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more vehicles than roads?
In M.'s last post on Two for the Road he wrote, "Most of Wim Wenders' works are 'road films' as well." The only Wenders film I've seen is Wings of Desire, so I'll briefly get back to that film after I make a distinction between 'road films' and films, like Two for the Road and Spetters, where vehicles are more potent message delivers than are the roads the vehicles travel on.
In Two for the Road we see Mark and Joanna crisscrossing the French countryside in an extensive sequence and array of cars, culminating with the Mercedes coupe. Each car corresponds to a different period of time within Mark and Joanna's relationship, and indeed each (style of) car carries its own symbolic message vis-à-vis the different phases of Mark and Joanna's life together (the station wagon with the proto-yuppie couple/friends and the couple's bratty daughter is classic modern social commentary). Automobiles are not the only vehicles employed in the movie, however. For example, the movie opens with the Mercedes being driven into the back of an aircraft, and it is another (privately owned) airplane that transports Joanna to her one marital infidelity. Plus there is the great scene where the young and still unmarried Mark and Joanna wake up with utter surprise to find themselves 'touring' the French countryside from within a huge concrete sewer pipe truckin' its way to some construction site (and keep an eye out for that bulldozer on the 'developing' beach).
 
Verhoeven's Spetters (which I first saw in 1984 and again on tape in 1986) is about three Dutch teenage boys that are somewhat local sports heroes from the town's motorcycle racing team. This movie is a nimiety (i.e., an abundance of redundance) of all kinds of vehicles. The lad who is the best racer has a bad motorcycling accident, winds up in a wheelchair (going from two wheels to four wheels), and ultimately commits suicide by rolling himself onto a highway where he is quickly run over by a very fast moving truck. Then there is the 'puritanical' farmer father of one of the boys that chases his son on the edge of a field while he, the father, is driving an enormous tractor. The boy is experiencing his father's wrath because the son has been associating with the local "whore of Babylon." The "whore" lives in and runs a luncheon business out of a camper hitched to the back of her car (which, if memory serves me correctly, is something like a 1970s Chevy Impala). The most popular item on the luncheon menu is extra long hot-dogs. [The actress who plays the "whore" is the same actress who in Verhoeven's The Fourth Man performs something just above castration in one of the neurotic dreams of 'the fourth man'.]
What I like about these movies is how vehicles are both very literal and very symbolic, and, moreover, it is the seamless transition from literalness to symbolism that the vehicles deliver.
So, doesn't the title Wings of Desire say it all for itself? Angel wings as the vehicle that might just deliver us to our most lofty desires.
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