masculinist ‘grunt’. Without these attributes a car is
not a muscle car.
For years rumours of a new version of the Goat being secretly designed by GM
engineers circulated. Eventually, the GTO name returned 40 years after the original
Goat was produced. Under the guidance of GM Vice-Chairman and product
development chief, Bob Lutz, GM sought to bring back the GTO name in the new
millennium. Lutz turned to Australia, citing the overwhelming success of GM
Holden’s Monaro and plucked the model from Australian shores. Like the Pontiac
GTO, the Holden Monaro is a 1960s marque reborn in the late 1990s and can be
understood as an example of the Australian equivalent of the US-based muscle car.
Even though the V8-powered, front-engine and rear-drive layout had all but died
out in the US, the design layout has lived on in Australia with both GM Holden
producing the Commodore (and its derivatives, including the Monaro) and Ford
producing the Falcon. The Monaro already used a US-sourced driveline based
around the LS1 V8 engine that had been used by GM in the US to power the
Corvette and Firebird, however the Monaro did require a few changes to make it
suitable for the US market.20 The overwhelming popularity of the Monaro in
Australia did not translate into success for the GTO in the United States. For all
intents and purposes the new 2004 GTO has been a flop.
If the new GTO is referenced against the design-based technological model of
the muscle car there is no obvious reason for such poor sales. It is a relatively small
car with a large V8 engine that drives the rear wheels. In the words of the 1964
GTO sales brochure, the 2004 GTO is the most successful ‘time and distance
shrinking device’ ever to wear the Pontiac GTO moniker. Yet, there is something
else missing. The new 2004 GTO fails the xXx muscle car test. What is ‘wrong’ with
the new GTO?
All commentators (from ‘official’ motoring media to comments posted on
online Pontiac enthusiast forums) have noted that the principle failing of the new
GTO is in its styling. Even though the new GTO has a high level of technological
performance and would certainly be able to beat the original Goat in any test of
technological performance, it is not a muscle car. In some ways the difference
between the old Goat and the new GTO is akin to the difference between the old
Goat and the Ferrari GTO from which DeLorean took the acronym ‘GTO’. The
original GTO was engineered inspired by the ‘street’ and the hot rod engineering
of the street racers of the 1960s. On the other hand, the ‘new’ GTO is a purpose
built sports car; it has too much finesse and design-based poise. To explore this
difference it is useful to place the old and new versions of the GTO in their
respective motorsport contexts. Organised and street-based drag racing has an all-
American institutional heritage and the Goat certainly serves as a mythological,
American muscle car icon of the sport. But Pontiac did not go drag racing with the
new GTO – they went drifting.21
Similar to the emergence of drag racing in the United States, drifting
developed in Japan from street racing activities. It was called touge, and emerged in
the Japanese mountainsides sometime in the 1960s (the exact date being unclear).
The racers (called ‘rolling zoku’) were intent on covering the distance between two
points in the shortest possible time. To do so, they adapted some of the driving
techniques from rally drivers. The techniques started to appear in official racing
circles almost 30 years ago. In its current form – as an official organised motorsport
– drifting is practiced in most countries and its popularity has grown exponentially
over the last 5 or 6 years. Drifting is a form of competitive motorsport unlike any
other. Unlike its legitimate and street racing origins, and for that matter almost all
others forms of motorsport, drifting does not necessarily involve racing directly
against competitors, or against the clock. Described as ‘the art of sideways,’ it is
based on style. Unlike drag racing, where than maximum useable grunt could be
regarded as the determining factor in winning competitions, successful drifting
stems from the skill of the driver to hold his or her car in a series of high-speed
sideways slides around a relatively tight track. Drift cars are set up for driving
poise, not brute horsepower, and competitions are not won or lost against an
opponent according to elapsed times, but judged in a method akin to that of figure
skating or platform diving.22
In the United States, drifting is considered as the motorsport of imports. In this
context, ‘import’ signifies a car’s non-US place of origin, that is, anything not
originally built for the United States domestic market. Until the new GTO
appeared, this term was mainly used to describe cars originally built for the
Japanese or European domestic markets. This is clearly evidenced by the
derogatory ethnocentric term used by enthusiasts of traditional muscle cars and
street machines and given to imports and their owners, ricers. In the earlier quote
from Rob Cohen he suggested that Xander Cage ‘does not belong in a rice rocket’.
