Auto Anthro: Why racing fans can’t stand some racing movies

Jack Swansey holds a degree in anthropology with a focus on car culture, and he is the world’s leading ethnographic authority (by default, if you must know) on NASCAR fandom. His love of the automobile fuels him to discover what cars mean to the people who own, drive, and love them. Read more Auto Anthro here. —EW

Racing movies are a Hollywood fixture, an action and drama genre to which cinematic storytellers regularly return. You might have noticed, however, that these films tend to be polarizing; mainstream audiences and real-life racing fans rarely agree on what makes a good racing movie or a bad one. I’ve met true gearheads who will defend Days of Thunder, Cannonball Run, or Sylvester Stallone’s Driven to their dying breaths, despite filmmaking gaffes or cheesy dialogue. And for every Ford v Ferrari that earns broad critical acclaim and undeniable box-office success, there’s a chorus of car enthusiasts eager to pick apart its every technical and historical inaccuracy.

The recent Gran Turismo summer blockbuster produced such a familiar dynamic. Despite $117M in box-office sales (against a $60M budget), car-savvy critics contend that it plays fast and loose (“on the edge of out of control,” some might say) with the order of events in the real-life racing career of Jann Mardenborough.

To understand from what or where these different perspectives stem, it helps to break down the medium of film into the most common narrative building blocks. There is a series of story beats that tend to occur in good movies—I often see screenwriter Christopher Vogler’s 12-step “Hero’s Journey”—but the most basic version is the famous “three-act structure.”

In the three-act form, the first act establishes the world in which the hero’s journey takes place. This act also defines what the journey is going to be about. In the beginning of Gran Turismo, Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) has a loving father who nevertheless disapproves of his son’s only ambition: to race cars. Success in this field seems impossible, since Jann’s only competitive experience behind the wheel is in the virtual world of PlayStation’s Gran Turismo. His eventual invitation to Nissan’s GT Academy, which gives gamers the chance to train as real-life racing drivers, serves as what Vogler would label the “call to adventure.” That opportunity is what sets the story in motion. Through it Jann meets a mentor figure, Jack Salter, (David Harbor) to help him improve his skills. Jann ultimately signs a contract with Nissan—“crossing the threshold” as Vogler would put it—into the world of professional racing.

Act two, usually the longest act in a good film, shows Mardenborough exploring and adjusting to his new environment in motorsports. He experiences success in some races and failure in others, eventually arriving at his lowest emotional point. In the case of the Gran Turismo movie, this nadir is his real-life accident in the Flugplatz section of the Nürburgring, in a VLN endurance race that claimed the life of a spectator. In reality, this crash happened in 2015, two years after the events that inspired the third act of Gran Turismo, in which the hero finds the power deep inside himself (“resurrection,” to Vogler) and emerges changed, if not triumphant.

According to Ben Queen, the screenwriter of Pixar’s Cars 2 and Cars 3, basic facts about racing make it tailor-made for a great film narrative: “built-in protagonists and antagonists—the other characters racing against our guy —the team element, the authenticity of the world.” You can check off all Vogler’s boxes here: the mentor, the threshold, et cetera—but it goes deeper than that. Because of humanity’s instinctive love of a good story, racing is a narrative medium in real life.

Vogler’s “Hero’s Journey” is directly based on the work of Joseph Campbell, the scholar widely credited with identifying the “monomyth” that bridges Hollywood scripts and Homeric poetry. (There are narrative structures other than Hollywood’s three acts: Shakespeare plays are told in five, for instance, and Game of Thrones’ many twists and turns resist easy categorization.) Campbell argues that humanity, throughout history, has always mythologized stories about heroes, be they real or fictional.

NASCAR, for instance, has stood the test of time because of the story arcs of its driver-heroes. The 1992 Hooters 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway witnessed six drivers enter with a shot at the Winston Cup championship, but it soon came down to two: Bill Elliott, NASCAR’s most popular driver who drove for Junior Johnson’s Budweiser-funded powerhouse operation, and Alan Kulwicki, a Wisconsinite outsider who built his own engines. While battling Elliott for the win, Kulwicki’s Ford Underbird (he had special permission from Ford to run without the Th-) broke the first three gears in its transmission, seemingly dooming Kulwicki’s championship charge. A brilliant strategy call to delay pitting and lead the pack for one lap more than Elliott earned Kulwicki just enough bonus points to win the title, though he lost the race.

It’s the monomyth, a perfect hero’s journey (unless you’re an Elliott fan). But this wasn’t a movie, which means the real-world race lasted three hours, 44 minutes, and 20 seconds. Fans had been watching Kulwicki’s entire career point to that moment; at the same time, Richard Petty was making his final Cup start in that race and Jeff Gordon was making his first. That race, considered by many NASCAR’s greatest, takes on its emotional meaning only in the context of the rest of the sport’s history. A feature film doesn’t have the time to establish that depth of context. As Queen warned me: “Even if the cars are moving forward, the story might not be.”

Racing’s narrative structure, so familiar to fans of the sport, is near-impossible to drop directly to the silver screen. Just like a novel or a TV show, it has to be adapted. And adaptations always make changes to the source material. They have to, in order to make it work in a new medium, but those changes can be frustrating to those in the know. Anyone expecting the film adaptation to be just like the book is almost inevitably disappointed. It can’t be exactly like the book because it’s a movie, which means a movie about racing will never be just like watching a race.

If done well, adaptation adds something only the new medium can provide.

Let’s take a look at 2013’s Rush. The film tells the story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda’s rivalry leading up to the 1976 Formula 1 championship. It ends with a quiet scene in an airplane hangar, with Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Lauda (Daniel Brühl) reconnecting weeks after the season is complete. It’s only the two drivers on location—no media, no fans, no cars even—and they just talk. They argue about the rainy conditions at the Japanese Grand Prix, when Lauda decided the conditions were too dangerous to drive; Hunt continued on to win the title. They argue about their different approaches to racing, yes, but it’s from the audience’s perspective in that narrative moment that we understand something more: They’re really arguing about life.

Lauda then delivers a monologue in voice-over, during which the film intercuts archival footage of the real Hunt and Lauda, with Brühl watching Hemsworth walk away. “People always think of us as rivals,” Brühl’s Lauda says, “but he was among the very few I liked … and even fewer that I respected. He remains the only person I envied.”

You can read books and articles about the 1976 Formula 1 season and the lives of Hunt and Lauda. Maybe you were lucky enough to have watched them race in real time. Their rivalry and friendship is rich with subtext, two very different men with very different philosophies that came into peak conflict that day at Fuji Speedway. Rush, the film, is about delivering the essence of that tension, whether or not the audience has a particular affinity or background in racing. It’s that rare film that succeeds in pleasing both casual viewers and serious racing fans.

With Ferrari coming out on Christmas Day this year, Michael Mann has his work cut out to thread that same needle. We car people are a tough crowd, but the movies that get it right we remember forever.

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