Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 48
We watched the road rage film Unhinged and wrote 1,000 word about what it means for cities
We're given to media studies here in the urban technology program, as you may remember from a previous discussion of Only Lovers Left Alive, the vampire movie set in Detroit and Tangier that offers a sharp critique of shoddy and expedient urban technology. This week we did something that very few others have ever done. We watched the 2020 film Unhinged starring Russell Crowe and Caren Pistorius so that you don’t have to.
Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan, written by faculty director Bryan Boyer, to explore the many issues and themes at the intersection of cities and technology. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction.
🛻 We’re as surprised as you are
Unhinged was not high on a list of must-see movies and does not immediately appear to be a reflection on the role of technology in today's cities, but if you look past the top notes of working class rage, patriarchal entitlement, and gratuitous violence, the movie contains a more nuanced commentary on urban planning and digital lifestyles.
Like many of the ails of modern life, Unhinged starts with a traffic jam. “Too many cars and too many people,” protagonist Rachel mutters under her breath. Right off the bat, the choice architecture of her car-dominated city is conditioning Rachel toward anti-social feelings inspired by the frustration of being stuck with nowhere to go. Though Rachel's city is not named in the movie, urbanists in the audience know immediately that it's not Muenster, Germany—home of the infamous image below comparing the amount of space needed to move 60 people by cycle, car, and bus—because that's a town that has known the problem is certainly too many cars and not too many people.
Rachel, driving a beat up Volvo station wagon, finds herself behind a brauny truck and lays into the horn when the truck lingers at a green light. She's agitated because her son is late for school (and other grievances) and after honking at the truck she speeds around him only to get stuck in traffic once again. The truck appears beside her vehicle and its driver insists that she was rude for not giving a 'courtesy tap.'
The driver of the mastodon-sized American truck is angry that Ms. Station Wagon did not follow social norms of giving her counterpart a chance to correct behavior before getting angry. The lack of social grace that Mr. Truck perceives is what sets him off, and from there he goes on a literal death spiral. Translation: social graces are hugely important in this busy world of ours, and even more so in the technological mediated public realm of the (American, car-dominated) city. Does the technology you utilize on a daily basis make it easier or harder for you to be empathetic with others?
After a spat about courtesy taps, Rachel speeds away only to get stuck in another traffic jam. Mr. Truck pulls up behind and slowly begins crushing her vehicle, further antagonizing a very freaked out Rachel and her son. "But Rachel," you will want to tell at the television, "get out and run!" The vengeful truck is immobilized by strangling traffic on all sides and there's no way that Russell Crowe (who, to put it politely, is not in great shape in this movie) would be able to outrun a teenage boy and his lithe mother as they weave through the standstill vehicles. This is Rachel's chance to use traffic, the real antagonist of the movie, to save herself and her child! Unfortunately, she is too blind to the possibility. The status-quo has trained Rachel to see her vehicle as an extension of herself rather than one among many choices for how she moves through the city.
The station wagon and its passengers escape. Rachel stops for gas after dropping off her son and when she returns from paying the bill, guess who has caught up with her? Mr. Truck. She manages to get into her car and speed off while losing the Truck, but little does Rachel know that Mr. Mastodon has stolen her phone!
At this point the movie takes on a new villain. While roads and their complications produce rage, what gets you killed is poor cyber hygiene. The film makes a big deal out of Rachel's preference to not use a password on her phone (because it causes distracted driving, apparently?). Without her phone and its maps and other records, Rachel is lost. With access to her email, calendar, and contacts, Mr. Truck decides to inflict maximum pain on Rachel (again, all for not giving a courtesy tap) and drives to a diner where Rachel's friend is waiting for her. Lesson: use two-factor authentication and strong passwords or some crazy dude is going to steal your phone and then murder your lawyer friend.
After much drama, Rachel and her son (now picked up from school) discovered that Mr. Truck has taped an iPad under the drivers seat of the station wagon and has been using its GPS to track them. No wonder they can't lose him! Whereas Rachel is blind to the choice of not using a car at all, she is simply without choice when it comes to technology. GPS tracking is foisted upon Rachel against her will, and at great cost to her personal safety. At this point you might as well get rid of anything with a screen on it, the film is suggesting, and that's what Rachel does by tossing the tablet out the window.
Of course that's not how the movie ends. Mr. Truck has already found the station wagon and thus a final chase ensues. Rachel has the brilliant idea to use traffic engineering, cause of the initial traffic jam frustrations, as a weapon against Mr. Truck. She speeds away, leading him into the planned community housing tract. Rachel knows the neighborhood because it's where her mother used to live, but with houses that look the same and a featureless public realm, Mr. Truck is lost immediately. Dazed and confused by urban planning—but not in a good way!
Mr. Mastodon truck punches a child, other violence happens, and then Rachel assaults him with a car and eventually incapacitates Mr. Truck and the movie ends.
Will this movie make any sense to kids who grow up with autonomous vehicles, some decades from now? Good question! While the specific downsides of autotopia that Unhinged reveals will likely fade, new ones will take their place in an AV world. Road rage will be supplanted by other interpersonal quibbles in AV shuttles. People can be rude with a car, a cell phone, or a robotaxi, and misunderstandings will never go extinct despite changes in everyday technology. Traffic jams are less likely in a future where vehicles are autonomous and connected, but instead you might find yourself with longer travel times as cities sprawl further into the countryside. Either way, you're waiting.
One thing is sure to be familiar to future generations, regardless of what changes technologically: will autonomous vehicles fix the privileged position of Mr. Truck (literally elevated in his giant vehicle) and his conviction that a social slight should be paid for in blood? Spoiler alert: absolutely not, autonomous vehicles will not do a single thing to dismantle the patriarchy, systemic racism, or class struggle.
We watched Unhinged so that you didn't have to, so here's the lesson that we draw from it: even the best-intentioned urban planning will eventually produce everyday frictions that should, if at all possible, be resolved socially before annoyance accumulates into unbridgeable rage (justified or not). When the reality of everyday life is complicated beyond repair, a combination of inventive interpretations of conventional urban planning wisdom (e.g. suburb = maze) and technology (car = attack device) create new opportunities to resolve the issue. Unhinged took this lesson in an extremely challenging direction with little cinematic reward, but what would be the storyline in an alternative that substitutes violence with redesign?
Links
🛋 I love lamp, and especially lamps that fly.
🚶♂️ Anika Goss, CEO of Detroit Future Cities, advocates for creating missing data sets as part of advocacy for improvements to the public realm. Yes!
🕯 Will you notice the last time you see a stoplight? Thoughtful interpretation by gnonymus bosch on Twitter of the Johan Christian Dahl painting, View of Dresden by Moonlight: “it's one of the last depictions of Dresden before street lighting was introduced… very shortly after its creation in 1839, Johan Christian Dahl had already depicted a view gone forever.”
🕶 Speaking of disappearing views in cities, here’s an AR app to visually delete building in Shinjuku.
👩🔬 And if you want to make your time disappear, get lost in the Wilson Center’s Science Stack list of low cost, open source tools for generating new data.
This week: An important meeting that ended well. Research projects. Docs, docs, docs, and a piece of bookkeeping: careful readers may notice that we’ve switched away from a t-minus countdown. We wont bore you with the details of why, but from now on we will be counting up. 🏃