In the commentary Cohen goes on to note that Vin Diesel drove a Dodge Charger
in his The Fast and the Furious (2001). The distinction Cohen makes between ‘rice
rockets’ and the cars driven by Vin Diesel in films is interesting in the context of
The Fast and the Furious because the film was a massive box-office hit amongst the
new generation of import-centric modified-car enthusiasts.23
Getting it Wrong
The exemplary text that dramatises how wrong GM Pontiac got it when they
attempted to rearticulate the 1960s ‘muscle car’ for the post-millennium generation
of ‘import’ enthusiasts is the made-for-television movie, The Last Ride (2004).24 The
film serves as an intersection between muscle car and import generations of car
enthusiasts and the cultural economy overlap between the automotive industry
and popular culture. It is the next iteration of ‘product placement’ where the new
GTO and GM products are not merely filmic window dressing, but are essential to
the structure of the storyline. The basic plot of the film involves Ronnie Purcell
(Dennis Hopper), chasing after evidence hidden in his 1969 Pontiac ‘Judge’ GTO
that he can use to gain revenge against the man, Daryll Kurtz (Fred Ward), who
killed his wife. Along the way he gets assistance from his grandson, Matthew
Purcell (Chris Carmack). To retrieve the GTO Matthew and Ronnie go to a GM-
sponsored classic car show. While at the car show Matthew has to make a quick
getaway and steals a new 2004 GTO at the very moment it is being unveiled to the
crowd of classic car enthusiasts.
The classic car show scene serves as a metonym for the role of The Last Ride’s in
the automotive cultural economy. The old ‘Goat’ GTO serves as a ‘star’ of The Last
Ride so as to ‘introduce’ the new GTO. The logic of the car show is homologous to
the logic of The Last Ride: the relevant enthusiast market is introduced to the new
2004 GTO by the watching/attending The Last Ride/classic car show. The Last Ride
is a more elaborate development of the logic and function to the “Little GTO” pop
song released concurrently with the original 1960s Goat. In the 1960s, fans of “The
Little GTO” were introduced to the car through the song. However, rather than
merely advertising the new GTO to a demographic that might think it was
desirable, in the case of The Last Ride Pontiac now had the slightly trickier
proposition of marketing the new GTO to a demographic that thought the old GTO
was cool.
Interestingly, Rob Cohen again surfaces as an important figure in the
intersection of the automotive industry and popular culture. Cohen is given story
and producer credits for The Last Ride. There are also strong parallels between the
film and The Fast and the Furious franchise – particularly the street racing scene
following the opening credits as it is a carbon copy of scenes from both The Fast and
the Furious and its sequel. The Last Ride is rich in interesting moments in the overlap
space between popular culture and the automotive industry. There is one scene
that perfectly captures the generational divide between enthusiasts of the muscle
car era and the more recent import-based enthusiasms. In this scene, Matthew
Purcell is picking up his grandfather, Ronnie Purcell, from prison:
Ronnie Purcell: Are you telling me a grandson of mine drives an import?
[pause] What is this rice-burner? A four banger?
Matthew Purcell: It’s a six.
Ronnie: You kids today don’t know how to handle a V8?
Matthew: We don’t need it. This one’s got quarter-inch lines, Hotshot
4-2-1 headers, Tenzo intake and a NX NOS system.
Ronnie: Well my Judge would kick your ass. [pause] A 400-cube
Ram Air 4, with a quick-shift package, hood tach, man.
Matthew: You’re speaking a dead language, man.
[…]
Ronnie: The first thing we gotta do is find the Judge.
Matthew: Your old GTO? It’s a relic.
Ronnie: You just help me find it, and along the way maybe you’ll
learn something about real cars.
Matthew: Oh yeah?
Ronnie: Yeah.
Matthew: Fire this rice-burner up.25
GM’s error of judgement was to imagine they could tap into the burgeoning
‘import’ demographic by creating a market that was something of an overlap
between the ‘muscle car’ and ‘import’ cultures. Why Pontiac would make a movie
that was obviously derisory towards the ethnic-coding of the import scene (‘rice-
burners’) when at the same time making the investment of a factory Pontiac GTO
drift team is difficult to imagine.
