Camus in Cars Getting Caught
What does a famous existentialist have in common with people who get caught up in high-speed car chases with the police?
By James Vescovi
Years ago, a friend invited me to read to an elderly woman who was going blind. I accepted the invite, though not purely for humanitarian reasons. The woman was Estelle O’Brien, the wife of the man who’d once translated the work of Albert Camus, of whom I was a great fan. He was the late Justin O’Brien, a professor of French literature at Columbia University. A date was set. I arrived at Mrs. O’Brien’s apartment house in the late afternoon and was greeted by my friend, Joan. She ushered me into a large, elegant living room. Estelle, a tiny woman in her eighties, rose from a chair to give me a cordial welcome. We sat down to read from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina because, as our hostess informed us, though she’d read the book a half dozen times, she wanted to make the acquaintance of Anna, Count Vronsky, Dolly, and Konstantin Levin once more.
We read for an hour, after which Estelle’s aide served us supper. It was during the meal that I’d planned to make inquiries about Camus. I wanted details and vignettes that hadn’t appeared in biographies. However, not wanting to appear mercenary, I waited until dessert before posing a question. It was something along the lines of, “What was Camus like as a person?”
Estelle O’Brien looked up from her chocolate ice cream and studied me for a while. I felt as if I’d asked an inappropriate question. She then smiled and kindly informed me that she could think of nothing to say about the great existential philosopher and returned to her dessert. I was surprised, but undeterred. I waited until Joan and I were getting on our coats by the front door, then asked the question in different words—and got the same response: She really couldn’t recall much about the author and his wife, Francine; it was so long ago, she added. I looked sideways at Joan and thought, “Don’t people who’ve rubbed elbows with Nobel-prize winning authors want to share their impressions?”
Just before Joan and I stepped out in the hallway, Estelle had mercy on me—the young grasshopper seeking knowledge. In a voice whose tone declared this was the only observation about Camus I was to receive, she said, “Albert Camus detested speed.” By this, she meant not only fast-moving objects but also the increasing pace of modern life. And that was that.
On my bewildered walk home, I noted the irony of her comment. On January 4, 1960, Camus died when a sports car driven by his publisher’s nephew, Michel Gallimard, went off a road and hit a tree southeast of Paris. Camus expired instantly, Gallimard a few days later. Police said the driver had not been speeding, though accounts vary on whether or not the road was slippery. Camus’s biographer Robert Zarestsky reports that when a friend warned Camus—himself the owner of a rarely-used Citroën—about the danger of driving on highways, the philosopher responded, “Don’t worry, I hate speed and don’t like automobiles.”
What possesses a person to race through three counties at 96 miles per hour, drive against traffic on city streets, and decapitate mailboxes, only to find themselves arrested and facing years in jail—all to avoid a minor citation like a broken taillight?
Camus came vividly to mind—thirty years after my dinner with Ms. O’Brien—when I found myself watching YouTube car chase videos during the Covid lockdown. I was teaching high school English via Zoom. Worried about the students’ transition from classroom to bedroom (where most “attended” class), the administration told us to go light on homework. Consequently, I had time on my hands. I was a fan of Hollywood car chases, but the pursuits on YouTube were different. The vehicles were driven not by professional stunt drivers, but by the average Joe (or Josephine)—people just like me. As teenagers growing up in suburban Michigan, my friends and I fantasized about fleeing from a cop trying to pull us over on suspicion of having open cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the car.
As I watched video after video, between classes or in the evenings while my wife slept, the connection to Camus became clear: The videos all had the ingredients of a classic existential text:
- a rebel who’s broken the law in an absurd and unfair universe;
- a confrontation with the Powers That Be in the guise of law enforcement; and
- an encounter that cannot possibly end in victory or justice for the rebel behind the wheel.
I imagined Sisyphus—Camus’s Greek alter ego, who pushes a boulder up a mountain—weaving in and out of traffic on a big-city beltway. Or better yet, Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger, pulled over for an expired license plate tag. As the gendarme checks for prior warrants, Meursault speeds off in his Renault. Soon several police cruisers are hot on his trail. After a long pursuit, the cops execute a pit-maneuver, in which a police car taps the lawbreaker’s vehicle at the point of the gas aperture. The tactic causes the rebel’s car to spin 180 degrees. Executed successfully, it comes to a halt against a guardrail or on a grassy median. His fated sealed, Meursault now finds himself surrounded by guns; a German Shepherd barks and slashes his paws against the window.
YouTube’s real-life pursuits and their near-certain outcome beg a question Camus might appreciate. Only a minority of people are fleeing a murder and kidnapping rap. What possesses a person to race through three counties at 96 miles per hour, drive against traffic on city streets, and decapitate mailboxes, only to find themselves arrested and facing years in jail—all to avoid a minor citation like a broken taillight?
