Drive: Vital Americana

Heroism in Metaphysical Winter

WARNING: The following will contain spoilers from “Drive,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Lord of the Rings,” and “The Batman.”

The “he’s literally me” memes are a sign of an eroding society in the deepest depths of winter. Young men are striving to be heroes in a zeitgeist when they’ve been outlawed. The talismans of “literally me,” give millennial and zoomer men alike, a heroic ideal to strive for that is no longer being provided in real life by our leaders or our military.

Ryan Gosling appears to have a controlling interest on such characters, having starred in “The Place Beyond the Pines” and “Blade Runner 2049,” but the film that started this phenomena amongst the younger generations in the late 2010s was 2011’s “Drive.”

For those of you reading this who have not encountered the “literally me” cultural template, it is as follows:

1. Young man witnesses a film or television character he resonates with due to his current lifestyle or due the ideal of the man he wants to be in his heart of hearts.

2. He says “he’s literally me,” and he figuratively means this statement every time it is made.

“Drive” is by every definition, a cult film.

After seeing it in theaters in 2011 while still in high school, I was left with a comforting feeling that told me the contents of my psyche were justified.

Young boys exist with a masculine instinct that is chomping at the bit for a life of adventure and righteous heroism when they are unaware of the modern world’s embargo on such things.

The young boy is the lone, noble knight searching for someone or something to save.

When adolescence arrives this search for heroism has nowhere to go but team sports culture, as our martial traditions have retreated from society as a whole and only live within the bounds of military bases.

The hero is then no longer the promising young swordsman who helped protect the village from the foreign invasions that arrived.

He is no longer the sharpshooter who shooed away the bandits that lurked on the edge of town.

He is the quarterback who threw the “Hail Mary” at the right time.

But of true heroic instinct: the instinct to protect and liberate the innocent who cannot protect and liberate themselves, this is now limited to the policemen who are not afflicted by the fray of red tape and firemen of all walks.

The military lost its chivalry in wake of modern warfare, and the last noble stand took place in the Franco-Prussian War or the Boer War depending on who you ask.

In 2001, men were given a new lease on heroism in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, and recruiting offices had lines going out the door and around the corner. Men found an excuse to take up arms. They found a cause in which violence would be justified and called it heroism. Payback for 911 would be found from boots in the sandbox, and no grey areas would emerge.

Twenty-two years later, Americans have a clearer yet paradoxically more jaded view of the fiascos in the Middle East. No one is normalizing Rambo anymore. No one is gearing up to fight the dragon in Eurasia that was the Soviet Union. There’s no clear enemy, and the men of America have known it since the end of the Cold War.

So where does heroism now lie?

For now, it is relegated mostly to our minds and to our hearts.

But we’re taught heroism from a young age in film and television that has reduced its placed value on such an ideal.

The year 1999 marked the precursor of the “anti-hero” on television with HBO’s “The Sopranos,” and when that plot abruptly ended in 2007, “Mad Men” lead the charge of the many television smash hits that featured an anti-hero as its main character. Don Draper, Walter White, Nicholas Brody, Dexter, Frank Underwood, Thomas Shelby, and the list goes on into the number two and number three shows for all the respective networks at the time.

To briefly explain cyclical history, societies go through seasons. Life, resurgence, and early seeds of prosperity begin with “spring.” These are the early days of a blossoming society, bearing bountiful levels of promise. Next comes summer: the full potential of those seeds from spring have grown, and mankind lives in the full, outward extent of prosperity. Autumn arrives, and this joy and outright nature begins to fade. That then leaves winter: a time when declaring anything worth of any meaning outright seems nonsensical.

There are arguments to be made as to when winter began, but what is clear is that America and the West as a whole are in winter with perhaps some early signs of spring’s arrival.

Winter’s toll on society is as follows:

• The fading of God from society

• The loss of honor and chivalry within the military

• The values of the merchant class supplanting the priest and warrior class in importance

• Feminism

• Sexual Degeneracy

• Feminized Men

• Destruction of the Family

• Fading of nationalism

• Fading of meaning in art

Art of our time has been explained by some as “winter art,” but within this art that has a lack of meaning, there are some examples of outright heroism.