The relationship between the GTO and drifting is problematic, because the
new 2004 GTO is itself considered an import. The paradox is that the GTO was not
imported from Japan or from the European markets, but was built according to
Australian design trends, which, in turn, are heavily influenced by trends in the
United States. The influence of the US on Australia in the example of the
GTO/Monaro can be seen in the choice of the US-designed LS1 V8 engine to
power what was originally an Australian designed car. However, the V8 engine of
the GTO/Monaro becomes a problem if the GTO is understood as an ‘import’
because enthusiasts of the import scene champion so-called ‘hi-tech’ automobile
technologies, such as multiple overhead camshafts and turbochargers, as it is these
technologies that primarily differentiate ‘imports’ from other forms of enthusiast
car culture. The near-vintage technology of the pushrod activated camshaft of the
LS1 engine that powers the GTO/Monaro means that it will and has been snubbed
by ‘proper’ enthusiasts of the import scene. In other words, the GTO fails in both
enthusiast markets. The irony is that Cohen, at least, is apparently aware of the
importance of perceived enthusiast sentiment in marketplace reception of the
GTO. As I have outlined above, in The Last Ride the new GTO is ‘unveiled’ at a
classic car show. People who attend such car shows are nearly all enthusiasts…
The new Pontiac GTO has failed because the Pontiac marketers did not fully
appreciate that ‘muscle’ does not simply signify a car’s technological performance
capacity, but is a hypostatic cultural category. Muscle will never change. Muscle cars
are brutish technologies built with the ‘grunt’ required for the task of drag racing,
which is the exact antithesis of the ‘sports car’ poise demanded in motorsports
such as drifting and historically associated with marques such as Ferrari. To
produce a cultural commodity that attempts to exist and appeal to both
enthusiasms is to underestimate the power that enthusiasm (or ‘desire’) has in
determining the market. The drift scene in the US and elsewhere around the world
is certainly considered ‘youthful’, but the youthfulness of drifting does not include
the ‘grunt’ of drag racing and actually invites marginalisation through distasteful
ethnocentric discourse. The intersection of ‘youth and ‘grunt’ lays at the heart of a
different generation of enthusiasts as represented in the above cross-generational
exchange from The Last Ride.26 ‘Muscle’ is locked into a localised historico-cultural
model and any car that is constructed (or expected) to wear the ‘muscle car’ tag
must signify a fidelity to this era. To repeat ‘muscle’ in the new millennium is to
differentially repeat a cultural model organised around age (‘youthfulness’),
gender (‘grunt’), and a third category that has only recently become relevant:
ethnicity (‘domestic’, i.e. ‘non-import’). Cohen’s understanding of this relation is
clearly demonstrated by his use of the Charger and GTO in his films with hyper-
masculine Diesel and the narrative interplay between the muscle car and import
cultures in The Last Ride. Cohen could not have produced the same effect or even
the same film if he had used a new 2004 GTO in xXx. By invoking the
mythologised cultural model of the original GTO – the Goat – through use of the
‘GTO’ automobile model name, enthusiasts did not expect GM to produce a car
that had poise and which could go drifting with ‘imports’, but expected a certain
kind of youthful, all-American, hyper-masculine automobile known as the muscle
car.
dialogue that engages with the automobile as a form of cultural production. As Rudy Koshar argues, “The automobile deserves at least as much attention as do other topics recently favoured in cultural studies scholarship, such as cinema or popular music, cultural productions that also have deep social resonance in modernity” (145). Rudy Koshar, “On the History of the Automobile in Everyday Life,” Contemporary European History 10.1 (2001): 143-154. 3 In drag racing and circuit racing there has been a strong drive to maintain the illusion of ‘stock-bodied’ race cars. For example, the development of ‘funny cars’ in drag racing was linked to Chrysler and Ford’s respective factory-sponsored drag racing teams building cars with elongated wheelbases to shift the weight balance rearward for better traction. The resultant cars looked like stock versions, but a ‘little bit funny.’ See, Robert Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, 1950-2000 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 133-142. 4 GM Holden has recently announced the cancellation of the Holden Monaro and hence the Pontiac GTO. The continued production of the Monaro was dependent on the sale of the GTO in North America. There have been roughly 10,000 sales in Australia and 40,000 to North America and Europe. The failure of the GTO in US-based markets has led to the production of the Monaro being discontinued. Pontiac and Holden are both subsidiaries of General Motors (GM). 5 Judith Roof, “Living the James Bond Lifestyle,” in Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, E. P. Comentale, S. Watt and S. Willman, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 81. 