The Nest in the Shell: Postwar Automobility and Film Noir Cars

Examining automobility in the cinema (and the cinematic in automobility) requires a deft approach to the theoretical tangle of interrelated issues relating to the fields of Sociology, Architecture, and Cinema Studies. There are simultaneously issues of spectatorship, subjectivity, surveillance, transparency, reflectivity, and body image – all rolled into a built environment on wheels that is simultaneously inside and outside – a nest within a shell.

This essay turns a phenomenological lens to these elements, examining how they work together to create meaning in the automobile, and how, in turn, we experience automobility in the cinema. To do this, my essay is designed in two parts. The first part examines the phenomenology of automobility by applying the framework originally created by Gaston Bachelard to examine the home in his influential book, The Poetics of Space.³This essay is part of a larger research project that examines how automobility has shaped perception and movement within the cinema – using a theoretical framework that combines phenomenology, sociology, and architecture with cinema studies. The second part applies that model in an inspection of films made after World War II to parse the role that automobility played in destabilizing the family home and transforming the built environment in America.

For French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, writing in 1958, the house was still the home, and the preeminent safe space that both embodied dreams and enabled daydreaming. In The Poetics of Space, he declared the “house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being.”⁴Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxxii. But just five years later, Roland Barthes proclaimed: “The car is a house.”⁵Roland Barthes, “Mythologie de l’automobile: la voiture projection de l’ego,” Réalités 213 (October, 1963): 96. Or, in its original French, “L’auto est une maison.” This was equally a commentary on design, and the increase in drive time in France in that period, but just as surely on the comforts of the automobile, and the centrality of its place in culture. In France, of course, this is in this period when two thirds of the population of Paris moves out of the city center and into the new suburbs created at the outer fringes. By this point in the United States over one-third of the population were living in suburbs, and driving had been one of the nation’s favorite pastimes for decades. It was a place for the individual to be alone, a place for a husband or a wife to escape (either with or away from each other), or a place for a family to be together, no matter the destination. For Barthes, the car was a reflection of self,⁶The title of Barthes’s 1963 article translates in English as “The Car as Ego Projection.” just as surely as Bachelard described of the house: “A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.”⁷Bachelard, 17. For Bachelard, this body of images included the attic, closets, drawers, even the very verticality of the house. As he sees it: “Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination.”⁸Bachelard, 17.

But so too does the car reflect on our stability – either solid or illusory, moving or still. The seats, steering wheel, glove compartment, trunk, roof, mats; even the very vertical organization of the automobile speaks to us and reflects on our being. What Bachelard observes of the house as home is also applicable to the automobile, where so many feel at home: “A roof tells its raison d’être right away: it gives mankind shelter from the rain and sun he fears. […] Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear. […] As for the cellar […] it is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”⁹Bachelard, 18. For the automobile, of course, the polarity of cellar and roof instead becomes the juxtaposition of the wheels and the roof and their relationship to what lies beyond the automobile, above and below – the road and the sky. The boundaries of the automobile, though blurred by perception enabled by the windscreen and windows, still have distinct categories of interior and exterior with regards to embodiment, the same as those of the house. Bachelard’s description of the house is also true of the automobile: on the outside, there is the shell; on the inside, there is the nest.

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard returns repeatedly to the nest as a model for our own homes, which is an equally applicable model to consider when interrogating the interior space of the automobile. He goes to great length examining a work from the nineteenth century devoted to “bird architecture” – Jules Michelet’s 1858 book, L’oiseau – applying Michelet’s insights regarding the phenomenological aspects of a bird’s nest to a human being’s home. Bachelard starts with its construction, and Michelet’s insight that “in reality […], a bird’s tool is its own body,” which in turn, is key to its comfort.¹⁰Bachelard, 100. But so too is that comfort built from discomfort. Here, Bachelard quotes Michelet: “The house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort, I shall even say, its suffering.”¹¹Bachelard, 101. Bachelard then goes on to point out that a nest is “a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically. The form of the nest is commanded from the inside.”¹²Bachelard, 101.

