Atrocity Exhibition

When I don’t want to think, I play Gran Turismo 7. I floor the accelerator of a midnight black Nissan GT-R Nismo ‘17 and weave through the narrow concrete ribbon of the Tokyo Expressway—the moon glowing faintly over a twilit skyline, the two-lane asphalt illuminated by amber streetlights, the roar of the twin-turbocharged engine echoing off buildings and billboards close enough to touch as I redline sixth gear, pushing 180, then 190, then over 200 mph before the driving line screams at me to BRAKE, the tires squealing and the carbon ceramic brake discs glowing molten red as I sweep clockwise through a hairpin 180 degree turn—my mind emptied, my thoughts obliterated, my concentration condensed to a single point at the center of the TV.

I literally cannot think about anything else when I’m trying not to slam a fake version of a real car into the wall of a fake version of a real highway that so captivated Andrei Tarkovsky he included a wordless, five-minute scene of driving through the Tokyo Expressway in Solaris. Lost in Translation doesn’t end with a shot of the main characters, but of the taxi ferrying Bill Murray’s character through the tunnels and overpasses of the Expressway, the camera following the car from the same third-person viewpoint of a racing game.

“I still drive on the Tokyo Expressway every night in my Porsche GT3,” said series creator Kazunori Yamauchi in an interview ahead of Gran Turismo 7’s release. Yamauchi explained that the purpose of GT7 was to “create new car fans out of the new generation of kids out there” by presenting 150 years of car culture “in a big museum format.” And like any good museum that parents drag their kids to, Gran Turismo 7 is centered on a café. It’s the equivalent of a tavern in a fantasy RPG: you enter and speak to the owner “Luca” (a static photo of a bearded middle-aged man) to receive a themed “menu book” (a quest). Each book focuses on a specific grouping of cars (Mustangs, Camaros, Supras) and contains three individual races to win.

You start off driving cars you could theoretically afford, like a Honda Fit or Mazda2, before working your way up to cars worth the GDPs of small island nations. My favorite races, though, weren’t the ones with the fastest, loudest, flashiest cars zipping around legendary real-life tracks like Laguna Seca or 24 Hours of Le Mans, but oddball events like a fleet of Ford F-150s offroading through Colorado. I had the most fun with the rally races—so much of the game is about maximizing grip and control, about hitting the most precise and optimal line around a given corner, that it felt refreshing to slide around in the dirt and mud and snow.

After completing a menu, you return to the café to receive a brief history lesson from Luca about the cars you just raced. An early menu that features iconic European compacts—the Fiat 500, the Mini Cooper, and the VW Beetle—explains that, due to mass production in the early 20th century, “cars were produced for everyone, not just the select few.” If you navigate to the Beetle’s info page (each car comes with its own page, like a plaque next to a museum artifact), you’ll learn that the Beetle was “designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche” as a “people’s car,” the literal translation of Volkswagen. Which is true: Dr. Porsche worked with Adolf Hitler to create a small, affordable car for the people of the Third Reich to drive on the newly constructed autobahns. Hitler oversaw the founding of the first Volkswagen factory in 1938, which quickly pivoted to producing cars for military rather than civilian use and relied on the slave labor of Jews, POWs, and non-Jewish civilians.

“The ‘pursuit of beauty’ is the motivation for creating Gran Turismo,” wrote Yamauchi on the occasion of the series’ 25th anniversary. Pursuing beauty means using the original CAD models from manufacturers to digitize each real-life car into tens of thousands of polygons. It means recording the actual engine sounds and tire rumble of over 1,700 cars. It means working with Honda and Hyundai and Chevrolet and every major car company on the “Vision Gran Turismo” program: supercars that exist only in the game, all sleek spline curves and shiny surfaces. It means teaching young players about “the cultural backgrounds of these significant cars,” but eliding the intertwined histories of the automobile, militarism, and fascism.

It certainly doesn’t mean depicting the real-life headaches and drudgeries of driving,parking, maintaining, and insuring Bernice, the 2013 Bug my wife bought after graduating college. Poor Bernice costs us nearly $100 every month in gas alone, not to mention the repairs we paid for just this past year: the brake pads that wore down like cartilage until metal scraped against metal, the switch that stopped latching so the trunk wouldn’t fully close (not good!), the front right tire I blew out from slamming into a pothole while driving to a wedding. I crashed Bernice when we lived in Brooklyn and had to move the car twice a week for street cleaning; as I waited for the mechanic in Gowanus to process our insurance info, he told me that a close friend of his had just been hit and killed while fixing his broken down car on a highway shoulder.

