Talladega Nights Explains America

The Talladega Superspeedway is uniquely American. Dreamt up by Bill France Sr., founder of NASCAR, for no other reason, really, than wanting to erect a motorsports track bigger and better than his own Daytona International Speedway, it illustrates our nation’s obsession with size just as the legend that Talladega was built on an Indian burial ground underlines the draconian steps our nation took to exploit our nation’s literal size. It only makes sense, then, that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s 2006 comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” exists as one of the most enlightening movies ever made about modern America.

It begins with a bout of myth-making, its future NASCAR star, Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby, born in the backseat of his good-for-nothing father’s (Gary Cole) car and eventually graduating to star race car driver, learning all the wrong lessons along the way, tuning out his mother and taking the words of his good-for-nothing father to heart, coming to believe heartily in his own myth. “I wake up in the morning and piss excellence!” he hollers at his Father-in-law (Ted Manson), presumably of the greatest generation but told his only societal contribution was making a hot daughter, before leading his family in a grace that contractually mandates his mentioning PowerAde, a comical collision of Christianity and Consumerism.

Ricky Bobby, of course, must go on his own version of the hero’s journey, receiving the call after winning another race, in a scene at a bar called the Pit Stop. The scene begins with Ricky and his buddies, including Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), Ricky’s put upon best friend, just sort of joshing, a scene that feels improvised which makes it ironic when it was interrupted by the sounds of Charlie Parker, the improvisation master himself, coming from the jukebox.



Jazz has been called the Devil’s Music, typically by whites communicating in code, and that’s how Ricky Bobby and friends react, like they’re trying to shake the devil out. The song has been played by Ricky’s emergent nemesis, the French Formula One driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), who asks why the jazz music has been stopped when someone pulls the jukebox plug. Demonstrating the thinly veiled meaning of Devil’s Music, the gruff bartender declares: “We keep it on there for profiling purposes. We’ve also got The Pet Shop Boys and Seal.”

Striding across the room, cigarette in hand, Jean Girard is like a French New Wave character striding straight into a broad American sports comedy, his stylish black suit juxtaposed against the extras behind whose shirts and hats are specifically color-coordinated to evince, of course, red, white and blue. Girard is here not just to challenge Ricky on the track but to question America itself, which Ricky unintentionally instigates when he misunderstands oui as we.

Ricky: “We? No, we are not French. We’re American, because you’re in America, okay? Greatest country on the planet.”
Girard: “Well, what have you given the world apart from George Bush, Cheerios, and the ThighMaster.”
Ricky: “Chinese food.”
Girard: “That’s from China.”
Ricky: “Pizza.”
Girard: “ltaly.”
Cal: “Chimichanga.”
Girard: “Mexico.”

In this moment, Jean Girard is quite literally the Other, everything the kind of American Ricky Bobby represents has been made (told) to fear, a foreigner whose accent sounds like “peanut butter on the roof of (his) mouth” and an intellectual unmasking, point by point, their sense of American Exceptionalism as being the work of someone from somewhere else. So naturally, with his insecurity already activated, when Girard expresses his sole reason for coming to America as defeating Ricky Bobby on the track, Ricky lashes out, attacking this Frenchman, the soundtrack evoking a showdown in a Western, as if John Wayne is going after Alain Delon. Girard, however, proving he is faster, pins Ricky to a table, threatening to break his arm...unless the NASCAR driver issues one simple declaration: I like crepes.

This was 2006, remember. Only three years after France declined America’s invitation to the so-called Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq, prompting geniuses of the American Government to declare French Fries as Freedom Fries and French Toast as Freedom Toast, that Patriotically Correct form of American Patriotism cheapening our nation’s ideals rather than honoring them. “Don’t you say it, ”Cal councils. “These colors don’t run.” “I’m not gonna say it,” Ricky confirms. As Ricky half-lies there, held down, however, a funny thing happens: he learns the true nature of the crepe.

Cal: “You know, just to put this in there, I had a whole mess of crepes this morning. They’re just like pancakes, maybe even better.”
Ricky: “Wait, are they the really thin pancakes?”
Girard: “Yes they are. They are the really thin pancakes. It’s just a French word for them.”
Ricky: “Oh, my god, I love those.”