Similarly, the car is our command center and our refuge where we can huddle, snug, hiding away, concealed. At the same time, we are held in place, held tight in case of any sudden moves, held in place for all to see, passing by (from the shoulders up, anyway, and depending on the tint of your windows, the elevation of the road, etc.) The car offers us a degree of invisibility (and anonymity) and nearly three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of potential view. Offering stillness and movement, safety and danger, the space of the automobile is in constant flux and contradiction. With each use of a muscle, our human strength is multiplied by the automobile. Apply a few pounds of force with your right foot to the gas pedal, and your velocity increases from zero to sixty miles per hour in a matter of seconds. A subtle shift in ankle flexibility and downward pressure finds us careening to a halt in half the time. Consider the empowerment of just these two basic proponents of propulsion in automobility, then consider the psychology this engenders: super-speed and invulnerability, encased in metal.

Of course, this is all assuming you are behind the wheel, at the helm, the driver, the pilot. If you’re a passenger, then the goal is comfort, and therein lies another form of empowerment. Instead of pedals you have legroom. Room to stretch out. Relax. Do whatever you want as you are driven. The balance of power gives way as easily as that. Wherever we are seated in the nest, the interior of the car provides a space for our interiority, in effect, to stretch out. The nest of the automobile can be a place for thought and reflection, even as your body pilots you through your environment thanks to the habit that Merleau-Ponty described. In the cinema, too, the interior of an automobile is a common location for characters to reflect, often giving the characters and the Traveler-Spectator¹³For more detailed discussions of the concept of the Traveler-Spectator, see my other essays: “What’s in the Windshield: Rear-Projection and Automobility,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies [JCMS] 64, no. 1 (Fall 2024), forthcoming; “Seeing by Automobility: Protoautomobility, Immersion, the Traveler-Spectator, and the Phantom Ride, 1897-1912,” in States of Immersion: Bodies, Media Technologies, ed. Philippe Bédard (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), forthcoming; and “Pandemic Modes of Automobility: Navigating Health, Safety, and Entertainment in Quarantimes,” Wide Screen 9, no. 1 (July 2022). a break from the action, even as the narrative continues its inexorable forward progress.

On the outside is the shell. For Bachelard, the model for our own homes were mollusks, clams, crustaceans, snails, and turtles – all creatures who carry their homes with them on their backs. This speaks on many levels to the figure in the automobile – the nest in a shell, so to speak. Certainly, the surface, the skin, the shell of metal, plastic and plexiglass serves as armor, even if it is stronger in our minds than in the world. In the world of automobility it is the shell that keeps us safe. It is also the dividing point, the defining line, of interior and exterior; a hardened skin that ensures the safety of our own flesh and bone nestled inside, vulnerable, easily broken. As Bachelard describes in terms of the home, so it is true of our home on wheels, the automobile:

Thus, well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge. Physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge, huddles up to itself, takes to cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed. If we were to look among the wealth of our vocabulary for verbs that express the dynamics of retreat, we should find images based on animal movements of withdrawal, movements that are engraved in our muscles. How psychology would deepen if we could know the psychology of each muscle!¹⁴Bachelard, 91.

Although at first glance, the role of the shell seems primarily for the protection of the nest and its precious occupants inside, its purposes are mutable and multifold, differing radically depending on where you are located. For those outside the car, the shell is perceived as the car’s body, a measure of the physical presence of automobility on the road. It can attract attention or render its occupants invisible (or, at least, anonymous) – depending on the style, shine, upkeep, etc. The shell links the automobile to the timeline of automobile production; its lines and/or curves, in short, its style links it to a specific era (as exacting as a specific year to the eyes of a car connoisseur) – even as the time-space within the nest is often experienced as outside of time, or the specific time of a trip. In a city, the shell is typically experienced as one component in the community of vehicles that dominate the streets; one unit in the system of automobility. In the country, the shell is perceived as an anomaly, with the shell of metal and glass providing a cold, hard counterpoint to the organic, natural environment it moves through. For those inside the car, the shell is perceived as a sort of exoskeleton, particularly by the driver, as an extension of his or her physical body. It is what preserves the sanctity of the nest and keeps other inhabitants of the road at what is perceived as a “safe distance.” Building on the ideas of influential phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, sociologist Tim Dant describes this as an embodied relationship between the driver and car:

