#039 - The Rock (1996) pt. 1 - Driving Too Fast in San Francisco in Popular Film
Hello and welcome to my web log. A couple of weeks back, I watched the first fifty minutes of The Rock (1996). The Rock is one of the most important movies of my youth which is a terribly embarrassing thing to admit publicly but here we are. I have a lot of thoughts about this movie and I don't think it would benefit anyone if I tried to put them all into a single email. So I won't. I think The Rock is a movie that I am going to revisit over the course of this project. I giggle when I think that out of every movie Nic Cage has made, to my knowledge the only two that have been included in the Criterion Collection are this one and the remarkable Moonstruck. But I don't think I would, or could, make different choices. Maybe I'd throw Wild at Heart in there too.
With everything that happens in The Rock, it's easy to forget that it starts with a car chase through the streets of San Francisco.
There's a sequence towards the end of The Great Escape (1963) where Steve McQueen's character steals a motorcycle and is chased by Nazis on motorcycles as he makes a run for the Swiss border. It is of course hilarious in a way that the production of this war drama had to give the one American character (and thereby proxy for an American audience) a big dumb motorcycle to do aerial stunts with. How are you going to get American audiences into theater seats without a big chase scene after all? The thing about Steve McQueen is that he actually was an incredibly accomplished motorcycle racer. The production for the Great Escape couldn't find stuntmen in Europe who could ride as well as he could so he trained them. Then he did his own stunts anyway. He also did some of the stunts for the actors portraying the Nazis because at that moment he was one of the best stunt riders in Europe.
In writing about and thinking about Nic Cage, for this project, I've looked for other actors to use as foils or points of comparison but I don't think I would have landed on Steve McQueen if not for The Rock and Bullitt (1968) and the idea of using San Francisco as a backdrop for smashing cars into things.
In Bullitt, Steve McQueen's character discovers that a pair of contract killers has been following his car. He manages to slip behind them, becoming their pursuer. He follows them calmly for a few blocks. The film signals to the audience that the chase is about to start by cutting to the driver of the other car buckling his seatbelt. On the downhills, both cars catch a little air after every cross street. In the corners they lose hubcaps. They escape the city and find space to really get up to speed. The cars jostle each other almost playfully. The other car loses its last two hubcaps as it jumps a guardrail and crashes into a gas station.
A car is like a vector. It is an increasingly straight line between two points. It has a velocity component. A car is also like a vector in the biological sense. It carries a disease. Immiseration, loneliness, social atomization, incipient fascism, disastrous approaches to urban planning. Spending too much time in a car does something bad to your brain. Does the American moviegoer's love of depictions of car recklessness represent a kind of escape fantasy; does spending time stuck in traffic make us long to see a car free from the laws of traffic, to see a car transcend traffic by ramming its way through?
Like many pervasive social ills, unfortunately, cars can also be a lot of fun. It can be fun to watch cars bounce around in movies, caroming off alley walls like perfect billiard balls and not the actual wretched contraptions built of plastic, steel, and latent explosion.
There are at least two reasons I imagine why you'd film a movie (or at least set a movie) with a car chase in San Francisco. The first is that maybe everything can't be set in L.A. Maybe another production has booked the Griffith Observatory or the L.A. River. Sometimes you have to go to the next available city of consequence. The second reason is that a car chase in the modern conception is not a struggle of car versus car (or driver versus driver) but instead one of car versus environment. Car chases work best in environments ill-suited for cars. We want to see the car squeak through an alley so narrow that it snaps both of the sideview mirrors off.
The car chase is pure choreography: the speedster ballet, the truck dressage, the handbrake pirouette, the pratfall through the fruit cart, the doffing of hubcaps and side mirrors, the storefront window grand jeté. The chase isn't about the catching, it's about the pursuing. For a pursuit to be visually interesting, there needs to be obstacles, things to react to and maneuver around. It's not enough to be fast: you have to be fast in spite of something that would slow you down because pure acceleration will only hold the attention so long. The problem with this is that for the last three quarters of a century, from Robert Moses on down, urban planning in America has been primarily concerned with removing every possible obstacle to the automobile. Think of a recent movie you've seen with a car chase and think about where the car chase was set; most of the big dumb American action movies I've seen recently had their car chases happen abroad, mostly in Europe.