That leads to an extended conversation on kinds of crepes — fromage-crepe, crepe suzette — and the tone of not just these three men but everyone in the room palpably changes. They are getting along! No one insists they get along, mind you, it just happens of its own accord, as if suggesting this how it could always be if we just let our preconceived notions fall away. But, of course, Ricky can’t do that. And when Girard offers a compromise, to say I love really thin pancakes instead of I love crepes, Ricky refuses to say it. Why? “Because you don’t understand freedom,” Ricky explains. “Because you don’t understand liberty.”

It’s strange days in America...but then again, maybe they are not so strange at all. As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, even after four months of evidence and research strongly suggesting that wearing a mask in public can greatly help tamp down the spread of this strain of Coronavirus, a certain sect of Americans refuse to cover their face. Why? Individual liberty, or something like it, is typically the reason given, a la Ricky Bobby, because this is America and we have the freedom to do anything we want. Of course, as smarter minds than me have eternally argued, liberty without responsibility is meaningless, and responsibility is tied to rationality. Each of us has the responsibility to be rational in the face of a health crisis like this to help preserve the health of the country that provides space for our liberty in the first place.

The scene in “Talladega Nights” ends with Ricky refusing to say I love really thin pancakes and Jean Girard breaking his arm. “He actually did it!” Ricky screams as he winces in pain. Rationality calls his bluff.

If I'm a Movie Driver, Who Am I?

Dudes all think they're Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a car, and nearly all of them are actually Jerry Lewis.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) April 13, 2017

I see the point, obviously, that Mr. Zoller Seitz is making. And yet, for this blog, it is nevertheless not quite right. Steve McQueen is, well, Steve McQueen and all that. I wish I was Steve McQueen zipping around in that “Thomas Crown” Ferrari but that’s still too fantastical for me. When I climb behind the wheel of a car I do not imagine myself as Steve McQueen because I cannot imagine myself as Steve McQueen because even my admittedly far-out imagination has its limits. No, when I get behind the wheel of a car, I picture myself as Skipp Sudduth in “Ronin.”

That might seem absurd too. If I’m going to picture myself as a driver in “Ronin” should it not be Robert DeNiro, considering he is at the wheel of the most daring and expansive of the film’s myriad car chases, going against traffic, briefly, and managing some sort of derring-do with the aid of the handbrake that is beyond my elementary mechanical expertise to properly explain. But as much as I love DeNiro in “Ronin”, Sudduth’s wonderfully ordinarily named Larry is my preferred automobile pilot. Like, you know how Ryan Gosling in “Drive” said “I drive”? That’s Larry except that Larry doesn’t even need to say “I drive.” He just...drives. He’s there because he drives. Everyone knows this. Plus, in a crew that includes DeNiro, Jean Reno and Natascha McElhone, Skipp Sudduth does not look like nor sound like be belongs. That is totally un-McQueen-ish; that is me.

But then, Skipp Sudduth in “Ronin” is my McQueen for a reason – I could never drive like that. “Something that can shovel a bit,” Sudduth’s character says of the car he needs. That is not what I say to the car salesman when I’m trying to buy a car. So, who am I really behind the wheel of a car? Me, a person who, in the unlikely event of a car chase, would wind up like Ricky Bobby post-comeback, piddling down the track at 26 mph...



Post comeback Ricky, in fact, is an intriguing choice. But even post-comeback Ricky Bobby is still Ricky Bobby, simply buying time until he becomes the requisite phoenix rising from the racetrack ashes. And so I feel uncomfortable going that route, just as I feel uncomfortable pegging myself as, say, Stephanie from “The Naked Gun”, the hapless driving school student who turns the Women Are Terrible Drivers cliche on its head when she unleashes her inner-Popeye Doyle. I could never unleash my inner-Popeye Doyle because I don’t have an inner-Popeye Doyle.

And that’s why maybe as a driver I’m most like Del Griffith in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” for whom driving is less the point than rocking out to “Mess Around” by Ray Charles while driving. I am, after all, not much of a driver, kind of like Del, who ends up going the wrong way in the worst situation possible, but I am really, really good at playing car dashboard piano.



The thing is, however, I don’t even own a car. I haven’t owned a car going on six years now. And I love it, I absolutely adore not owning a car. Becoming car-less was one of the best decisions I ever made even if it also means that the few times I do drive, usually in an unfamiliar rental car, I discover I am a more fearful and worse driver than ever. Who in their right mind would want to be in a car with me? No one! Ask my girlfriend! Ask me, for God’s sake! I don’t want to be in a car with me!

So maybe, in the end, I’m not a driver at all. Maybe I’ve become the guy at the end of “The Pink Panther” in the zebra costume, the one running after the car chase, post-costume party, that is in progress, just trying to catch up.

