Cars 3

It’s been six years since Cars 2 was released, and since the Cars franchise is a money-printing juggernaut for Pixar, they’re putting out another one. Lightning McQueen is still the great racer he’s always been, but nowadays he’s being outclassed by a new generation of high-tech racing machines whom he can’t compete with, and all his old friends and colleagues are retiring because they feel they can’t compete with the up and coming generation either. Lightning doesn’t want to quit and stop doing the thing he loves, but the racing world is changing; becoming more advanced and a lot more colder. Cars 3 itself is a colder movie; the first Cars and Cars 2 were filled with love and warmth for car and racing culture, but Cars 3 is a lot more tense.

One thing that makes the movie more tense is that there’s a lot of “teasing” going on. Many of the jokes are essentially insults, and the inspirational and motivational messaging lands like a put-down. In recent times it feels to me like a lot of messages meant to sound uplifting or encouraging are hollow, back-handed, condescending or discouraging, as if the person who says she wants you to succeed secretly wants or expects you to fail. Lightning McQueen is constantly being bombarded with statements meant to make him feel bad and while he tries to deal with it as gracefully as he can, I would feel bad if I were in his tires. Cruz says that “you can use anything negative to push through toward the positive”. I disagree with that; not everyone thrives on being insulted or put-down. Most of the time it just hurts. Teasing wouldn’t hurt if you trusted the person you were with and understood implicitly that you’re both joking around [you see this a lot more near the end of the movie], but actually hurting someone and then implying that it shouldn’t hurt adds insult to the injury, blaming the victim for being hurt. This kind of behavior not only makes me mad at characters I’m supposed to be mad at like Jackson Storm and Chick Hicks, but also makes me dislike Lightning’s new training partner Cruz Ramirez right out of the gate. This anger doesn’t fuel me to perform better; it makes me want to visualize Cruz Ramirez getting totaled in a nasty accident, which is more likely to distract me from achieving my overall goals and possibly inspire me to do some things I’d likely regret.

Thankfully, Cars 3 has Cruz Ramirez getting very humbled indeed. It turns out that while in the training center she’s all talk, but out in the real world on real terrain where Lightning has real experience, Cruz doesn’t know anything about anything and Lightning is the one who has to train her, which also tests his patience. One of Cruz’s earliest races is at a demolition derby race, and even she knows she has no business being there, but wins mostly by sitting out, letting other racers destroy themselves, and letting Lightning McQueen sacrifice himself for her safety. Cruz later admits in her character’s defining moment that the reason she became a trainer when she wanted to be a racer was because she lost all her confidence. I should be sympathetic, and yet I find it difficult to assess how I should woke score it. She lost her confidence, as many of us do, but she seems to get her kicks acting confident while undermining the confidence of other racers, and something inside me views that as being a borderline villain origin: you wanted to be a hero, but your dreams were smashed so now you smash other people’s dreams to make yourself feel better. Especially since Cruz says her parents intentionally didn’t want her to be ambitious, and she backed out of her first race because “none of the other racers looked like me”. Is that supposed to imply she thought she couldn’t compete because because she was female and Hispanic? All I can say is that a genuinely confident person doesn’t need to put others down in order to make herself feel good or strong. Someone who has real confidence would use her strengths to generously build others up without worrying about compromising her own status.

Lightning does genuinely help Cruz build back some of her lost confidence by going on a nostalgia tour and talking to some older, more experienced racers, and this is where the movie earns back some of the warmth that was sadly missing in the first two thirds of the movie. Lightning also regains confidence in himself when he learns that just because he might have to retire from racing doesn’t mean his life is over, as his mentor Hudson also regained his lost confidence when he started to train Lightning back in the first film. In the end, Cruz does earn her first real victory, but I’m more pleased with Lightning McQueen’s magnanimity, as he’s a better and more encouraging trainer than Cruz ever was to him.

A couple extra things:

Before practicing racing on a sandy beach, Lightning tells Cruz “Life’s a beach, and then you drive.”

Lightning and Cruz mistakenly sign up for a demolition derby, and one of the rules is “No cursing. It’s family night.”