“Are you still watching that crap?” my wife asked drowsily.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because I had to find out: What are these YouTube rebels seeking?
For drivers, the chase is replete with possibility.
To begin to answer this question, imagine a tan Mercedes-Benz 450SEL. At 5:30 am on a Sunday in August 1975, a filmmaker captures it bolting through the near-empty streets of Paris. Beginning at Avenue Foch, the driver rockets down the Champs Elysees, then past the Arc de Triomphe and Place de la Concorde, blowing through red lights, scattering pigeons, and barely avoiding garbage trucks. After nine minutes of dizzying driving, the car screeches to a halt. The driver leaps out and into the arms of a waiting blonde at the church of Sacre Coeur. He’s covered 10.5 miles, at an average speed of 50 mph, and has performed his feat sans acun trucage ni acelere—without special effects or film acceleration. The driver is filmmaker Claude Lelouch; the movie is C’était un Rendezvous (It was a Rendezvous).
But there’s more to the story, containing a detail which so shamed Lelouch that he hid the film away for decades. He was not a professional driver, though he roars through the City of Light in a single take—without municipal permission, endangering the lives of trash collectors, taxi drivers, and insomniacs. What makes the feat more audacious is that assistants posted at blind junctions to help avoid collisions discovered, just before filming, that their walkie-talkies didn’t work. Lelouch proceeds, anyway. Thankfully, no one was hurt or killed.
Still, what was behind Lelouch’s uninhibited dash—knowing that a fatality might remain on his conscience forever, let alone send him to prison? Was it a simple adrenaline rush? A Mercedes endorsement?
Or might it be rebellion? In 18th-century England, when public hangings attracted thousands of spectators, criminals who mounted the scaffold with insouciance and irreverence were cheered. Offenders who exhibited penitence or who recited the “Our Father” with a clergyman were booed and pelted with debris. Given his abhorrence of capital punishment, Camus would’ve admired these criminals, in the same way he seems to admire his own creation, Meursault. The protagonist has shot and killed an Arab during a senseless confrontation on an Algiers beach. Found guilty, Meursault shows no remorse in court and is sentenced to death. His guilt is as evident as that of every desperado in a YouTube police chase.
However, Meursault is fictional. So are the well-known cinema car chases, in which stunt drivers screech up and down the hills of San Francisco in Bullit (1968) or who nearly flatten children playing at in the street in the Seven Ups (1973). In Ronin (1998), cars dash the wrong way through the ring tunnels of Paris; the chase scene in H. B. Halicki’s blockbuster Gone in 60 Seconds (1974) lasts forty minutes and wrecked 125 cars.
Still, careful planning by film directors did not always forestall real-life danger. Slow the video of police officer Roy Schieder rounding a corner onto Riverside Drive in the Seven Ups. His Pontiac Ventura amputates the door of a parked vehicle; you’ll see the flying object nearly kill a stunt coordinator. In The French Connection, Gene Hackman’s Pontiac LeMans barrels down the street under an elevated subway train in Brooklyn. Like Lelouch, director William Friedken didn’t have city permits, either. Instead, with the unofficial assistance of off-duty NYPD officers, stunt driver Bill Hickman flies twenty-six blocks at speeds of up to 90 mph. Only a police “gumball” light on the roof of his car warns drivers and pedestrians he is coming—except for a local man who strays into the shot and gets his car t-boned. Luckily, the mishap occurs before the era when the fellow might have made himself a millionaire by suing the film’s producers; Friedken gets away with paying for the man’s repairs.
Of course, the real draw of YouTube car pursuits is that they are completely un-orchestrated. For drivers, the chase is replete with possibility. They flee for their own reasons, improvise their own routes. Today, the lawbreakers are pretty much assured of being filmed by passersby or by police dashcams. Think of it: The brief experience might be among the grandest moments of a person’s life, the footage handed down to grandchildren. With a dash of imagination, a driver might envision himself as Steve McQueen or Robert DeNiro, with hairpin turns broadcast to thousands from a TV news helicopter.
These drivers are true rebels; for them the momentary fantasy and fame is obviously worth the jail time.
A search on YouTube turns up hundreds of authentic chases going back decades, and the comments can be as interesting as the video. While most viewers are rooting for law enforcement, they cannot help but admire an amateur driver’s skill and luck. In one video, police deploy rubber strips with spikes, which puncture the driver’s tires. Viewers write:
“What a wheelman!”