Some Drivel On...Talladega Nights

In 2006, fresh off his soccer movie, and in advance of his figure skating and basketball movies, Will Ferrell made his NASCAR movie, the loquaciously titled “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, directed and co-written by his frequent cohort Adam McKay. And in such close proximity to Ferrell’s other athletic-endeavored efforts, it was easy, and remains so, to lump “Ricky Bobby” in with their inconsistent bits of low-pressure comedy. And while it is fair to say that “Ricky Bobby”, like the others, often feels, in moments, indulgent, like a scene of saying grace that is as protracted as it is amusing, it would be wrong to say that “Ricky Bobby” is low-pressure. It has ideas on its mind, yes it does, and communicates them with a comical force.

“Ricky Bobby” lashes its culture commentary to the structure of a run-of-mill athletic biopic, which, despite its lapses, for better and for worse into riffing comedy, it inhabits all the way through, “not,” as Jim Emerson wrote, simply “stand(ing) outside and making references to other movies.” Instead, Emerson notes that McKay and Ferrell’s movie “inhabits the biopic formula all the way through -- even down to the slightly draggy stretch in the second act, before the big comeback.” That biopic takes root in an early scene when Ricky Bobby learns his life’s mantra from his father, Reece Bobby (played by Gary Cole with an impressive droll hilarity) – “If you’re not first, your last.” It’s a sentiment that has, over time, become so relevant to reality Kevin Durant unironically said it. But Ricky Bobby’s inevitable journey is learning that this mantra is not true, taking the top perch as a narcissistic NASCAR top dog, falling from the perch when he’s challenged by a driver from a different world, Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), other customs invading his own, losing his wife and his kids, bottoming out, and then rising back up.

As vain as Ricky Bobby might initially be, Ferrell is not, allowing ample room for his skilled co-stars to maneuver. In another movie Amy Adams’s emergent love interest would be there simply to support the hero with googly eyes rather than comedic lines, but Adams gets great lines and sells them gusto, and then adds an almost unbridled ecstasy on top of the gusto. Adams, in fact, is afforded the end-of-second-act speech in which she presents the Hero’s Elixir in the form of a motivational speech. “’Me’ is you because it’s just you out there. We don’t have any corporate sponsors. We don’t have any fancy team owners. We have you and this car.” America, as complicated and paradoxical a country as there is, often touts an individualist ethos even as the necessity of being part of a team, or the importance of family, is routinely stressed, seemingly in contradiction of the first idea. But “Talladega Nights” effortlessly embodies the idea that in messed-up ol’ America both are true. Ricky Bobby eradicates his narcissism even as he drives alone.

That journey to inner peace, meanwhile, is sandwiched within a comical commentary on cultural sensitivity, which is, by far, the most memorable through line of “Talladega Nights”. NASCAR is nothing if not a subculture. America, this vast nation, is rife with subcultures, and those subcultures are often born of regionalism, and NASCAR is no different. The supposed invader of this regionalistic subculture then becomes Jean Girard, introduced at The Pit Stop, the bar which so many NASCAR drivers frequent, and Girard announces his presence by playing jazz on the jukebox. When the music is cut off, Girard asks why it’s on the jukebox in the first place, leading the bartender to gruffly remark “We keep it on there for profiling purposes.” It's funny, yes, but also revealing, indicative not just of NASCAR but so much of the U.S.A where outsiders are immediately suspect and regulations are put in place to keep an eye out for them.

Jean Girard’s ensuing confrontation of Ricky Bobby leads to one of the most spectacular sequences of the last movie decade, in which he demands Ricky Bobby say “I like crepes.” Ricky Bobby will not. “These colors don't run.” Even when it is explained to him what crepes are, and even when he admits that he actually likes them, and when his best friend says he actually had crepes that very morning, Ricky Bobby still will not say it, the sort of ridiculous American defiance that is so currently in vogue. This prompts Girard to injure him, not fatally but to the extent that Ricky Bobby is forced off the track, ceding his #1 spot to the scurrilous Frenchman.

If it is American hubris that does Ricky Bobby in then it is a good dose of humility that prompts his rebirth, eventually allowing him to find acceptance of this crepe-loving Other, emblemized in the moment at the end when he refuses to shake Girard’s hand yet openly kisses him anyway. “You taste,” says Girard, “of America.” It is one of my favorite lines of the new cinematic century. It is the best evidence I have seen yet that maybe, one day, we really can all get along. {Laughs.}