Heart like a Wheel

Abstract

approximately seventy minutes into the running of Jonathan Kaplan’s Heart Like a Wheel (1983)—the story of female drag racer Shirley Muldowney—there comes a point at which the style and imagery radically differ from the preceding and succeeding narrative sequences. While the film in general appears to reinvent the racing movie genre in favor of a female heroine, this brief three-minute sequence depicts an entirely different set of values. Rather than appearing human, the figure of Bonnie Bedelias Shirley Muldowney now appears like something resembling a mechanized image in a science fiction movie. She seems almost robotic. Dialogue becomes suspended. An eerie moog synthesizer dominates the soundtrack, contrasting with the basic aural representation employed in this film, and Shirley’s body becomes suddenly objectified. Her living personality is reduced the level of the mechanized objects in the world of drag racing.

A lot of people watching for wrecks and roaring for blood. All they want to see is a car turn over so they can hold their breath. And, in the end, when they remove what’s left of you, they point to it and say, “Oh, they’ve taken him away!”

—Lee, in Howard Hawks’s The Crowd Roars (1932)

The whole experience is somewhere between an orgasm and a glimpse of Armageddon. It is l-o-u-d. It is primal. It is ferocious. … I have been fascinated with the machinations of nitromethane and its incumbent pyromania for quite some time. I am also fascinated with women who harness, finesse, dominate, and control the fierce, unwieldy machines of drag racing.

—Cole Coonce: “Drag Strip Blast Off Girls: Shirley Muldowney and Stacy ‘the Femme Fatale’ Paul”