6 This is taken to the absurd limit in the sequel to xXx, entitled xXx: State of the Union and directed by Lee Tamahori (USA: Columbia Tristar, 2005, DVD; released in Australia as xXx: The Next Level). The ‘new’ xXx (Ice Cube) has a veritable ‘war machine’ SUV as his vehicle. To contextualize the close relation between super-hero type characters and their vehicles it may be useful to think about the changing nature of Batman’s vehicle across the half-century history of the Batman franchise. The television Batman had a George Barris-designed vehicle. Barris was described by Tom Wolfe in his famous “Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby” essay as the ‘king of the kustomisers’. Customising emerged in the 1960s as a baroque, artistic form of car modification. In the latest incarnation of the Batman franchise, the film Batman Returns (2005), Batman has a ‘sports tank’. The film’s production designer drew inspiration from tanks and ‘supercar’ Lamborghinis. See Tom Wolfe, Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby (New York: Bantam Books, 1965); Eric Mayne, “Batman returns in rugged ride,” Detroit News (June 13, 2005 [accessed 7 October 2005]), available from http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0506/14/A01-213652.htm).7 The GTO also has an important place in Australian modified-car culture. A GTO graced the cover of the first issue of the iconic Australian modified-car culture magazine, Street Machine (1981). 8 David Gartman. Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 196. 9 On ‘immaterial labour’ see Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Cambridge, Mass; London: Semiotext(e), 2003); Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Michael Hardt & Paolo Virno, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133-147. Part of the shift to post-Fordism involved a movement towards what has been termed ‘Toyotism’. Investment in material accumulation to just-in-time logistics is an important dimension of this shift. 10 On the relation between enthusiasm (in general) and leisure-time activities see Paul Hoggett and Jeff Bishop, Organizing Around Enthusiasms: Patterns of Mutual Aid in Leisure (London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1986). On the relation between enthusiasm and modified-car culture (hot rodding) see Herbert Moorhouse, Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the American Hot Rod Enthusiasm (New York: Manchester University Press, 1991). 11 The post-Fordist self-referentiality of the muscle car’s difference – what enthusiasts call its individuality – is an expression of its singularity or, more specifically, the series of singularities invariably expressed as the ‘muscle car’. Every self-ordered social system is organised according patterns (attractors) and thresholds (bifurcations); singularities are useful for ‘mapping’ (or what Felix Guattari has called ‘diagrammatizing’) the self-organizing capacity of social systems. The post-Fordist nature of the ‘muscle car’ is derived from the fact that its self-referential difference was part of the muscle car’s identity as a cultural commodity. This is different from the hierarchised dialectical difference of distinction. Once the entire automobile market becomes determined by such self-referential difference, its relative importance compared to other cultural differences is lessened. Segements of the automobile market escape subsumption to the self-referential logic of difference, such as fleet purchases for government, business and taxi companies. It is unlikely that such self-referential difference has become a hypostatic cultural category as exemplified by the relative success of the ‘new’ retro-styled 2004 Ford Mustang. On ‘Singularity’ see Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 143. The distinction between the GTO and the muscle car is comparable to the distinction between the “bare repetition” and the “singular subject” of repetition in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 23-25, 84. 12 In March 1963, at GM’s Milford proving grounds, DeLorean presented a Pontiac Tempest with a 389 cubic-inch V8 to Jim Wangers from Pontiac’s advertising department. Engineers at Pontiac developed
1970s. From as early as 1966, just two years after the introduction of the Goat, Pontiac engineers were under pressure from ‘head office’ due to concerns about the unsafe nature of the vehicle and public safety. Eventually this pressure included explicit directives to pull out from all organised motorsport, which included ‘street based’ drag racing. The pressure continued to build in response to the 1973 oil supply/price scare orchestrated by the Arab oil producing nations in response to Western European and US support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli War. Muscle cars often had big block V8 engines that demanded much more fuel than what was required for everyday transport. 14 Post writes: “Some conceive of performance in the context of engineering; for others the crucial referent is entertainment. The show can be as scrubby as a small-time carnival, or it can be the stuff of high drama.” Post, xviii. 15 A genealogy of car enthusiasm discourse, in the sense I am discussing it here, would have to be traced back to the 1920s and 1930s and the salt lake racers of Southern California. In fact, the entire ‘muscle car’ cultural formation can be understood as a commodified rearticulation of the early hot rodding culture. 16 The stock racing classes were organised according to reported factory power figures and it has been suggested that part of the Goat’s success was due to the way Pontiac engineers quoted its power figures. Most other manufacturers relied on ‘brake horse power’ (BHP) figures, measuring the performance of an engine running on high octane fuel without any ancillaries such as alternators, air-conditioning compressors and so on. This does not give a very good indication of how the car performs in real world conditions. By contrast, Pontiac reported power figures for the car measured in real world conditions, resulting in a lower quoted figure for an equivalent power output. Thus, the Goat was able to dominate against less powerful vehicles. 