In Los Angeles you get the sense that every available surface has been forfeited to cars: even the river has been remade as a drag strip. There is no tension between the car and the environment because the environment was built specifically for the car. Which is not to say that driving in Los Angeles is a frictionless endeavor but it lacks the kind of problems that make for visually-interesting car chases.
In To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), which I think has one of the better L.A. car chases, they had to make the cars drive into oncoming traffic to make it interesting. In Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)*, Nic Cage had to use a car-carrier truck as a ramp to jump over a firetruck in order to make the chase compelling.
Maybe you can't set a good car chase in Los Angeles because the main thing that everybody knows about the place is that there's too many cars; as the global center of film production, the city could pick any aspect of itself to self-mythologize and inexplicably it continues to pick 'traffic'.
I do not mean to speak for the actual contemporary condition on the ground in San Francisco because I do not live there and only visited once twenty years ago but the popular conception of San Francisco in American action movies is a place that is less conducive to driving cars too fast, which I believe makes it a better setting for a movie car chase. We always see trolley cars which in addition to being a sort of metaphorical impediment to cars are also used as literal impediments, either causing the pursued to make a dramatic change of course or delaying the pursuer, giving the pursued a little more breathing room. There is the topography, the hills, which allow for the cars in action movies to become airborne and fall back down to earth with a loud sound and a hail of sparks. Lombard Street is one of the most recognizable streets in the country with its serpentine path down Russian Hill because we can't stop trying to film car chases on it. It would be great to see a contemporary action movie set in San Francisco lampoon the self-driving vehicle companies that are co-opting that city's streets as their test tracks but that kind of critique is largely out of reach for modern cinema because movies, like most art forms, are made by cowards beholden to investors.
There may be other reasons to put a car chase in San Francisco. Maybe everyone making action movies after Bullitt is, in their own way, trying to recreate Bullitt. Maybe they're shooting a film noir. Maybe filmmakers, especially those of the last century, used the car as a sort of heteronormative weapon against San Francisco, imposing its violent order on the city through senseless destruction. Maybe the city has (or had) overly-generous financial incentives for film productions or a department of transportation or public safety willing to bend over backwards to close streets for filming chase scenes on, like Mayor Feinstein's administration apparently did for A View to a Kill (1985). I guess my key insight here, as someone whose primary qualification is watching a lot of movies, is that a lot of movies are set in San Francisco.
In the Rock, Sean Connery's character escapes FBI custody in a stolen Humvee and is pursued through San Francisco by Nic Cage's character in a commandeered Ferrari. They drive through multiple fruit stands, a bottled water delivery truck, several parking meters; it feels like a parody of an action movie car chase instead of an earnest attempt at the form. They do not drive through a sheet of plate glass that two guys are carrying through an alley but it feels like they could. The military-style Humvee, in what is maybe some sort of commentary, drives over a hand-painted hippie VW Beetle which is further damaged when multiple unmarked police cars crash into it. Soon after, the unmarked cars are made to pirouette through the air in a sort of Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events that starts with a GO-4 Interceptor or similar three-wheeled traffic enforcement vehicle exploding. The chase derails a trolley car which manages to rocket at least twenty feet straight up into the air in a ball of flame. The filming is frenetic with lots of jiggling close up shots of Connery and Cage grimacing and pretending to drive cars too fast. It's spectacle but unfortunately it isn't spectacular. Watching it again now, I feel underwhelmed, which is not something I thought I would find myself saying about an action sequence in a Michael Bay movie.
*see email number 24 in this series for more on Gone in 60 Second (2000)