Who Killed The Electric Car?
Starring: Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Martin Sheen, Phyllis Diller, Chelsea Sexton
Written by: Chris Paine
Directed by: Chris Paine
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Rated: PG
As the earth’s atmosphere heats up and a host of other environmental concerns creep into the public’s consciousness, the more active corridors of public awareness do something about it: they make documentaries. As a cinematic environmental warning, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was well-behaved. It spoke of the earth’s environmental problems in clear, rational tones. Hard on its heels, Chris Paine’s Who Killed The Electric Car? speaks a language almost any American political conservative can understand: the universal American love of the automobile.
With a thick beard and a glint in his eye, Mel Gibson talks about his electric car, about how quiet, fast and efficient it was. He makes reference to feeling like Batman whenever he drove it out of the garage. You’d think he was talking about a fantasy vehicle—not that many people actually possessed electric cars at once. Just like everyone else, Mel Gibson no longer drives an electric car because they were never leased to buy. They were all property of the auto manufacturers. Just as quickly as they appeared on the road, they disappeared.
The electric cars of a few years ago weren’t clumsy hybrids or inefficient, Byzantine hydrogen fuel celled vehicles. Created by major auto manufacturers only a few years ago, they were simple, efficient and cheap. You simply plugged the car into your garage wall at night and unplugged it the following morning. You could drive over 100 miles before you needed to recharge. There being no internal combustion engine, it didn’t break down or need repair nearly as much as its gas-powered colleagues. The owners of the electric cars loved them. Then the auto manufacturers took them all back.
Paine’s exploration into the arrival and sudden disappearance of the electric car is both deeply touching and profoundly frustrating. From talking-head interviews with CEOs and engineers to footage of an all-night vigil outside a company lot by dedicated former owners of the vehicles, this is a ceaselessly provocative film. From behind the lens, Paine systematically tries every “suspect” in the death of the electric car. Some pretty obvious verdicts are reached. The big oil companies and the auto manufacturers who apparently make a fortune on disposable vehicles and replacement engine parts are two of the biggest villains here. As the film illustrates, however, it took just as many people to pull the vehicles off the road as it did to put them there in the first place.
The deepest impact in Paine’s film is felt when it casts its attention on those people who owned the vehicles and loved them enough to find out why they couldn’t keep them. There’s a lingering feeling of disgust at the fact that popular demand was completely irrelevant in the case of the electric car, even in what is advertised as a free-market economy. We should know better. VS
Russ Bickerstaff is a local poet and writer. His poems can be heard regularly at Linneman's Monday Poetry Night.
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