by Levi Thompson
In its celebration of machines, of speed as success, and of petro-culture—i.e., the transformation of human experience following from oil extraction in the twentieth century—as the primary organizing principle of society, Disney’s Cars dramatizes a concept that hitherto has remained underexplored in scholarship: petro-post-modernity. A twenty-first-century condition emerging out of petro-modernity, that moment when we lost the capacity to recognize the central role of petroleum in our lives, petro-post-modernity represents our disconnection one step further from the realities of petroleum extraction in spite of our continued embroilment within it. As Stephanie LeMenager observes, “petro-modernity” describes “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum.” Cars, though, highlights petro-post-modernity as pastiche, following Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It reflects the American obsession with the automobile—given the percentage of the US population that drives—through callbacks to the introduction of the Ford Model T (Lizzie, a character in Cars, is a striking example) to Bobby Troup’s 1946 song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” and onward to George Lucas’s 1973 American Graffiti, a celebration of youth, cars, and freedom set in 1962.
The hero in Cars, Lightning McQueen, ends up stuck in a small town called Radiator Springs after accidentally destroying its main street. The town judge, Doc Hudson (voiced by actor and race car driver Paul Newman in his final film “appearance”), sentences Lightning to repave it. In one of many intertexts, the town’s resident cars celebrate in a scene reminiscent of the teenage cruising culture in Lucas’s movie. Not simply a children’s cartoon, Cars runs on nostalgia for a “simpler” time. Sally Carrera, Lightning’s love interest, reflects on how Interstate 40 changed Radiator Springs when it bypassed Route 66: “Back then, cars came across the country a whole different way. The road didn’t cut through the land like that interstate. It moved with the land […]. Cars didn’t drive on it to make great time. They drove on it to have a great time.” For automobiles, Cars suggests, the road is original and natural; it is only the interstate that disrupts the order of things.
While only a cartoon representation, this Disney film neatly reflects broader cultural experiences in the twentieth century. For instance, petroleum extraction drove not only politics in the Middle East but also American culture at home. We might consider the case of Franklin Book Publications (FBP), an American Cold-War translation and publishing endeavor that worked in countries across the Global South. The FBP Baghdad office, active from 1957-1968, spent nearly its entire operating period attempting to secure funding from philanthropic petro-dollars. While the New York office successfully cultivated relationships with the Rockefeller Foundation—founded with Standard Oil money—and the Ford Foundation—part of auto manufacturer Henry Ford’s financial legacy—the Iraqi branch sought support from a charitable organization founded after the death of Armenian oil magnate and art collector Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian in 1955. At that time, Gulbenkian was the richest man in the world due to his role as the architect of the 1928 Red Line Agreement that created the Turkish Petroleum Company (later the Iraq Petroleum Company [IPC]).
A full account of the role that petroleum had in the foundation and operation of the FBP remains beyond the scope of this piece. In short, the FBP, like much of the cultural and political sphere following World War Two and the advent of the Cold War, was—despite the nuclear anxieties that characterized the age—primarily driven by oil. As historian David S. Painter argues in Oil, Resources, and the Cold War, 1945-1962, oil was central to establishing US power in the postwar international system. In this case, cheaper access to air travel allowed Franklin’s New York representatives to visit their satellites abroad more frequently. On one such trip to Baghdad, Franklin President Datus C. Smith, Jr., met the famous Palestinian intellectual Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who had initially taken a job editing the journal of the IPC’s cultural branch after settling in Iraq. Smith ensured that Jabra was taken into the FBP fold. They drew on his skill with English-to-Arabic translation and his IPC connections as they sought local sources of funding. Beyond the FBP, formally marking the shift from petro-modernity to petro-post-modernity, Jabra later collaborated with Abdul Rahman Munif, who held a PhD in the economics of petroleum from the University of Belgrade, with a thesis on the metafictional novel A World Without Maps. Munif also wrote the acclaimed quintet Cities of Salt (1984-1989), which tracks the transformation of a Gulf Arab society in the fictional city of Harran following the discovery of oil in the desert, including the Arabs’ intercultural interactions with Americans who arrived to administer the oil fields. When he introduced the term “petrofiction” in 1992, Amitav Ghosh noted that while American writers had yet to “tak[e] on the Oil Encounter,” Cities of Salt “ought to be regarded as a work of immense significance” for “giv[ing] the Oil Encounter a literary expression.” Indeed, the novel explores the effects of oil on the economy and politics, serving as a fictional parallel to the materialist history Timothy Mitchell offers in Carbon Democracy. It stands, therefore, as a major work of twentieth-century petro-modernity.
