Cars 3 was fine. There's always something to enjoy in a Pixar film, if nothing else the art. Cars 2 had wonderful ocean animation (notoriously hard to do) and breathtaking city scapes. Cars 3 had racetracks, including an old abandoned one, that looked so completely real it was almost a shock when talking cars with eyes rolled onto them.
I have some gripes that were shared by others. For one thing, the gang from Radiator Springs has virtually nothing to do in this movie, just enough to ensure sales of the toys continue. I don't think poor old Lizzie had a single line of dialogue.
Suffice it to say it's the story of an aging star athlete who has to face the end of his career; not usually the stuff of kids' movies. Then again, the end of a loving relationship was the heart of Toy Story 3, and I don't even want to talk about Up. Is Pixar making movies for old people or children?
There is a serious plot point I want to address here, though, but to do so I will first have to issue a
Okay, here we go.
Disney can be proud of itself, I suppose, that like other great organizations such as the Boy Scouts, they're able to tell boys, go cram it, kids, no one needs you.
The plot of the movie has Lightning McQueen being outraced by a new breed of racecar; to get back in shape following an accident and get in racing trim he gets trained by Cruz Ramirez, a female sports car who -- surprise! -- wanted to be a racer but lacked the confidence.
Because if there's one thing all personal trainers who work for billion-dollar training facilities have in common, it's lack of confidence.
In the end, Lightning pulls out of a big race in the middle and, with the most bizarre use of rules you will ever see in a movie, gets Cruz into the race wearing his number 95 to finish. She had not even run a time trial, had never been entered as a contender in this race or a competitor on the circuit. Lightning hadn't even crashed at that point, he just gave up.
The precedent this sets is ridiculous. As this is allowed, it will mean that every race team from that point will have four or five spare cars ready to go with the same number, cars with secret technological edges. If a squad starts a guy and he's having a bad day, they can freely substitute other cars as desired under this rule. It was stone-cold stupid.
But, okay, fine. By sharing the win with Cruz, Lightning gets to keep racing if he wants to. He is also going to mentor her the way Doc Hudson mentored him (although he was already a star by the time he met Doc Hudson in the first picture). And now Cruz Ramirez is the star if the Cars world.
And what's your problem with that, you big sexist bastard? you may ask.
My problem isn't really about the setup. Auto racing is one of few sports where women and men are able to compete against one another. I think it's safe to say that Danica Patrick, going by her record, wouldn't be a big star if she looked like a horse's patootie instead of the assistant DA on a Dick Wolf show. Never mind; we can certainly suppose that a woman can and eventually will win the biggest races.
My problem is just that the Cars world had been particularly special to boys. Ten years ago or so when Disney had princesses out the bazooty but was unable to make a successful film for boys (Meet the Robinsons: too creepy, Mars Needs Moms: don't ask), they had Cars. Whenever you saw Princess-themed Disney stuff, you saw Cars-themed Disney stuff too. They might as well have written "For Boys" on the Cars toothpaste, sheets, PJs, and so on. And now they've turned the wheel over to a female character.
It doesn't stop there, of course. They bought the Star Wars universe so that they'd have something boys would want to see -- and turned that over to a female character, too.
If they'd gotten involved with Marvel ten years later than they did, the first joint picture wouldn't have been Iron Man, it would have been Black Widow or Girl Thor or something.
And there's no reciprocity on this. In the girls' movies Disney has been making, men are shrinking to insignificance. Let's put 2010's Tangled and its Flynn Rider aside as an outlier (Disney was desperate to get boys to like the movie, which is why the title was changed from Rapunzel). In The Princess and the Frog, the prince is a numbskull; Ray the firefly is more useful and he's a comic-relief bug. All the men in Brave are total idiots. The two young dudes in Frozen are a two-faced usurper and a ludicrous nonentity. And in Mary Sue -- sorry, Moana -- the male lead is a god and still plays second fiddle to the spunky kid who is always right.
Non-Disney properties like Harry Potter and sort-of Disney property Percy Jackson do star boys, but make it painfully clear that their female friends (Hermoine, Annabeth) are the real brains of the operation. Annabeth insults Percy regularly in a way that would get a boy thrown out of school if he did that to a girl -- and the school would be right to do so.
The point is, by wanting to be progressive, Disney is stomping on the audience they were targeting in the first place. It's exactly what's been happening in Marvel comics: as Instapundit says, Get Woke, Go Broke. But Disney's properties have a lot of ruin in them; they can insult and ignore boys for decades without seeing a direct line to loss of revenue, and even then they'd probably still keep at it. Toxic masculinity is the crisis of the day to the intelligentsia. A woman I used to respect reposted this last week:
Now that's inclusivity -- she includes her beloved dad, the man she married, her male friends; all of us think a man who rapes is better than a woman who has sex. Every goddamn one of us. Because now it's fine to stereotype and stuff.
And this is why it's okay when boys are informed that they are nothing special, that girls are really better, just as they are being told in schools. When they let girls into the Boy Scouts last fall, I said that boys had nothing left they could call their own; everything had been taken from them. Now I see that Cars has been taken too.
I suggest rather that boys need good, manly role models; the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are not men of honor and dignity. But our broken families and our sick culture are incapable of doing this. It's a mystery to many why boys are failing to launch, not marrying, not becoming fathers, and adapting to life as losers -- except to Dr. Helen Smith, who explained in Men on Strike that this is a logical response to being shamed, overlooked, neglected.
The more militant may say Good, it's time the men got a taste of their own medicine. Well, these are their own sons, boys who came into the world not having subjugated anything, the boys who are supposed to be role models for the generation after them. Do they really think this is going to work out for society in the long run?
As Lewis wrote, "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." Get ready for more.
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