So what defines a hero?

While there are thousands of definitions of hero, the one I’ll plug in is as follows:

A hero is a man who gives his life to a righteous cause using both an either already obtained or gradually acquired high proficiency for violence, restraint, virtue, and rhetoric.

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Declarations of one’s devotion to a life striving for a heroic ideal are now seen as naive or unnecessary. As a result, man’s capacity for rhetoric in his every day life has diminished, and poetry whether in the traditional execution of it on paper, or in an attempt to live it has become something either lost or declared to be feminine.

Imagine for a moment, a current British military officer reciting “One More Unto the Breach…” from “Henry V” before battle. His men would look at him as if he had a stroke, and they might even believe they are in danger of being led into battle by a mentally compromised individual.

And yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find a man who wouldn’t see King Theodin’s speech in Lord of the Rings before the Battle of Pelennor Fields as something that cuts to his bones, rouses him to action, and causes him to long for a purpose greater than himself.

But alas, we no longer live in an era when men can speak with passion and poetry. The only strength for men in our era is in silence.

How this came to pass can be tied to the English language’s decline by the hand of advertising which is another subject I will address in the near future.

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This lack of traditional heroes in the post-modern era has left room only for a tragic, more jaded kind of a hero who in spite of his brokenness stemming from events out his control, has become a singular weapon hellbent on seeking and fulfilling a righteous cause.

Two of the foremost examples of these are Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Max Rockatansky in “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) and Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman in “The Batman” (2022).

In Hardy’s portrayal of Max Rockatansky, he notes his “haunting from both the living and the dead,” as he is tormented by visions and ghosts of the people he could not save in his past and the people he fears he cannot save in the present all while his being has been reduced to one instinct that is survival. The style of filming in the picture forces the lens of anxiety, fury, and trauma that courses through Rockatansky’s veins into his eyes in order for the audience to understand the weight of the burden he bears throughout. He has been reduced to someone who finds trouble in stringing more than one sentence together and does not volunteer his name to his fellow warrior in arms, Furiosa until she nears her death. Even in this moment, to speak his name is to bare his soul: an action that proves far more difficult for him than any of the extreme feats of combat he previously displayed in the film.

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While Max and Furiosa are victorious in their efforts, the only form of celebration seen from Max is a far away nod to Furiosa before rides off beyond the horizon in search of his next righteous cause.

Pattinson’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman has been lauded as the most accurate portrayal of Batman in respect to the comic books, particularly its source material: “The Long Halloween.” Batman was always more noir detective story in the comic books, but film portrayals have typically leaned more into campy superhero adaptations like the films starring Michael Keaton and George Clooney.

Robert Pattinson’s younger Bruce Wayne/Batman presented a misanthropic recluse, wearing his grief and cold rage on his sleeve behind the mask or without it. With a timeline closer to his parents’ death as a child, the audience is presented with a hero not capable of stunning rhetoric or even a demonstrative effort of heroism. He is a concentrated opposite reaction to the crime that claimed his parents’ lives, nothing more. There is a suspension of Wayne’s humanity, and it’s his response to Alfred’s concerns for his life stating, “I don’t care what happens to me,” that shows he is not a selfless hero, but a cold force of nature.

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What “The Batman” does better than any other Batman film is create an environment of decay, corruption, and malaise that wears on the viewer over time. There is a visceral reaction sparked by the slow, grinding pace of the film that is interrupted only by jolts of plausible terrorist attacks in response to this painfully real environment. These events culminate in a climax that rouses Wayne’s humanity from the void and answers a call of people who desperately need a hero. Still, this humanity is a quieter one, and this brand of heroism is shrouded in shadows of a spiritual winter, with Batman’s realization of needing to strive for more: a heroic ideal that is limited to the confines of his own inner monologue:

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“I’m starting to see now. I have had an effect here. But not the one I intended. Vengeance, won’t change the past. Mine… or anyone else’s. I have to become more. People need hope. To know someone’s out there for them. This cities angry, and scarred. Like me. Our scars can destroy us… even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we can survive them. They can give us the power. To Endure. And the strength to fight.”

