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The following is a flight of imagination by Sam@Cultlabs. Any similarities between the following and real life living tyres is purely coincidental…
When I first heard about Rubber the premise immediately brought to mind other film and TV based around inanimate, man-made objects that have been given life and human personalities.
In Rubber, the reanimated tyre turns out to be a sociopathic and murderous individual with weird, telekinetic powers but the objects man manufactures have long had onscreen personas, from the slightly camp and vaguely superior KITT in 80s big hair/tight pants action-adventure series Knightrider to living computers of various temperaments in numerous movies, like the slowly disintergrating HAL in 2001, the melomanical Proteus in Demon Seed or Edgar, the lovesick home computer in Electric Dreams.
So this lead me to think… Why does a tyre suddenly spring into life in the American desert in Rubber anyway? Although living tyres are non-existent in reality, the long history of living objects in the movies points to only one, terrible conclusion.
The tyre in Rubber is the ghost of Herbie. The signs are there. Herbies mental inbalances have been recorded on film. Think about the heartwrenching moment in The Love Bug when, bereft, he attempts to throw himself off a bridge into a raging river below. There’s also a massive clue in the film title Herbie Goes Bananas. Hardly a double entendre.
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I posit this theory, which is no more crackpot than the idea that Ex-Disney boss Micheal Eisner had Walt’s cryogenically preserved head in a glass cabinet in his office* (deep within the sinister Globe of Epcot). After the Disney Corporation finished the first wave of Herbie movies they decided to save a few bucks and have Herbie towed into the desert. Disney operatives disabled his engine and left him to erode, a victim of the persitent wind and sand. Is this the fractured vision of an addled mind?
And so, like a ring buried in the silt of a riverbed, Herbie lay dormant, waiting for a miracle. Some psychic event that could help him muster the strength to pursue the only thing left. Revenge!
It took a simple remake to reactivate what was left of a 60s icon. The psychic fallout from the recent Herbie redux sent out ripples of torment from cinema goers and home video viewers the world over. A mind scream reverberated across the globe as people woke up to sheer numbing inanity of the new version. Not since The Phantom Menace caused nerd riots in downtown LA, with the terrible destruction of numerous independent comic book stores and Role Playing Game emporia, had a film caused such an ink black mood of agitation and suffering to grip the world.
As the ebony waves of anguish slowly made their way out into the wilds, something stirred. Slowly, a rubber tyre inched its way to life. By fractions, it shook the dust and grit of forty summers from its treads and rolled upright. If the tyre had hands, it would have licked a finger and held it to the air but as it was, the rubbery anto-hero had one thought in mind and one direction to take.
The road to Hollywood.
The road to VENGEANCE!
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