In terms of pulps, nothing could be cooler than Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. The alternate comic, yes, but also the film as shot by John Carpenter. I'm talking Christine, the nostalgia-rage auto that picked-up Pete Cunningham (Keith Gordon) to the beat of Buddy Holly's
Carpenter's drizzle-infested garage wasteland reeks of dinosaurs. It's not that you literally see them, they are everywhere in the sodden, post-industrial landscape of those seeking a return to lost glories. (All Carpenter's films are nostalgic cos he realizes how bad things are.)
Instead of more and more metal (that transmogrifies to plastics) a return to the bone-fields of the Pleistocene and the literal origins of fossil fuel. The landscape, in short, is
BAD TO THE BONE (Thorogood is 80s but harks back to 50s boogie)
Modernists abhor fossils, but remnants are real and harbor real dreams of shadowy love amongst the leafy equatorial lost jungles.
The fact that Christine's love for Pete is nostalgic is the reality that goes against modernist delusions. Nostalgia has the watery infestations of jungle dewdrops and, in a word, the fertility that modernism denies.
Fetid jungles are real - and harbor feral beasts - whereas the plastic-electric future 'they' promise is less than an illusion. It is an evil that has to be hunted down, as Christine hunts down those who would harm her love.
This reality is shown by two ilos that have previously appeared on these unhallowed pages.
Fertility is the province of empirical tradition, where customs and beliefs accrue from practices in-the-field (where ploughing in a line is not the province of GPS software.)
The power of a swamp is that carbon is kept and enabled to cycle in justifiable ways that attract different species and allows them to flourish, each to their own.
Differences flourish when the power of fertility is honoured by lore and empirical tradition. This s is the world of romance that allows feuding to occur through the power of differences.
Joe Manchin on his riverboat is displaying this Fenimore Cooper lost world of greenery that hovers beyond any political manifesto of numbers and carbon-neutrality (see prev.) The wet peat of a wild moor is vastly more productive than any political agenda (let alone the dollar-fixation of Biden.)
In Christine, 'wet Pete' is given a tough ride by his domineering parents, before his ancient automobile forges him into manhood with true - and deadly - love. Move forward to Musk's sterile electrical delusion, and we see a psychic diminution.
The psyche needs tactile situations - green fronds of ancient vintage - and it can only get this from the fertile areas, the swamps of yore. The problem of the modern scene is that domination of the head is highly convincing to the ego, and it creates a heady delusion (numbers, algorithms.) But only the active forces, the fertile areas, empower the psyche and allow it to dream.
The dream, the unreal, penetrates reality through the fertile swamps of past vistas. The unreal (the animated line) produces an active terrain of putrid growth, while the 'realism'of an electric-green future is a mental infection spread by Greta-Muckeros and their gullible followers.
Tribal or free-form action - song, dance - cannot fall for these mental illusions of the modern order. As in the film, the love of Christine - of the 50s that harboured psychic rebellion - is stronger than the domination of sterile normality that passes for reality.
CHRISTINE SHOWS HER HUMAN SIDE
