Collision Course
exploring power and artifice by way of car crash compilations
My friends insist that I download a shopping app, something MoviePass–adjacent in that it gives you more free credit for joining than can surely be financially viable. I try to log in to claim my $40 and get stuck on a glitching screen–it’s a new app–that asks me what my interests are. I think–right now, I’m interested in listening to the same Sky Ferreira song over and over. I’m interested in these sour candy strips that my best friend mistook for edibles. I’m interested in loneliness, because if I’m not, I’d die on the spot.
I’m mostly interested in car crashes.
I stumbled onto these videos by TikTok user @crashmandjaro.official. The ‘crash’ is in reference to the videos’ narrative focus of cars crashing. The ‘mandjaro’ is–I don’t know–a first name? The ‘official’ is clearly necessary for validating Mr. Mandjaro’s content as their own. A quick search of the same user on Youtube yields a channel explaining that the videos are taken from a game called “Beamng Drive” (a brief search reveals the game is stylized as BeamNG.drive). BeamNG exists to generate any car crash you could imagine, and CrashMandjaro exists to disseminate the game’s wisdom to the masses. BeamNG.drive’s website suggests that their “crashes feel visceral, as the game uses an incredibly accurate damage model.” I’m not sure I would corroborate the ‘incredibly accurate damage model’--oftentimes I’ve seen a car flattened by a mysterious rotating metal machine and somehow emerge with a 40% survival rate, but ‘visceral’ is a surprisingly self-aware descriptor. Mandjaro’s Youtube description claims that the channel is based in France. This is all of the information I have to offer–I don’t mind, I think that the videos are more compelling under the guise of mystery.
I mute my phone’s volume when I watch these videos, because once I tried listening and was met with a computer-generated woman’s voice attempting to pronounce the names of each different car (think TeZla instead of TeSla), and the sounds of the cars crashing, flattening, and burning were too brutal–they fractured the magic.
There is no rhyme or reason that propels these cars to run off of their rails, falling to their demise–no data informing the percentage survival rate, the cars themselves. No continuity whatsoever, just endless Toyotas getting their doors ripped off, double decker tour buses filled with crash dummies that fly into the neon jungle below.
I was just reading a Sharon Olds’ collection and landed on a piece called “Ballad Torn Apart,” describing a collision. It reads:
“a
car leaped straight up like a cat
and turned in the air
and rushed past me
and slammed into a solid
oak behind me
as if against
the rush of time
back to when love
was being invented
before we spoiled the conditions for its
existence–land, fire, air, and water”
These stupid animated car crash videos–the derision feels necessary in conversation with real life destruction–swing so far to the side of unreality that they circle all the way back to prehistory. So unnatural that they become human–only people with hopes and wishes and dreams could imagine something so childishly hedonistic. These videos create a world where we never ‘spoiled the conditions for existence’--the jungle coexists with the burning, exhaust-fume-ridden race car. There is no extinction and every animal is happy to pick at the wreckage. There are Truffula trees and Bar-ba-loot bears in Bar-ba-loot suits. No consequences to destruction, therefore an immediate open door to unlimited destruction. Not like a landfill burning, instead a harmless earthquake where the shaking only serves to uncover some lost hidden treasure. Like an endless kiss with so much tongue, but in a world where tongues are bone dry. Back to when love was being invented, and the destruction of love was inconceivably distant.
I am sorry if my writing feels empty right now, or if I’m turning to empty things in the hopes that they’ll meet me where I’m at.
Every CrashMandjaro video features a main obstacle, systematically testing different models of car through the same ridiculous track. After each main obstacle–boulders, a narrow bridge, oncoming truck–there are smaller, less calculated obstacles. Even if a Lamborghini maintains a 60% chance of survival after completing its journey down two pipes inexplicably stretched over a ravine, the odds are high that it will end up crushed on impact by some spiky, otherworldly windmill around the next corner. In this way the videos combat their own logic–in trying to convince you that the vehicles’ chances of survival are at all mathematically calculated, they throw in some punishing metal animal at the end, simply because they can’t help themselves.
I suppose that CrashMandjaro (cannot type the name without giggling) gets me thinking about power, or reflects the way that I’ve been thinking about power recently. Sort of a chastity belt of artifice–these car crashes are so quick, so bright and shiny, that the videos strip any potential for catharsis from the watching experience. They don’t give me the ability to feel that release, or any intense emotionality, providing only a brief dopamine hit of animated flames–then onto the next one. And is dopamine not power?
Let me explain–I want to feel. I believe that everyone wants to feel deeply, this is why the numbness of contemporary depression is so pervasive and so universal. If you remove a person’s ability to feel a feeling, especially if that feeling is so close they could touch it, absorb it, this is the ultimate power. Perhaps this root of power explains why internet addictions have a hold over so many–the internet provides an unending well of tiny releases–dopamine hits, what have you–while maintaining the ability to restrict this release from us just as quickly. Like a slap versus a slow strangle. For example–choosing to not reply to an apology text. Placing vulnerability against complete silence, silence that has only become destructive post-internet, as responses become momentary and carry expected immediacy. The payoff of not responding to a snail-mail letter certainly doesn’t hold the same emotional weight. In CrashMandjaro’s case, the whiplash of these short, violent, and inconclusive car crashes keeps us coming back for more. An obscured, borderline inhuman entity is able to have human power over its viewers–control without consciousness.
Heartache holds its own kind of power. Like pinball. Every treacherous thought flung into space could hit a wall, could give you that hit of bright lights and loud hope, or could instead fall right through the center of the earth. I resent the power that this emotion holds over me, I would rather watch my dumb videos from an anonymous creator who has no interest in putting on a front of good intentions. I would rather be slapped in the face by someone who I know is making money off of me than by someone who claims to care for me. Like loss. The perverse, Hunger Games-ian power that these videos have over me also serve as a mode of self-control. I avoid self-destruction and violence in my real life, partially because all I must do to witness the destruction that I crave is to watch a car crash into another doomed car in a meditative loop. These accidents are larger-than-life, at least much larger than my life.
I do not want to give out my feelings with abandon. I don’t want to give out my feelings because when you are told directly about a feeling, someone else’s feeling, it is now in your possession, you can use it for yourself. Maybe not now–maybe in 10 months, or years–but when you’re digging up an anecdote to share or an emotion to channel, you may remember how you hurt someone else, and subsequently benefit from that knowledge. I am not interested in supplying this benefit. No matter if your actions caused you shame or pride, you know with certainty that you created an emotion in another person. If I give up these feelings, they are no longer my own–they can be accessed and referenced and perverted in perpetuity because I gave my only power away in a moment of heat and weakness. Or maybe this power is artificial. Maybe no one wants to use my emotions for their own gain, I’m overestimating the power of pathos and acting on the same late capitalistic impulse that made me want to watch videos of fake cars crashing into each other in the first place.
For all of the research and articles about the negative psychological impact of the Grand Theft Autos of the world, I’ve found very real solace in this simulated destruction. Mr. CrashMandjaro himself has never made any grand overtures to me, no snake oil schemes beyond telling me that there’s a 40% chance I’d survive falling off of a cliff in a Honda. In my weakest moments–my stubbornness, my unwillingness to admit that sometimes cruelty is just cruelty, not an injured bird you can take in off of the street and nurture as if it were love–he is the gatekeeper of my emotions. And I hope that he’s a fucking millionaire.