17 ‘Little GTO’ was an unabashed attempt at using the popular music form to advertise the then new Pontiac GTO. It exists at the intersection of the automotive industry and popular culture and its lyrics are constructed from the language of enthusiasts of the time. ‘Little GTO’ reached number 4 in the charts in 1964. See further discussion below. 18 The term ‘grunt’ is a concept I am using to capture the way the affects belonging to the ‘machinic phylum’ of automobility are segmented by enthusiasts. In the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘grunt’ is an affect of automobile technology. Like the ‘sharpness’ of a blade or ‘hardness’ of a metal, ‘grunt’ is on the leading edge between technology and human users in assemblages. The importance of ‘grunt’ cannot be understated and relates to the masculine drive for technological mastery. Instead of the human user becoming a subsumed part of the system of automobility’s ‘immune’ or ‘reproductive’ system (what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘machinic enslavement’), the hierarchy of human domination over technology is reasserted at the very moment the human body can be affected by technology in a non-technological manner. I call this the ‘kickstart my heart’ effect. Recognition and appreciation of ‘grunt’ is one of the primary signifiers of the pre-personal ‘enthusiast’ subjectivity. On the ‘Machinic Phylum’ see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 406-410. 19 See Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2000), 32-35. 20 The steering hand to be changed from right to left-hand drive, the position of the fuel tank had to be shifted to conform to US design rules, and lastly there were a few minor cosmetic changes to the front and rear of the vehicle. The second iteration of the Monaro-based Series II GTO had more extensive cosmetic changes, but by this stage the ill will of enthusiasts had already set in and infiltrated the market. 21 The new GTO has been very successful in US-based drifting competitions. At the time of writing, Rhys Millen in his race-prepped Pontiac GTO is currently leading the 2005 Formula Drift competition. See the GTO Drift team’s website: http://www.gtodrift.com/index.html [accessed 7 October 2005]. 22 On the subjective nature of drift judging see the online article “Judging a Drift Event,” http://www.drifting.com/article.php?threadid=3866&goto=newpost&show_Title= [accessed 7 October 2005]. 23 Rob Cohen, The Fast and the Furious (USA: Universal Studios, 2003 [2001]), DVD. Although the general consensus amongst modified-car enthusiasts is that The Fast and the Furious is a film about the ‘import scene’ or ‘ricers’, it did not exclusively feature imports, nor did its sequel, Too Fast Too Furious, directed by John Singleton (USA: Universal Studios, 2005 [2003], DVD). In the first film, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) chases down the ‘baddies’ in the final scene driving the aforementioned Dodge Charger. The Charger is the only car in the film that could be understood as being realistically built for drag racing. In reality the other cars in the film would be lucky to run 10 second elapsed times in a quarter mile drag race (the rough time suggested in the film that they could run). Beyond the technological reality of the cars, the Charger also has similar styling cues to two of the greatest filmic street-machines of all time. Firstly, Mad Max’s V8 Interceptor with which it shares a ‘blower’ mounted on top of the engine and sticking out of the bonnet (see George Miller, Mad Max (Australia: Village Roadshow, 2005 [1979]), DVD). Secondly, it also has the ‘bigs and littles’ combination of wide racing tyres on the rear and skinny ‘front runners’ of the primer-grey ‘55 Chevy from Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop (USA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2002 [1971], DVD). The Charger is explained in The Fast and the Furious as belonging to Toretto’s father, thus underpinning the generational divide between contemporary enthusiasts belonging to the import scene and the previous generation of enthusiasts of the muscle car era. The GTO also appeared in the cult film classic Two Lane Blacktop. It was the car driven by the character also known as GTO and played by Warren Oates. It was the competition to the
when he then says it has ‘Hotshot 4-2-1’ headers, which indicates he has a four cylinder motor, would cause enthusiasts to wince at the blatant artifice. 26 Another line of inquiry not engaged here would be to examine the dominance of the ‘baby boomer’ generation definition of ‘youth’ as a perpetual ‘youthfulness’. Drifting is associated with an actual contemporary generation of ‘youth’; yet the ‘muscle’ of ‘muscle car’ is associated with an everlasting ‘youthfulness’ of the 1960s era. The shift in actual youth and contemporary constructions of ‘youthful’ cultural commodities amongst car enthusiasts is represented by Matthew describing the language of his grandfather (and hence the immaterial labour of the cultural industry which dealt in the language of enthusiasts) as ‘dead’. On the relation between car enthusiasts, the cultural category of ‘youthfulness’ and the actual social category of ‘youth’, see Ben Chappell, “What Youth Culture? Race, Rubric, and Identified Performance,” Politics and Culture 2:2. (2003). Available from http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=225 [accessed 7 October 2005].