I've been thinking about how I'd write about Cars if I were in grad school. It would be great fun to look at the all shoes (or should I say tires) that walked the same path as Lightning McQueen in the movie. Within the movie itself, we can see signposts pointing to those heroes who wore the shoes (Yep, I should switch metaphors). Think about Newman in Hud or Cool Hand Luke. And of course there's the racecar's namesake Steve McQueen. Newman and McQueen both played characters who either chose to live outside the law or were forced to. Unlike their counterparts from classic Hollywood westerns, characters such as Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, and Bullit, did not end up seeing heir stories tied up in as neat a bow as Lightning's. In the sixties, as cars replaced horses, filmmakers began to question generic conventions. Contradictions that had been masked were set into relief. It became impossible for the reluctant hero to survive on the edge of the law. He couldn't simply marry the schoolteacher, keep his job as the town sherriff and keep his edge. In the sixites, we watched characters on screen who had to choose between the individual's needs and those of the society. It wasn't good enough to have your cake and eat it too. The hero might end up reluctantly help some kind of community (which was often a collection of criminals), but ultimately he'd have to escape society's constraints one way or another.

I'm imagining an ending for Cars that would take place with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman flick from the sixties. We might see Lightning crashing into the audience at the end of the race. We might see him driving off into the desert where he'd end up finding a town just like the Hudson (Newmans' car-achter) did in Cars. The only way for him to find a place in the community would have been for him to lose his bad boy image just as Hudson did.

Some other topics that would be fun to explore would be Cars and its outlaw hero as they relate to other genres such as road movies and racecar films.