Used Cars

"Used car salesman" has always been as much a pejorative term in the US as, say, realtor, auditor, or OVB employee would be here. And it's no wonder that an amoral comedy about a sleazy used car salesman found its time period somewhere along a dusty highway in the early 1980s. Used Cars is, in essence, a showcase of the amoral American hedonism of that decade arising from rapid economic growth and a deep breath after 2 uneasy decades in which the very essence of the American way of life had been called into question. The grime, sleaziness, and moral degradation here also seems so obvious as to suggest that it is not a deliberately set mirror. Used Cars is, imo, a pretty unflinching, if perhaps unintentional, satire of an era when you tossed trash over your shoulder, where telling the truth was a career liability, and some ethics were not permitted to stand in the way of capitalist ambition. If you accept it as such, you begin to marvel at how spineless the film is right up to the end, and how utterly unwilling it is to punish blatant character missteps at all. (10/05/2021)