On March 28th, 2015 at the Nürburgring in Germany, the 23-year-old British motorsport athlete Jann Mardenborough floored the accelerator of his Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3. Mardenborough had been one of the first winners of GT Academy, a reality TV show where Gran Turismo players got behind the wheel of real-life race cars and competed for a spot with Nissan Motorsport. Mardenborough hit 125 mph as he crested the “Flugplatz” section of the track—the “airfield,” nicknamed because cars actually lift off the ground. In the 2023 Gran Turismo movie that dramatizes Mardenborough’s life and career, his GT-R catches air and starts cartwheeling upward, like a clock hand travelling back in time. The car smashed through the track barrier and into a crowd of spectators, injuring twelve people and killing one.

The final race in GT7’s campaign is a single lap at the Nürburgring. By that point I had dutifully “[optimized] the fun out of [the] game”: every event has a limit on your car’s Performance Points, a numerical representation of each car’s abilities. A Toyota Prius has about 375 PP, while a Lamborghini Murciélago has over 600 PP. But if you tune a car so that it’s like 0.05 below the limit—if you slap on soft racing tires and a turbocharger and reduce its weight—you can handily beat pretty much every race. There were some events where I lapped the AI. For the Nürburgring race, I used a Ferrari F12berlinetta that I upgraded to 912 horsepower; the other cars had less than 600 horsepower. It felt like playing Mario Kart as Bullet Bill. But the Nürburgring is so long and winding and narrow, endless hills and valleys and chicanes and banked turns cutting through the medieval German woods, that I still became transfixed—my mind emptied, my thoughts obliterated, my concentration condensed to a single point at the center of the TV. I’m playing on a refurbished PS4 and don’t have the fancy DualSense controller, but even with a standard DualShock you really can feel every subtle shift in the car’s body and the track’s texture, including when the wheels lift off the ground and you briefly fly above the tarmac.

As dusk turned to dawn and I rocketed down the final straightaway, I realized that a more accurate term for Gran Turismo’s essence isn’t the pursuit of beauty, but of the sublime. When we experience the sublime, we’re both awed and terrified. Cars are terrifying. Cars kill 1.19 million people across the globe every year. Cars emit 28% of all greenhouse gases in the US. Growing up in the suburbs, I instinctively understood that this country is built for cars, not people. Most of America is functionally unlivable without a car, so it’s no wonder that “Americans are behind on car payments at a record level.”

“What car culture is really about is death,” wrote Mark Krotov in n+1. Gran Turismo 7 attempts to depoliticize and aestheticize the history and culture of the automobile and motorsports, to present gleaming virtual toys behind glass, but the game draws its power from the inseparability of cars from death. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is a leftist mantra that’s become overused to the point of meaninglessness, but maybe it’s more accurate to say that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the car.” Every post-apocalyptic narrative I can think of, from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us, features characters still driving cars, often using them to run over zombies or people. At least when the world is over, there’re no traffic jams.

Here in the real world, which may or may not be ending, there’re no more traffic jams on the Tokyo Expressway. There’s no traffic at all. The entire road is closed to cars and being transformed into a public park. Concept images show a strip of green snaking through the city, pedestrians ambling along paths lined with picnic tables and cafes. Today, the only way you can drive on the Tokyo Expressway is in Gran Turismo.

Can we imagine a world without cars? Here in Pittsburgh, the local bike advocacy group puts on OpenStreetsPGH, a day where miles of city roads are closed to cars. When my friend and I attended a few years ago, we entered the route and instinctively walked on the sidewalk before stepping onto the open road. There’s something innately transgressive about walking in the middle of a six-lane boulevard, surrounded only by fellow pedestrians and cyclists. Maybe that’s why when we protest, we scream WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS! As my friend and I ate our ice cream and strolled and chatted, I could briefly imagine a world where we retake the highways built as concrete canals for metal cages; where flowers bloom from the asphalt and people replace vehicles; where cars in all their sound and fury exist only as relics of an unenlightened past, preserved in the museum of death that is Gran Turismo.

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