“80-95 mph on just the steel rim is very commendable”;
“Goddamn, that was intense! I peed myself watching”; and
“not bad …I hope they make him the President’s driver.”
And of course, there’s always praise for the pursuing officer:
“Never seen a Trooper so calm and composed even when he made the arrest [sic] good job his patience paid off”; and
“I’m amazed that trooper can even fit in the driver’s seat with those giant balls of steel.”
These drivers are true rebels; for them the momentary fantasy and fame is obviously worth the jail time. Who cannot raise a glass to a woman who foils several police pit maneuvers in a Nissan Cube? After the police spin her car around, she glides backwards along a grassy knoll and then uses her momentum to turn another 180 degrees. Her vehicle now facing forward, she speeds off down an exit ramp to elude law enforcement.
Nothing is rehearsed in YouTube chases. In Los Angeles, helicopters film live pursuits, giving viewers a bird’s-eye view of a driver’s skill and handling. Network anchors call the play by play. They serve as scolds, but their voices cannot hide their amazement and secret admiration for the driver.
The thrill for YouTube viewers is vicarious driving. There goes a semi-truck with a burning cargo of two-by-fours! Here’s a Zamboni driver who’s taken his vehicle to Wendy’s for a snack! Had the Internet been around when I was a teenager, my pals and I would have tipped our Detroit Tiger caps to a thirteen-year-old who stole an empty school bus and was pursued by police down an interstate. He’s a teen rebel like Antoine Doinel in the film The 400 Blows or Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. In literature, he is the juvenile delinquent Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and S. E. Hinton’s Ponyboy Curtis in The Outsiders.
Camus would understand. He might even empathize.
The protagonist of “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” Smith, is a disillusioned 16-year-old pretty criminal pinched for burglarizing a bakery. He is sent to a Bortsal, the equivalent of a juvenile facility. After the director (called the governor) discovers Smith’s penchant for long-distance running, he promises him an easy stay if he will train for a race against a posh boys’ school. Victory would bring the governor prestige. Smith agrees.
The starting gun sounds. Smith dashes off. Soon he is far ahead of the pack. It’s clear he’ll win effortlessly. He nears the finish line. The governor is jubilant. But just as Smith is about to secure first place, he halts. He goes not a step further. The finish line is a stride away. He locks eyes with the governor, who realizes he’s been duped.
Was Smith’s rebellion worth it? According to Camus, to rebel for the sake of rebellion was a form of bad faith. There was enough injustice to battle without attacking windmills. Life, he believed, precisely because it is absurd, is a most precious possession. When the author took a ride through New York’s Holland Tunnel in 1947, he noted a man who sat mid-tunnel in an enclosed booth watching for traffic accidents (this was before the installation of cameras). Camus wrote: “All day long on a raised footbridge, he counts the cars which pass endlessly in a deafening din the whole length of the violently lit tunnel which is too long for him to be able to see either one of the exits. This is the hero of the American novel.”
Ironically, in any one of these cars using the tunnel is a driver who—given the right circumstances—could become an instant rebel of the road. For example, a Passaic man is on his way home from work. A pleasant dinner awaits him. As he slides onto the New Jersey turnpike, police lights flash in his rearview. He realizes that he forgot to get his taillight repaired—as his spouse has been nagging him to do for weeks. However, in an expanding and inane universe, he asks himself, “Why have I been singled out for harassment? Doesn’t this representative of law enforcement have better things to do with his time? A citation will take $160 from my pocket—money that I, a decent father, need to pay for my daughter’s summer camp.”
Fuck authority.
Though he knows his chances of escape are nil, he puts the pedal to the metal. It’s possible his actions will cause a multiple-car accident; it may trigger charges of vehicular homicide; he’ll never see his daughter graduate college if he’s in prison!
And here I sit, slouched on my couch, watching him weave in and out of traffic. There is congestion ahead; he drives on the shoulder. He cuts off an 18-wheeler, whose driver blares his horn. He’s doing 70…80…85. Police from three counties are closing in from all directions. Their crackling radios exchange information. Spike strips are deployed. The driver dreams he’s on a Los Angeles freeway. With helicopters hovering, he’d be live on the evening news.
Eventually, the driver abandons his vehicle in a Home Depot parking lot. He runs into the jaws of a police German Shepherd. He goes into a fetal position and is cuffed by two beefy sheriffs.
Camus is sitting next to me on my couch. Certainement, the driver did a stupid thing! Did he really believe he could escape?! Camus would understand. He might even empathize.
But the consummate existentialist also said, “There is nothing stupider than dying in a car accident.”
James Vescovi‘s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, the Georgetown Review, Mars Hill Review, Saturday Evening Post, and Creative Nonfiction.
