Royale With Cheese.

It has been almost twenty years since Pulp Fiction came out.  The movie has been dissembled so many different ways, from the fractured timeline to the violence to the literary cursing.  I was watching it tonight and was struck by something for the first time.

Pulp Fiction presents being in a car as a character all its own.

Sometimes films or shows present their settings as a unique character, one of the antagonists.  I do not recall a movie where the act of being in a vehicle is treated as the truly unique setting it is.  In a lot of films, the car is a hook to get from one place to another.  Tolkien made folks walk for months, and a car is usually treated the same.  In movies like American Graffiti, the car is a symbol of virile youth.  Of course, the Road Trip is its own genre.

But for most of us, being in a car is being in a diving bell.  You are moving through space, sealed off from the world around you.  It creates a cabin fever.  You act differently when you are stuck in a car with someone.  You talk about the mundane.  You stare uncomfortably forward, washed out from your encounter with an adrenaline needle. Hell, even the lead up to the famous dance scene takes place in a car (it just happens to be parked inside the restaurant).

We do act differently when we get behind the wheel.  Differently enough to remember the next time we make decisions about driving and traffic while sitting behind a desk rather than a dashboard.  I am not sure if it's the velocity or the freedom or the other folks whizzing by.  It may even be that we drive so much we simply ignore the novelty of it all.  We are not the same people when we become drivers.