As preposterous at it may sound, I believe this monologue to be a sign, in the midst our winter art, of spring not being completely out of reach. A man in fiction coming out of a long, jaded, and bleak era and beginning to accept that something more is possible.

But in the midst of our still present winter, the likes of Max Rockastansky and the Batman are only fantasy when it comes to declarations of “literally me.” There is no action, no course of thought that could have one embody a post-apocalyptic wanderer or a billionaire vigilante detective.

And with no righteous causes for the modern military and a select few who answer the call to save people from a fiery grave, the only form of heroism comes in bizarre chances within the mundane.

“Drive” captures such a winter heroism.

“A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Driver, the protagonist who is never named begins the film in the role of a villain: a getaway driver for hire in the middle of driving two bank robbers who then manages to escape the Los Angeles police department’s tracking of him by parking his car in the Staples Center, as a Los Angeles Clippers game is concluding.

The scene is night, neon, and caressed in noir’s shadow, as Kavinsky’s “Nightcall” backs a montage of a drive through the lesser known Los Angeles: the scattered urban sprawl in the gaps between iconic settings and shrines of Americana. The protagonist concludes his journey in the parking garage of his building where he encounters an ethereal yet ordinary young woman on her way to work in a uniform for a service industry job.

The Driver is stoic, nondescript, somber, capable, and detached from the degenerate, scattered, and chaotic world of Los Angeles. While New York City’s anxieties are unavoidable, many a resident of Los Angeles has a relationship with the sprawl where they pick a lane out of the fray and carve a life for themselves within it.

Despite the Driver picking this lane he has picked, his own paths of chaos are not only in being a getaway driver for hire, but a stunt driver for movies when he is not in his baseline grind of working as a mechanic.

The intensity of his nights dominates the monotony of his days until a chance meeting with the woman from his building at the local grocery store. The Driver helps fix her car in the parking lot and interacts with both her and her eight year old son.

Upon being invited into this woman’s apartment, the Driver learns that her name is Irene, that her husband is in jail, and that her son Benicio looks up to him. What is clear is that there is not only a chemistry between Irene and the Driver, but a purity that emerges within both of these quiet, intentional people who had never before conceived of a life beyond their arduous given circumstances. The Driver appears to depart before he begins to form an attachment, but there is a slight hesitation to stay due to his new infatuation that is reciprocated.

The audience gets an immediate payoff from this encounter when Irene and Benicio have their car towed to the Driver's garage in the valley, quite a deal far away from just outside Downtown Los Angeles where both Irene and the Driver live. Irene makes the acquaintance of Shannon, the Driver’s employer in the garage, the movie set, and the incoming stock car racing venture funded by Jewish mobster, Bernie Rose and his less than savory partner, Nino. After some sheepish smiles from both of them and Shannon volunteering the Driver to get Irene and Benicio home, the audience receives a subtly displayed offer of redemption.

"And you have proved to be a real human being and a real hero."

For the first time, the Driver is seen with rays of light in his eyes when he takes Irene and Benicio on a detour to a secluded spot of nature within Los Angeles after scenes of only night, indoors, and wearing sunglasses when in daylight. It is the first time that the Driver can feel something outside of his secluded life.

After several dates of driving with Irene and ingratiating himself with her and Benicio at their home, the Driver becomes more open about the question of whether or not he can be truly good.

The Driver playfully questions Benicio about his views of a character in a cartoon they watch together.

"How do you know he's a bad guy?"

"Just look at him, he's a shark."

"Sharks cant be good guys?"

"No."

