“We’re finally getting out of this turkey town and now you want to crawl back into your cell, right? You can’t just stay seventeen forever.”
My first car was a 1994 Toyota Camry—one of the special ones with the gold badges and electric windows and sunroof and, would you believe it, a working CD player! It was hardly the bastion of Americana and car culture that you find in the Caddies and Bel Airs and Corvettes and Corsairs of George Lucas’ American Graffiti, yet I can’t help but relate to the characters driving those cars.
The film follows four young men—Curt, Steve, John, and Terry—through one night in the summer of 1962, sometimes separate and sometimes together. All four of them get into various forms of tomfoolery, skullduggery even, but they are four sides of the same coin, all being inspired by different parts of George Lucas’ real life. Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is a mild-mannered high school graduate who has just received a scholarship, but is leaning towards staying home and attending the local junior college instead of moving away with Steve (Ron Howard), his more brash friend. Meanwhile, John (Paul Le Mat) is trying to keep hold of his title as the town’s fastest drag racer while also cruising with an unwanted passenger. And then there’s Terry (Charles Martin Smith), the stereotypical nerd, who has been loaned Steve’s Impala while he goes away for college, and who uses this newfound freedom and masculinity to pick up a girl and lie his way into her heart.
The focal point of American Graffiti, though, is the contrast between Curt and Steve, the two recent high school graduates. Steve is certain he wants to leave their “turkey town,” aiming to fly off to college the very next day. He offers a somewhat one-sided deal to his girlfriend, Laurie (Cindy Williams), which would allow them to remain together but also to see other people while he’s away at school so he can engage in the pleasures of college life. He becomes so focused on the idea of chasing tail that she officially breaks up with him before the night is over and he’s left alone.
All the while Curt is drifting like a ghost from friend group to friend group around town, never really fitting in. Most of his screen time is spent alone, wandering until he comes across someone who will take him in. At one point he even helps a local car gang rob some pinball machines and sabotage a cop car. He is asked multiple times about his college plans, always timidly saying he’s thinking of staying home but never giving a concrete reason why. All night, however, he is taunted by a beautiful blonde woman in a white Thunderbird, who he swears was trying to speak to him on the main drag. He obsesses over finding this white Thunderbird, trying to follow it whenever possible and even putting a call out for her over the radio. Multiple people claim to know who she is—some say she is the daughter of a local business owner, others say she is a Lady of the Night—but to Curt, she represents one thing: a reason to stay.
“It doesn’t make sense to leave home to look for home, to give up a life to find a new life, to say goodbye to friends you love just to find new friends.”
Now, I wasn’t drag racing my Camry down Main Street and swapping out girls at every stoplight like they do in American Graffiti, but I did stay out far too late driving with friends and girlfriends, testing the local law enforcement’s ability to stop those of us willing to challenge the limits of the North Carolina Limited Provisional Driver’s License. I wasn’t driving to a soundtrack of Buddy Holly and Wolfman Jack, but these outings were usually scored by the likes of No Doubt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And believe me, if I didn’t have any other passengers or cargo in the car with me, I could beat anyone’s mom off the line at any given stoplight in their overpriced 4-cylinder Mustang—laying down all 125 horses of my Japanese muscle on the roads paved by the fine folks at the NC Division of Highways.
By the time I moved on to my next car—a 2003 Pontiac Grand Prix, the true symbol of American Engineering—my Camry had only one functioning electric window out of four and two broken door handles, both of which were on the driver’s side. It took both hands and an extensive song-and-dance to get the door open, and it was a routine I mastered so as to avoid the humiliation of opening the door for myself from the passenger side. The engine would cut out any time I stopped, and at least once a week a fuse would blow that wiped out both my headlights and all my dashboard gauges, meaning I was actively endangering the general public by exercising my Constitutional Right to Burn Rubber. The one constant was the sunroof, which never faltered. When it wasn’t dumping leaves on me after being parked under a tree for too long, it was turning the interior into a convection oven. But that Camry got me through two years of high school and a year of college.
Clearly, car culture and life in general isn’t the same as it was in the ’50s and ’60s, but still the Fear remains—the fear of moving away, of losing what we know to give way to a world of unknowns. Like Curt and Steve, America was also going through a major transition in 1962. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the JFK assassination and eventually the Vietnam War, every major historical moment over the next few years chipped away at the American way of life, making it harder and harder to go back to the way things were. And that still rings true today, as we seem to face those historical moments every couple weeks or more, while still trying to cling onto a vision of the country that simply does not and cannot exist anymore. But we don’t even know what that vision is. Like Curt’s blonde woman in the Thunderbird, what we think we want is always elusive and undefinable. It doesn’t matter what that T-Bird might represent, as long as it keeps us safe in the comfort of our old ways. To define it would make it real, and we might find it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. To define it would mean there is an actual destination and a reason for the chase. Do we really want an end to our pursuit of the Good Old Days, or is the pursuit an end in itself?
“You’re the most beautiful, exciting thing I’ve ever seen in my life and I don’t know anything about you.”
In the end, Curt can’t connect with the blonde woman in the T-Bird and decides he will fly to college the next day, while Steve decides to stay home a little longer and reconnect with Laurie before moving away. Steve realizes he can’t erase his past to make his future arrive more quickly, and Curt realizes he can’t put off his future in order to remain in the past forever. Before he became a glorified toy salesman, George Lucas was already hinting at the necessity of balance that would be prevalent throughout the entirety of his marginally successful sci-fi franchise. Accepting the things you can’t change and all that jazz.
As Curt takes off in a plane to fly across the country, though, he sees a white car driving down on the ground. It’s his Thunderbird. It looks awfully small from the air, but he can still see it following him and now he’s able to appreciate it from afar. Up close, the Thunderbird was the most “beautiful” and “exciting” thing he had ever seen. In reality, it is insignificant—just a speck compared to the vast sky in front of him and the sprawling country laid out below him. It is no longer a specter he chases around street corners, a constantly changing mirage drawing him toward a destination he can’t define. Now, he can recognize it for what it is: a fond memory that he can look back on, a small blur in his past that momentarily kept him from where he needed to be.
In hindsight, it’s all a bit childish and stupid, but then again, so is high school.
I Write What I Want 