For Merleau-Ponty visual perception is an orientation of the whole body to the world through which it moves. What is perceived in the visual field is complemented by the kinaesthesia of the body and its trajectory as a whole, by the sounds of the engine, the road and the wind on the car, by the resistance of steering wheel, accelerator and brakes – even the feel of the road through the wheels of the car.¹⁵Tim Dant, “The Driver-Car,” in Automobilities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry (London: SAGE, 2005), 72.

Described by some sociologists as a “hybrid,” by others, an “assemblage,” or even a “hybrid assemblage,” the interface of car and driver is a subject addressed in sociology more than anywhere else. Preferring the term “assemblage,” Dant points out in his oft-quoted article “The Driver-Car,” that while the word “hybrid” refers to the collaboration of human and object forms, the word “refers to the offspring of two species that are usually unable to reproduce whereas the Driver-Car is an assemblage that comes apart when the driver leaves the vehicle and which can be endlessly re-formed or re-assembled given the availability of the component cars and drivers.”¹⁶Dant, “The Driver-Car,” 62. Dant argues that the relationship of the car and driver is symbiotic, and the combination of the car and driver acts as one body – a social being that “results from the collaboration of human and machine” – not unlike the cyborg that Donna Haraway famously interrogated.¹⁷Dant, 62. See also: Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–182.

Encased in the shell on a road free of traffic, travelers perceive themselves as the projectile both Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Paul Virilio describe, moving at great speeds.¹⁸See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19^th Century (New York: Urizen, 1979 [1977]) and Paul Virilio, The Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, trans. Michael Degener (New York: Continuum, 2008). At slower speeds, or even stopped, it is the shell that marks your territory, preserves your precious position in a line of traffic that will get you to your destination before everyone behind you (seen in the rearview mirror). As Kristin Ross explains in her crucial book on the rise of automobility in France, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, this too is a form of “liberty from social constraint that speed once promised to provide.”¹⁹Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 55. The social constraints one is liberated from include the necessity of communicating with people around you (as you may feel compelled to do in a room full of people), or worrying what you say or do or even wear, within the protective confines of the nest within the shell.

The divide between the nest and shell of the automobile only seems to strengthen after World War II. As automobile historians Robert Wieder and George Hall describe it, most enclosed cars manufactured after the war were “mini-arsenal[s]—of privacy, seclusion and isolationism on par with our national thinking—and a vehicular deterrent to invasion by others.”²⁰Robert Wieder and George Hall, The Great American Convertible: An Affectionate Guide (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 32. At the same time, the relationship between an automobile’s interior and interiority had been growing since the end of World War II “when automobility was promoted as a solution to economic and social malaise” and “driving a new car became ‘a way to celebrate winning the war.’”²¹See Mark Osteen, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 4 (2008): 184; and Katie Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction and Television (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 36. Not only was the automobile increasingly a measure of personal autonomy, it provided tangible evidence of a new beginning. Prosperity was no longer around the corner, it had arrived, and was parked in the driveway (or garage). But becoming a measure of success also meant becoming a target for those still lacking access to automobility. In Hollywood films released after the war we see an unprecedented rise in crimes involving the automobile – as the space where violence occurs, the getaway car, even as the murder weapon itself. The featured role of the automobile heralds the return of automobile production after being paused during the war, which (along with Hollywood) largely fueled the war boom years. But at the same time, it also marks a transformation of the unique space of the automobile as both a space of vulnerability (for the victim) and a likely space to commit crimes (by the perpetrator).