This answer visibly upsets the Driver who then received more bad news of Irene's husband, Standard Gabriel getting out of jail. The Driver journeys back into the night alone, sitting at a diner with an entire side of the bar top to himself before a former client of his comes to say hello and inquires about another job. It is in this moment when the "shark" within fully surfaces and coldly cuts off this man’s inquiry by saying "shut your mouth, or I'll kick your teeth down your throat and shut it for you."

The Driver makes it a point to say to all of his criminal customers that he does not carry a gun and solely drives, so this is the first instance in which we see the clinical, shark-like nature he displays behind the wheel bleed out into threats of violence.

In a “welcome home” party for Standard Gabriel, we receive two perspectives, one from the Driver who is hearing music from this party muffled through the walls: a dream pop song called “Under Your Spell,” by Montreal-based duo, Desire. The Driver is doing his best to ignore the noise while fixing something at his table, while Irene has her mind visibly on the Driver despite her forcing a smile during her husband’s speech declaring his need to do better for the sake of his family. When the view is shifted back towards the Driver, the music is no longer muffled, drawing him into the lyrics that echo throughout the scene.

“I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I do nothing but think of you. You keep me under your spell. You keep me under your spell. You keep me under your spell.”

The Driver switches off the lamp above his table and leaves his apartment to see Irene sitting on the floor against the wall outside of her apartment. They lock eyes with each other for one of the greatest scenes of mutual longing in the history of cinema.

“Sorry about the noise.”

“I was going to call the cops.”

“I wish you would.”

Their tender moment is interrupted by a meeting with Standard Gabriel who is taking out the trash with Benicio and introduces himself to the Driver and thanks him for “helping out” Irene and Benicio during a tense yet strangely friendly meeting.

The next time the Driver sees Standard is in the parking lot of the building with a bloodied face while urging Benicio to not tell his mother about this incident. Standard was beaten by the hands of a gang who offered him protection in prison for an ever-increasing price and then asked him to rob a pawn shop in order to clear his debt which he refuses to accept.

When the Driver sees that these criminals handed Benicio a bullet to “hold onto,” the audience sees an expression on the Driver’s face that is simultaneously the shark within and one of righteous fatherly rage. The Driver asks Benicio if he can hold onto the bullet for him, a proposition Benicio accepts.

The Driver offers to help Standard with the pawn shop hesit and declares his terms to his shady employer. The job itself becomes a double cross in which Standard is shot and killed, and the Driver is left on the run with an accomplice named Blanche who was pre-assigned by the job’s employer and carries one million dollars as opposed to the forty thousand that was originally supposed to be stolen. The Driver interrogates Blanche for information about the double cross and for the name of their employer, Chris Cook. Shortly after, two assassin’s who tracked the pair down to their motel successfully murder Blanche, but they are overpowered and killed by the Driver.

The Driver tracks down Chris Cook and bashes his hand with a hammer and places the bullet he gave to Benicio on his head, threatening to nail it into his skull until Cook calls his employer who turns out to be the silent partner of the stock car racing venture, Nino. Nino refuses to meet with the Driver after a short conversation on the phone and instead sends an assassin to kill the Driver at his apartment building. The assassin arrives shortly after a tense conversation between Irene and the Driver in which the Driver confesses his involvement in the operation gone awry that got her husband killed. The assassin is identified by the Driver in an elevator when he sees a narrow view of his gun under his suit jacket.

It is in this moment that the Driver silently laments the realization that he will have to show the shark within himself to Irene in order to save their lives. He takes a tender moment of peace to kiss Irene in the elevator before taking down the assassin and stomping out his skull. Irene is horrified at this sight, and the Driver stares at her with eyes that scream “I’m sorry,” “I did this to save your life,” “sadly, this is what I am,” and “I hope you still love me after all of this.”

