ABSTRACT
Recognizing the car beyond its immediate materiality or aesthetics and treating it as the spiritus movens opening doors to other areas of experience endows the car with some form of agency so often explored and cherished by cinematic culture. Even though cars in movies are habitually portrayed as heroes or villains, a theme further explored later in this chapter, once we allow for the multi-contextual perspective in which moving cars can potentially appear in moving pictures, their role as characters – or, following the chapter’s title, as “caracters” – and their significance as narrative devices are bound to be seriously promoted. The chapter presents a closer look at the cars' narrative potential to reveal a slightly surprising background, removing the aura of either threat or desire that they habitually provoke in favor of their narrative complexity and character-like traits.