No genre makes this alignment more clearly than film noir. As Mark Osteen explains in his essay, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir,” while the automobile’s fusion of privacy and mobility “promised a means of bypassing class and gender barriers [,] noir’s cars likewise frequently represent the propulsive aspirations of disenfranchised people who turn to crime, embodying the possibility of social mobility through automobility.”²²Osteen, “Noir’s Cars,” 184. Indeed, many of the classic film noirs of the 1940s revolve around issues of automobility: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), The Devil Thumbs a Ride (Felix E. Feist, 1947), They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948), and Impact (Arthur Lubin, 1949).

In Double Indemnity, the assumption of the family automobile as a space of safety and privacy sealed off from the outside world proves deadly to Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers) when his wife Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) and insurance investigator Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) conspire to murder him. The protective powers and privacy enabled by the shell are what seal Mr. Dietrichson off from the outside world, ensuring the privacy of his murder. Here, the rules of automobility are subverted and turned against the patriarch. The hierarchy of the front seat is overthrown, transforming the back seat into a potential threat within automobility when Neff emerges from the dark behind the driver’s seat to strangle Mr. Dietrichson as his wife, Phyllis, watches. Afterwards, Walter Neff emerges as from the confines of the nest, as a double for Mr. Dietrichson (in more ways than even he knows, as it will turn out by the end).

Two years later in The Postman Always Rings Twice, history repeats. This time it is the young wife Cora (Lana Turner) in the driver’s seat, with her older husband (Cecil Kellaway) in the passenger seat fully aware of the drifter-turned-employee, Frank Chambers (John Garfield), in the backseat, but of course unaware of the conspiracy between Frank and his wife. In both films we see that when all the occupants are facing forward towards the front windshield the balance of power tips to the person in the backseat because s/he has the broader perspective. While the front seat offers the driver and passenger a privileged point of view of the road ahead and seemingly superior access to automobility, the back seat becomes a kind of blind spot determining the direction and velocity of the narrative. In the nest of the automobile, it is the secret relationship that is empowered, the conspiracy between front and back seats, that easily overpowers the institution of marriage. As Osteen describes it, “The profound sense of privacy and isolation fostered by geography extends to citizens’ cars, which in films noir become not only alternative homes but also amoral spaces where laws and social arrangements—marriage, class hierarchies—are suspended.”²³Osteen, 184. As a result, there is a new moral hierarchy established in the nest in the shell, giving preference to the passion of lovers over the institution of marriage. Kathleen McHugh agrees, pointing out that the narrative of this film, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946), uses the car to threaten or destroy romance, domesticity, and reproduction.²⁴Kathleen McHugh, “Women in Traffic: L.A. Autobiography,” Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches, eds. Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 430. To cover their tracks (literally), after the murder, Frank and Cora push the car over the edge of a cliff, repurposing the automobile as a sort of coffin, with the corpse tucked inside the nest in the shell. Here the lovers seek to frame automobility itself for the death of Cora’s husband, reframing the murder as ‘accident’ in the form of a car crash. For a while it looks as though they’re going to get away with it. But in the end, automobility has its revenge. Returning to the scene of the crime (the front seat of the car) near the close of the film, Cora kisses Frank to celebrate their success, causing Frank to crash into the bridge, killing Cora in the process and ultimately condemning himself to execution for her murder.

