That feeling of hopelessness and bottomless malaise that pours into the souls of trapped highway drivers on a daily basis in the major urban corridors…all I can say is that the gloomy authors and philosophers of yesteryear never knew this kind of anguish…they never knew they had it so good.
Industrial asphalt downerism became an American “thing” in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s vast interstate highway system began construction.
One of the first cinematic depictions of this stifling nationwide depression happens in the first minutes of Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (‘62), a mostly middling family comedy with James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara in the leads. Stewart, playing a banker, is trapped in his sedan during a highway commute, and a truck just ahead belches out a cloud of brown exhaust.
But it wasn’t the exhaust and smog that so weighed on drivers. It was the sheer number, the tens of thousands of other commuters.