American cultural production, however, now engages the Oil Encounter through a petro-post-modern lens. Naturally, TV and the movies are where American ideology played out before the rise of social media, and they remain relevant even as their influence wanes in the streaming era. Viewers today can curate their watching however, whenever, and often wherever they like. While Cars only indirectly gestures at the petro-post-modern, consider the 2025 King of the Hill reboot, which flips Munif’s novel in its first episode as the Hills, Hank and his wife Peggy, return to the fictional town of Arlen, Texas, after Hank spends several years working in Saudi Arabia using his expertise on propane and propane accessories for ARAMCO. Confronted with unexpected changes in Arlen, Hank recalls driving back from a Saudi market in a pickup truck to their home in a development named “ARAMCO Residential.” As the theme of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) looms in the background, Hank declares, “I tell you what, they really did their homework here on America. This is what I imagine things were like in the ’50s.” Reflecting on the experience after returning to their old house in Arlen, he tells Peggy, “You know, I’m beginning to think that ARAMCO base in Saudi Arabia was more Texan than Texas.” Hank’s vision of what Texas ought to be is stuck in time, and the Saudi recreation of an American neighborhood is based on those same nostalgic notions. Hank has no idea how true his hunch really is: ARAMCO’s real-world Dhahran Compound, originally built to house Western expats like Hank, dates back to 1933 and provided the model for Munif’s depiction of the American colony in Harran.
As the twenty-first century pushes forward, we continue to flounder in petro-post-modernity: Donald Trump reiterates the phrase “drill, baby drill” in his 2025 inauguration speech. Trump’s ally, Elon Musk, extols the benefits of artificial intelligence for his business ventures, including Tesla robotaxis and individually-owned Teslas. These vehicles—despite being powered by electricity—still depend on vast amounts of cheap carbon (for tires, auto parts, roadways, etc.) and likewise bypass our eventual liberation from cars altogether as a mode of transport. I contend that we ought to consider Trump’s above declaration and Musk’s continuation of America’s automobile obsession as the product of a wider nostalgia for the same time period that Jameson describes in a brief treatment of American Graffiti: “one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire.” Trump, Musk, and others’ “cannibalizations” (to use Jameson’s term) of the past to repackage it for present consumption are particularly apt illustrations of petro-post-modernity. Another excellent example can be found in Musk’s Tesla Diner concept, a drive-in movie theater and restaurant based on a classic 1950’s diner, where Tesla owners can comfortably eat and watch films while charging their cars. The petro-post-modern Tesla driver recognizes neither how he gets to the diner, because the abject economic and political violence of petroleum extraction at the core of the process is sublimated through many layers of production, nor how his presence at the diner only imitates an “authentic” experience since the entire enterprise rests on nostalgia for an inaccessible time.
So how could we effectively frame this drift into petro-post-modernity? Interestingly, Disney’s cultural imagination in Cars 3 (2017), like the original film, illustrates one perspective. Faced with the superior capabilities of next-generation racers like Armie Hammer’s Jackson Storm, who depend on off-track racing simulators and computer-generated data streams, an aging Lightning rejects technological advance in favor of what he calls “real racing.” Leaving the simulator aside, he takes his trainer to the beach, to a muddy demolition derby, and to the dirt track where his mentor Doc Hudson trained. (Paul Newman voices Doc again in a posthumous, digitally created, ersatz appearance.) The track, Thomasville Speedway, is clearly based on a real one found in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, built in 1947. Although it does not predate Daytona, it offers a more direct link to NASCAR’s origins among moonshine bootleggers in Appalachia. Lightning’s search for authenticity here entails the rejection of further disconnection from the environment, like the primary critique offered in the original Cars about the interstate bypassing Route 66. In Cars 3, this quest entails Lightning’s refusal to use new technology to train and a subsequent search for origins. During a moonlit off-road training session in the mountains, Lightning speeds through a stand of pine, tree branches tearing off the digitally enhanced suit that his new sponsor had attached to his body. Yet Lightning’s return to “real racing” is driven by the same nostalgia machine that produces figures like Trump and Musk—there is no longer a way to return, if there ever was. Even if we might eventually leave automobiles in the past, as the world becomes increasingly structured around artificial intelligence and digital recreations of things humans used to produce, we stand on the precipice not of a replacement for petro-post-modernity but rather, because of the immense environmental resources demanded by digital “creation,” to fall even deeper into its contradictions. Our wish to return to the past is obscured by sources of our own design.
“Nostalgia films,” Jameson explains in Postmodernism, “restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation.” He sets up American Graffiti as the “inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse,” which “set out to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era.” Placing Cars at the other end of this timeline offers instead an aesthetic discourse of petro-post-modernity where humans are shunted aside while machines grind on—the apotheosis of what Jameson recognizes as the “insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode.” While Lightning ultimately shed his digital skin, we remain liable to finding new means to escape ours.
Levi Thompson is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His monograph, Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry, won the inaugural Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies from the Modern Language Association. Levi is also the editor of A History of Middle Eastern Modernism, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Edited by Sarah Hussain
Featured Image: Hafidh Al-Qadhi Square, Baghdad, 1950s, via Wikimedia Commons.