In Impact, we see these same variables reworked to radically different results. While the motive and plan remain the same – an unfaithful wife (Helen Walker) and her lover (Tony Barrett) conspiring to kill her husband, Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy), behind the wheel – this time it is only the two men in the car, with the ghost of the wife’s intentions haunting the nest throughout the trip. Walter Williams has no idea that the man in the passenger seat is not actually his wife Irene’s cousin, Jim Torrance, as she claims, but instead her lover. As in both Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, the Traveler-Spectator is aware of the murderous plan before we get into the automobile with these two men. As a result, we are trapped in the intimate space of the nest, unwilling observers, and unable to do anything about it. This time it is the lover/killer at the wheel, with the husband joining us in the passenger seat. Here we see a murderous plan entirely framed by automobility. Jim causes the rear tire to have a slow leak before they begin their trip. Eventually having to pull the car over on the side of a steep roadside cliff to fix the flat provides the setting. With the trunk open blocking Walter’s vision, Jim produces his weapon of choice: the tire jack. After the tire is changed, Jim insists that Walter dropped his cufflink under the car. When he reaches underneath, his vision blocked by the shell, Jim strikes him with the tire jack. When a concerned passerby stops just moments afterwards, again it is the shell of the car that acts to obscure the scene of the crime, as Walter’s body lies on the side of the road out of sight. Jim rolls Walter’s body over the side of a cliff, then realizes the keys are still in his pocket, so must go retrieve them. When a moving van pulls up, also asking if he needs help, Jim panics, jumps in the car and speeds off, missing the approaching gas tanker coming around the bend as he looks back over his shoulder. The two vehicles collide head on, and both plunge over the side of the cliff, engulfed in flames.

In The Devil Thumbs a Ride, the nest is portrayed as a space of vulnerability, with the shell easily pierced with a thumb from the side of the road. After being normalized during World War II as a safe and easy way for troops to get from one part of the country to another, picking up a hitchhiker was considered a civic duty. However, this was one of the first films to offer the Traveler-Spectator a vantage point on the potential dangers of hitchhiking.²⁵For a fascinating look at the cultural history of hitchhiking, see Jack Reid, Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Here, the nest in the shell quickly transforms from a safe space of anonymity insulating escaped killer Steve Morgan (Lawrence Tierney) to the projectile Schivelbusch and Virilio warned us about, used as a dangerous weapon to strike down a motorcycle cop who threatens to arrest him at gunpoint. But so too is justice doled out via automobility when in the climactic car chase near the end of the film, Tierney’s character is shot down by police officers while behind the wheel, proving there are limits to the shell – especially when attempting to evade the law.

In They Live by Night the fates of the lovers are interminably linked to automobility, for better, and more often, worse. The nest within the shell insulates them from a world that both rejects them and is hunting for them. Here we see some of the clearest examples of the absolute equivalence of the nest of the automobile to the nest that a house typically provides. For the young couple on the run who are denied access to the traditional family home, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) instead recraft the nest of the automobile as their home; protected by the shell, and, unlike the immobile house, the home on wheels is a better fit for the fugitive couple. While the home on wheels seems to offer anonymity, at the same time, the windows on all four sides also put the fugitive couple on constant display for anyone looking in their direction. As Osteen summarizes: “Their convertible provided only the illusion of transformation; its mobility was merely geographic, never social, and even that movement was circular. Little more than children Bowie and Keechie were merely playacting in their wagon, briefly realizing a fantasy of rising from poverty.”²⁶Osteen, 186.

For anti-heroes and thieves like these, the unique fusion of nest and shell the automobile offered in the 1940s provided the “topography of intimate being” that Gaston Bachelard describes and the “reflection of self” that Roland Barthes declared. But this is a nest built by suffering, exactly as Bachelard describes with respect to Michelet’s interrogation of the bird’s nest. These noir films not only reveal the “illusions of stability”²⁷Bachelard, 17. that automobility promised in this period, but just how quickly they fall apart. Being sealed in a shell – even one as partly transparent as the automobile– also means being cut off from the outside world, disconnected from the environment that contains a community of travelers, each sealed off from one another in their own nest within a shell. The ramifications of this stretch far beyond the individual, or even a community, affecting the very construction of the city itself. Within the nest there are the limits to the senses of automobility. Certainly, the traveler feels the road through the assemblage, and sees the world outside. But at the same time, the confines of the shell limit the traveler to the nest within the shell, even as the promise of automobility continues to reach as far as one can see and beyond.

Michael Stock

Michael Stock is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies and English at Pepperdine University and Adjunct Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). His research interests in film and television history, horror, science fiction, animation, automobility and transmedia are reflected in his extensive published work and the wide array of courses he teaches. Stock received his Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, and his M.A. and B.A. in English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.