Review of Cars 2 (2011) by Shiira — 04 Aug 2011

A VHS copy of the musical "Hello, Dolly" is the robot's most-prized possession. "WALL-E", a lonely earthbound portable garbage compactor, makes a recording of the duet "It Only Takes a Moment" because the song moves him, inspiring the machine to hold his own hand, in imitation of the characters who have fallen for each other, from a long-ago past when the planet was habitable.

Nothing green grows on earth anymore. The detritus of human civilization, bearing a color scheme that's nearly monochromatic in its brownness, is all that's left. Overrun by trash, entire populations boarded vast spaceships, leaving WALL-E behind with the endless job of minimizing waste into stacked cubes, while the planetary refugees floated around space in what are, essentially, movable countries, displaced indefinitely from their homes.

But what does hardware know about love? How can something made out of microprocessors and integrated circuits develop a consciousness? At what point in time did "it" evolve and become a "he"? It's only a matter of time before robots like Eve(as in Adam &) supplant a human race made morbidly obese by generation upon generation of insentient living.

Whereas "WALL-E" presents a dystopian take on our extrapolated planet that's easily identifiable, "Cars 2"(and "Cars"), obscures the nightmarish elements of a four-wheeled society through the audience's supposition that this largely inorganic world is an alternate one.

Under closer scrutiny, "Cars" starts to look more and more Cronenberg-ian, in which the pornography of auto fetishism in "Crash" actually gets put into practice. Let's meet the Flintstones again.

Similar to the animated series, with its parodic names like Rock Quarry and Cary Granite to corroborate the Jurassic Period setting, both films use car-centric names(Bob Cutlass, Brent Mustangburger) as a means of harmonizing its metal beings with this variant earth.

But when it comes to places, in which Bedford becomes Bedrock, the conversion process stalls in "Cars 2" stalls, leaving the names of Paris, Tokyo, and London in its original incarnation, and furthermore, the landmarks of the cities(for instance, the Eiffel Tower) remain unaltered.

Where are we, exactly? In "Planet of the Apes", the astronaut learns that he traveled across time, not space, when he discovers Lady Liberty in ruins, decapitated and rusting, along the shoreline of what turns out to be the Atlantic Ocean.

Dr. Zaius' best efforts to perpetuate the long-standing notion of simian superiority is undermined by a chimpanzee, the archaeologist Cornelius, who unearths artifacts which proves that apes evolved from man during his cave excavations in the forbidden zone.

"Cars" shares with "Planet of the Apes" the same conspiracy: the suppression of evolution. While remaining silent on the subject of man, despite the cars' admission that dinosaurs existed, they give themselves away, therefore deeming full disclosure of the timeline a moot point.

Unlike Dreamworks, whose "Shrek" films employ a lot of pop culture references, Pixar avoids such anachronisms(the post-modernism of pastiche) yet in "Cars", Kenny G.'s "Songbird" scores a cheap laugh when a car gang puts Mack to sleep with the easy-listening jazz, causing the truck to lose his precious cargo(Lightning McQueen).

This instrumental, like the videotape in "Wall-E", proves that man existed. Quite possibly, he's the missing link. Bolstering this theory, a VW bus, an auto-hippie, without any spoofing appellation, names Hendrix, after a military jeep voices his displeasure with the metalized version of "The Star-Spangled Banner".

This is our earth, not some near-identical equivalent, like the one in the Tim Burton remake, where the film ends with a man staring aghast at the Lincoln Memorial, augmented with ape-like features. These cars are partly human.

Vestiges of their humanity can be glimpsed in their faces. In addition to the eyes, Lightning has a tongue, while Mater sports buckteeth like a hayseed. And somewhere in the recesses of their "brains", these evolved vehicles remember sex.

In "Cars", Mater throws Lightning into a homosexual panic as the tow-truck uses his hook on the auto racing car's undercarriage(read; sodomy). Likewise, the spy in "Cars 2", as suggested by the double entendre inherent in the name Holly Shiftswell, denotes a woman who was mustard in the sack.

Unlike "Planet of the Apes", perhaps the conspiracy is an extra-diegetic one. In "Cars", Sally waxes nostalgic about Radiator Springs in the fifties. This history runs concurrently with the our timeline.

What if she's lying? What if the conspiracy is the film itself, in which the narrators, both omniscient and first-person are fallible? In the climactic race for the coveted Piston Cup("Cars"), a blimp hanging over the stadium reads "Light Year".

It's a clue. Exactly what year is it in this planet of the cars? Maybe these aren't Anno Domini times.