Cars and Class (A Quick Breakdown)

 

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 I'm going to take a wild guess and say you've seen the Pixar film Cars (2006) by now. It's not exactly an unknown movie. It has several bad sequels and spin offs and there is truly an insane amount of merchandise and toys based off the film. For a film so successful though, there seems to be very little examination being done into it. My reading of the film is pretty surface level but I do think it is a good place to start.

To put it simply, Cars is about poverty and class in America as well as classism. Our protagonist, Lightning McQueen, is a young hot shot rookie race car sponsored by a company that sells medicated rust ointment. One of our first scenes with McQueen is him meeting some of his fans, older cars covered in rust. A convenient visual metaphor for poverty. McQueen is clearly made uncomfortable by this, not wanting to be seen with those he views as dirty.

  

McQueen views the poor as dirty, not worthy of his attention or respect. They, and his sponsor Rusteze, are merely stepping stones in his career to him. This viewpoint goes challenged throughout the rest of the movie. Due to a variety of circumstances, McQueen ends up trapped in the once prosperous town of Radiator Springs. McQueen slowly becomes friends with the inhabitants of the town but something I appreciate about the film is that it doesn't do the Hallmark movie trope of McQueen just sort of seeing the "good" of small town America and deciding to stay. Instead, McQueen learns a more important lesson. The ways in which poverty is often a result of large scale decision making and poor luck and has basically nothing to do with personal virtuosity of worthiness. We, as well as McQueen, learn that Radiator Springs is only run down because of the building of an interstate that skips right past them. They had no control over the slow death of their town. This is a pretty convenient explanation of poverty in America and the greater world as well. Most places and people are poor not because they have nothing to offer, but because people in power made decisions that made them poor.

  

    This realization about the truth of poverty is what ultimately brings about change in McQueen's character. It is that realization combined with his friendships with those in Radiator Springs that allows him to overcome the artificial barriers of class.