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I took this shot last year in the midst of the incredibly bad week of wildfire smoke that Reno got (AQI 600+ for days; it was horrifying). This shoot day was the final inspiration that got Postcards moving, even though I didn't use this shot in the narrative. (Although a tiny sliver of this shot is actually visible in the cover of Postcards.) It was only cut from the story because I was attempting to make the narrative of Postcards less time-constrained, and the truck felt too specific and distracting from the overall narrative of the piece for me. 

Which brings me to the crux of my writing today, and this is more of a question than a post: what does define the correct vehicle for post-apocalyptic/dystopian media? I think I've mostly seen the default be "old muscle cars", likely because of Mad Max. The thing is, the Interceptor is just a '73 Falcon because the movie came out in '79. The equivalent car today would be, like, casting a pre-facelift S550 Mustang.

Simon Stalenhag usually uses 80s-90s era vehicles in his stories, but those stories also tend to be set explicitly in the era the cars are from (which is part of why his genre of lost futurism is so interesting, admittedly). Looper actually did something fairly interesting, at least conceptually, with its dystopian future where Joseph Gordon-Levitt has his somehow-wire-modified NA Miata in a world with a combination of many old pre-OBDII cars and futuristic vehicles. Minority Report just got a big-ass check from Lexus and threw a concept directly into the movie, which makes sense for its high-gloss dystopia and automatic pod-cars. 

Blade Runner has the Peugeot, which is the most imaginative future of all: an America where we can buy French domestic marques again. 

Of course the reason why I ask this is because I am yet again planning to go out and shoot some more dystopic photos that mirror how I feel about being alive, here, in Idaho, in 2023, as myself. If I could get the Peugeot from Blade Runner I totally would, but that has proved unfortunately difficult. I am simply grappling with how to portray the correct image of an ending world and still include a car; why does an '89 Camry feel like it fits, but an '08 Yaris doesn't? If I can figure that reason out, can I circumvent it? Can I broaden the scope or narrative in some way that it feels like a Yaris could be running around after the end of the world? Is my vision of the apocalypse solely driven by the media I have consumed; do I need to imagine something broader and newer? 

I don't have any answers right now, but I thought it couldn't hurt to write it out.