The One-Way Wrong Way European Movie Blues
Europe-watchers aren’t surprised that the continent is having trouble pulling out from under its economic slump.
As documented time and again in Hollywood movies, their streets, boulevards, routes, avenues, and esplanades, if that is the word I am looking for, all go in one direction only, and it is always the wrong direction.
The purpose of this is so the hero of the piece, upon hopping in his car and squealing off into traffic pursued by villains, can immediately proceed to tear down the wrong way of the first one-way street he chooses.
This is baked in the cake of every single script placed in Europe that Hollywood has put out since the 1920s. Screenwriters would sooner give up mysterious redheads, secret CIA plots, and big clocks on the wall ticking down to Armageddon.
Well, the streets have to be ready for these scenes, you can’t just rely on chance. Having a movie filmed in your European city can be a positive jolt to the local economy, so the city fathers want to be ready. They pass a law saying that all streets from here on out must be one-way and must go the wrong way.
This naturally serves as a drag upon output and reduces worker productivity.
Say that a fellow, not a movie star, an ordinary fellow, lives in such and such a spot, we’ll call it the spot of the first part, but works in another such and such a spot, we’ll call it the spot of the second part.
It is only natural for him to expect under ordinary circumstances that he ought to be able to drive from the spot of the first part to the spot of the second part.
And he would be able to, if he didn’t find that the road that he wishes to traverse goes in the exact opposite direction of the direction he wishes to go.
The one-way sign is right there telling the tale: one-way, the wrong way.
There is no point is putting on a good impression of a salmon swimming upstream while fighting all the traffic coming at you, as it is no doubt against the law, and besides it gets you talked about in those sidewalk cafes they have over there.
Our European friends are known for their melancholy take on the world, and this phenomenon surely has a lot to do with it.
And furthermore, it becomes clear over time to our workman friend that not only this street or boulevard or esplanade, again if I have correctly identified this word as the one that denotes a sort of broad thoroughfare meant to carry traffic, it becomes clear that not only does it goes the wrong direction, but every street that might possibly be taken likewise goes the wrong direction.
It is like, and there’s some irony in the observation, it is like some French existential drama meant to convey the futility of human existence and the complete absence of any graceful exit from the situation.
It takes only a moment’s thought to recognize that if all the streets are one-way the wrong way between you and your destination, then your worker’s only choice in the matter is to face away from his intended object and follow the one-way streets going the exact opposite direction until they carry him all the way around the world and finally get him to his place of employment in that manner, coming up from behind it so to speak.
Well, goodness.
We were just talking about loss of productivity, and there is no keener example of this than the mental image of a man following all the rules of the road and, with a sigh no doubt, setting off around the world in the opposite direction of his destination.
Simply making the commute one-way is now consuming several weeks of his life and that only gets him into the position of clocking in. He still has an eight hour shift ahead of him!
No wonder that the Europeans lag in economic performance.
Hard on the commuter no doubt, but easy upon the moviegoer, who, upon seeing the hero tearing down the street going the wrong way, can sit back and enjoy the rest of the movie, no longer wondering if the setting is Des Moines or Pittsburgh, secure in the knowledge that the drama is unfolding in some European capital or other.
In the prefrontal cortex of the average human brain there is a section or shelf devoted to Movie Locales, and the understanding is clear between the viewer and his brain that One-Way Streets = Europe.
The rest of the action is well-known and the moviegoer may in fact close her eyes for a moment secure in the knowledge that pedestrians on the sidewalks, fruit and vegetable stands and their proprietors, flower stalls and their proprietors, diners at these sidewalk cafes we were talking about, bicyclists with baguettes balanced precariously in the storage basket on the front of the bike, and of course all those damned cars going in the other direction, will scatter, skid, dodge, dive, weave, and fling themselves one way or the other like leaves before a sudden autumn storm. They may even shake their fists after the driver in that peculiar European way that you just don’t see in other parts of the world.
A simple statistical sampling shows that this happens 100% of the time in movies that are set in Europe.
It is not for me to tell these fine people how to live their lives or direct them how to lay out their cities, and as noted there seems to be some sort of law in favor of it, but for the life of me I can’t help but see the impact this has on the economy.
The only winners are automotive repair shops, storefront glass window replacement outfits, and fruit, vegetable, and flower stall restoration crews. Their professional lives have never been this busy. It’s the rest of the working class that suffers!
No wonder so many of these European states are in arrears, and no wonder we see so many people driving all the way around the world just to get to a destination a mile or so down the road in the other direction.
