Talladega Nights


"Our methods do not differ as much as you pretend. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light."

- Rene Belloq to Indiana Jones, Cairo, 1936

There's a canard floating around out there that seems impossible to avoid. You hear it on Fox News and Dateline and on all the other media outlets that have a vested interest in keeping us distracted: Americans are more divided now than at any time in our history.

You can call bullshit on this if you want. Point out that the civil war and the civil rights eras were much more divisive. You don't really have majorities or significant minorities of the population saying that blacks shouldn't be allowed to vote. You don't really see the states raising armies to attack the other states.

In fact, public opinion in America is much more homogenous now than at any other time. We agree on so much more than we disagree on. But disagreement makes good press and makes politics easy. Does it really matter that some of us eat yellow mustard and others eat brown mustard? It's all still mustard, isn't it?

Yes, you can point this out, and some screaming asshole on MSNBC will shout you down, because THAT'S infotainment. And, as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have shown us, you must fight infotainment WITH infotainment.

George W. Bush once ludicrously characterized himself as a "uniter" not a "divider," but that honorific truly belongs to Ricky Bobby.

Ricky Bobby is a NASCAR hero, a man who equates love with victory and who will finish first or die trying.

His nemesis is Jean Girard, a gay French existentialist Formula 'Un' driver who spends his weekends exchanging bon-mots with Elvis Costello and Mos Def.

Ricky Bobby drives for Wonder Bread. Jean Girard drives for Perrier.

The absurdity of the so-called divisions between us, whether between red staters and blue staters or between America and 'Old' Europe are revealed in the competition between Ricky and Jean.

Ricky drives to win, to be loved. Jean Girard drives to lose, to be destroyed and therefore to be freed from the victory trap, to freed to redefine himself.

In their conflict, we see more similarity than difference. Both men drive, both men are arrogant, both men want to go fast, both men are compelled to win yet find growth only in defeat.

Both men are shadowy reflections of each other. When each stares into the other's eyes it is as if they stare into the abyss. When each sees the other defined only by the crude stereotypes foisted on them by the corporate elite, the owners who will pit each against the other so long as profit can be found, the absurdity of their hubris becomes undeniable.

So I call upon us all, red and blue, coastal and mid-western, liberal and conservative to follow the healing path laid down by Ricky and Jean, to cast aside the petty differences sold to us by the marketeers of strife, to demand from our leaders justice, not vengeance, truth, not truthiness, vision, not pandering.

Then, and only then, will we all go fast.

Four stars, Jason Bob sez this film will save America.