The Driver deduces that someone must have revealed his location, and after realizing that it could have only been Shannon, he confronts him in the garage for Shannon to then warn him to flee Los Angeles before Nino kills them both. In a conversation between Bernie Rose and Nino that is spoken in front of Cook, Nino confesses his double crossing of the Driver and Standard Gabriel in the pawn shop heist was part of a plot to prevent a Philadelphia mobster’s entry into the Los Angels crime world. The partners agree that all men with knowledge of the job need to be killed in order to prevent the job being tied to them and subsequently pursued and killed by the East Coast Italian Mafia. Bernie Rose kills Cook at the conclusion of this conversation and travels to the garage to question Shannon who refuses to reveal the Driver’s whereabouts, resulting in Bernie regretfully slicing his wrist with a straight razor while declaring his apologies for Shannon’s bad luck in his knowledge of the operation.

The Driver is enraged in finding Shannon’s corpse at the garage and is roused into action, stealing a prosthetic makeup bust he used as a stunt double in one of his film jobs to wear in his steady, cold, and quiet pursuit of Nino on the Pacific Coast Highway. The pursuit concludes with the Driver ramming Nino’s car off a cliff and menacingly walking towards a crawling Nino on the beach to drown him in the Pacific Ocean.

The Driver calls Irene to tell her he cannot return and that her and Benicio were the greatest part of his life. It is a gut-wrenching call with no answer that signifies the death of the Driver’s hope for a brighter life as a potential husband and stepfather with the pair he’s grown to love and grown convicted to protect.

It is through this protective instinct that he calls Bernie Rose for a final standoff to cut a deal to protect Irene and Benicio. The Driver meets Bernie at a Chinese restaurant in broad daylight and informs him that the money is in his car parked outside. Bernie guarantees that Irene and Benicio will be spared but warns that the Driver will have to be on the run for the rest of his life. The pair go outside to make the exchange, with Bernie stabbing the Driver before the Driver stabs Bernie to death.

The Driver sits in his car bleeding and staring and out of his windshield with a frozen, sorrowful expression, as rays of light shine upon his eyes once more with the lyrics “real human being and a real hero” faintly playing one last time. The memory of the Driver in his purest form fades away in exchange for this act of heroism, protecting the people he has loved briefly and loved most from the world of his unfortunate past before the song is played at full volume. Amidst this audience’s goodbye, Irene is shown in a dress knocking on the door of the Driver’s apartment with no answer, resulting in face that wish it could cry. The Driver then drives into the night with a sad expression on his face, doomed to carry on in the same way he lived before he met his chance at fulfillment that was so mercilessly smothered to death. He did not ask Irene and Benicio to run away with him in the fashion of a selfish man but drove away to ensure they would remain unharmed for the rest of their lives.

The Driver lived a life far closer to a villain, but he answered the call to live out redemption adjacent to a Christian standard of one. His capacity for violence and quick decision making was used to protect the innocent instead of exploiting strangers. The skills acquired from his life of sin were made righteous through his heroic actions and his decision to self-sacrifice. A human being and hero indeed.

We are in a time when sound rhetoric is scarce, inspiring speeches in surges of thumos are dead, heroism is outlawed in the name of alleged pragmatism, balance sheets usurp hierarchy, and enchantment is a thing of the not so distant past.

You, the American man cannot leave the cinema after watching a superhero film and suddenly acquire billions to pursue an effective career as a vigilante. You cannot enlist in the United States Military and fight in a conflict of sound moral backing. No one is coming to rob your town at high noon. You can don a badge to serve and protect, but you’ll likely forget about that ideal amidst paperwork and removing homeless folk from places they aren’t permitted to stand and beg in. You can carry people out of burning buildings, but if heat is a force that melts you, your inspiration has nowhere to go unless you manage to live with your mind and soul completely in the background world with an undying discipline of prayer and an uncommon ability to hear through post-modern white noise and see through the muck on our fellow citizens’ souls.

But every once in a while, amidst your struggle with the nastier enemy of the grey that is far more difficult to condemn than the black, you may be presented an opportunity to rise to heroism in a tight window within the mundane that will likely be thankless, muted, and brutal. But until a conflict and renaissance arrive and endsthis time of metaphysical winter, this the only force that will keep heroism in America alive.

Remember this winter’s vital Americana.