Alex F.

Brown
Center for Integrated Media
California Institute of the Arts
March 17, 2015
Vanishing Points and the Technicity of the Future
Both Filippo Marinetti and Franco Berardi have something to say about cars. The fourth
point of the Manifesto of Futurism is a hymn to the car: The splendor of the world has been
enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned
with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath a roaring motor car which seems to run
on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace (Berardi 20). A century
later, this time praising the post-future, Berardi can claim that cars have lost their allure of
rarity and, above all, they can no longer perform the task for which they were conceived. Speed
has slowed down. Cars are as immobile as stupid slumbering tortoises in the city traffic (165).
This points to a situation which Bernard Stiegler would call pharmacological, a dynamic
where one and the same entity is both a medicine and a poison, with no clear dividing line. The
car becomes a slumbering tortoise because it is stuck in city traffic with thousands of other
cars; the allure of the car with its speed, freedom of mobility and independence from the
timetables of trains and buses is the same condition which eventuates in the congestion of
roads, long lines at gas stations and dependence on navigational supplements such as GPS
systems and traffic reports. The same concrete freedoms it offers are the ones in which it finds
itself currently ensnared. Where Stiegler departs from Berardi is that a pharmacological
contradiction (such as the overreliance on cars leading to their diminished reliability) is not one
that should be simply abandoned and withdrawn from, but rather one which demands a

refocusing of attention directed towards a proper care which can only be found in the
technicity specific to the ecology surrounding cars and traffic.
The film Vanishing Point (Richard Sarafian, 1971) and its 1997 remake place themselves
explicitly into this constellation of technological/machinic futurism and the receding horizon of
futural promise. As the radio DJ who serves as the poetic narrator of the original film states, its
protagonist is the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul. The story is
elegantly simple: Kowalski is hired to deliver a 1970 Dodge Challenger from Denver to San
Francisco in two days. He will have to drive really fast, and he wont have time to stop. To make
things interesting he makes a bet on it with his friend and drug dealer (who provides him with
the Benzedrine hell need to complete his trip)the tab for the pills or double the deal next
time around. And so he takes off across the open western landscape of unpopulated arid hills
and deserts. Problems only begin when he refuses to pull over for some motorcycle cops and
ends up running one of them off the road when they become too persistent. They radio ahead
and Kowalski draws more police attention, which he evades, and the swarm of cops only grows
larger.
The film proceeds with the narrative elegance and simplicity of the Aristotelian unity of
action: in the course of a short period of time (two days unbroken by sleep) he attempts to
complete a basic task: get to San Francisco as fast as possible. His goal is met by a reversal of
intention (peripeteia)the faster he goes the more the police come out in force. He achieves a
moment of recognition (anagnorisis)he may be able to disregard and escape from some cops,
maybe even a lot of them, but he cannot escape from Law itself as an inherent limit condition;
nothing can accelerate forever. This leads directly to the ultimate change of fortune

(catastrophe)hes not going to make it to San Francisco. The tragic element of the story is to
be found in this simple reversal whereby speed reverts into its own obstacle. The film
(supported by its chorus embodied in the person of the DJ Super Soul who follows and narrates
the police chase on his radio station) serves as a lament for the impossible/utopian dream of
pure speed and unfettered freedom. The radical dimension of Kowalski is that his speed is
entirely unmotivatedit isnt for anything else that he wants to make the voyage so quickly or
to defy the police. This is an instance of auto-propulsion at its purestspeed leading to more
speed (and the drug metaphor is entirely legible here).
Perhaps the best way to highlight this dimension is to point out the ideological
regressions which manifest themselves in the 1997 remake. The worst impulse of this film is to
mystify the death of Kowalski, stating that no body was recovered from the wreckage of his car
and thereby implying a kind of supernatural transcendence with explicit Christological
implications rather than the original tragedic/mythical death where he dies necessarily and
directly as an outcome of his own excessive desire. Secondly, the car itself is reduced to an
artefact. While the first film features an absolutely contemporary car (and actually functions in
many ways as a virtual extension of the Dodge television ad campaign for that model) the
remake features exactly the same car, this time inflected as a piece of lost history; Kowalski calls
it the apotheosis of muscle car technology, a reminder of when we were on top, thus
relegating the futuristic aesthetic embodied in the vehicle as an already-forgotten and
abandoned one. Finally, the radio DJ is nowinstead of the unabashed champion of social
freedom and political rebellion in the originala sort of off-the-grid reactionary or libertarian
separatist/survivalist.

Most indicative of the shift of mood is the way the second Kowalski needs to be
motivated by external problems in order to initiate the chase. The first Kowalski simply
dismisses the police as a drag he doesnt needtheyll slow him down, so he simply ignores
them. The new Kowalski is embedded in a world full of financial pressures and responsibilities.
He needs to make the car delivery fast in order to obtain the monetary bonus he needs to make
the payment on his house so that hell still have a home when his pregnant wife gives birth. At
the time of his first encounter with police, hes just been notified that his wife is in hospital with
complications and he is breaking the speed limit in order to get back to be with her. The cops
refuse to listen and even insist on arresting him and making him wait for the judge. Clearly, this
film goes to great lengths to justify Kowalskis flight in ways that the original derives its anarchic
allure from refusing to offer.
If the first film offers a tragic view of machinic acceleration, the remake portrays an age
which has lost its capacity for tragedy as such. The 1971 Vanishing Point exploits a nostalgia for
the innocence of the drive to pure speed, the desire to just outrun everything. By 1997 this
story can only be inscribed in an aesthetic of nostalgia for nostalgia.

Works Cited
Berardi, Bifo. After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011. Print.