The title character of Christine, the 1983 film by John Carpenter based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, is an evil car—specifically a red 1958 Plymouth Fury. Christine is possessive, vindictive, and violent—murdering, or trying to, anyone who insults or injures her. After teen nerd Arnie lovingly restores the vintage automobile to her former glory, his infatuation with his four-wheeled companion threatens his relationships with his family, his best friend and new girlfriend, and, eventually, his life.
My only humble quibble with this premise is that the film presents Christine as uniquely destructive, instead of emblematic of the deadliness of all cars, and our obsession with them.
If you find yourself wanting to object, or to roll your eyes, consider this: Since the invention of the car, somewhere between 54 and 69 million people have died in traffic crashes; 6.3 to 9 million people have died from traffic-related air pollution; and as many as 5.7 million people have died from vehicle-based lead exposure. All told, cars have killed somewhere between 61 and 83 million people. As David Obst observes in his new book, Saving Ourselves From Big Car, cars have killed more people than World War II.
Obst is no stranger to going up against powerful forces. He’s worn many hats in his time—author, editor, film producer—but is perhaps best known for being the literary agent for Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Daniel Ellsberg, and for publishing and distributing Seymour Hersh’s exposé on the My Lai massacre. His only regret with this new book, he confided, is that Big Car collectively shrugged.
“I’m kind of disappointed and shocked that I didn’t get Big Car to come after me,” he said. “They just kind of ignored the book.”
Obst is not the only writer to take aim at car culture this year. There’s also Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Carsby Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, and Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek. But I was intrigued by Obst’s explicit framing of the car as an existential threat. Because while Big Car kills many of us quickly, in deadly collisions, it is killing many more of us slowly, by polluting the environment, warming the Earth, sowing misinformation and doubt about climate science, and impeding attempts to redress these harms.
“I don’t think of the car as a villain,” Obst writes in his introduction (here, we may disagree). “Like you, I use my car almost every day. However, I now understand the price we’re all paying for it. It’s much too high. If we don’t stop Big Car, Big Car will destroy us.”
I recently reached Obst by phone to ask him about how he arrived at this thesis, whether it’s confusing to have the umbrella term Big Car when it overlaps significantly with the widely used phrase Big Oil, and where we go from here.
Jessica S. McKenzie 