It’s 2 am. I tend to write these Cold Start posts the night before, like I am now. While there’s many nights I’d rather just sleep, the late hour also helps me to free myself of the shackles of rationality or even the burden of selecting subjects that, you know, make any sense. That’s why I feel like it’s somehow okay to write about this morning’s subject: how a particular design detail of the interior of the Renault 5 makes me think of a strangely matching particular design detail from the wonderfully peculiar David Lynch movie, Dune, based on the Frank Herbert novel. Neither of which has anything to do with Renault. And yet here we are.
Okay, so here’s the visual element that somehow fired the synapses in my brain that stored old visual images from the 1984 version of Dune:
Okay, so not so much the visor, which luxuriantly has a mirror, but the quilted headliner. That quilted headliner, in color and texture, immediately made me think of this:
See those padded walls? They sure look and feel like they’re covered with Renault 5 headliner material, don’t they?
Sure they do! Here, you can see the clip where this comes from, and also you can see David Lynch himself in there, as the guy running the spice harvester:
Man, thank god I don’t have to pitch these Cold Starts. Who would okay this?
Damn the headliner! GET THOSE MEN OUT OF THERE!
> the late hour also helps me to free myself of the shackles of rationality
I didn’t realize rationality was a burden you bore
Perhaps ‘handicap’ is more accurate? Though a handicap can be a burden, not all burdens are necessarily handicaps.
I love 1984’s Dune (big surprise, I know) and Das Boot too (mentioned in an earlier comment). Upon seeing your headline Jason, I resolved to figure out what you were referring to before reading any text… only using the Renault image you chose.
All I could manage to come up with pre-late-morning-coffee was the very slight similarity between the Renault’s folded-over hood and wide-set headlights with the upper brow and eyes of a Guild Navigator: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.GZV-13NoPazVtpfvuWbr4AHaDH%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=44fb72e70504e0207e2e1086a5c773aa708100854988e691d51d48387a6a933d&ipo=images
PS: how does one embed external image files so they display in a post? Is that a thing yet?
Also, Jason’s output could be described as many things, but boring?
I respectfully disagree.
It’s what Italian set designers thought fantastically rich space-faring people decorated their flying runabouts with 20,000 years from now. And Pugs.
Don’t you mean Alan Smithee’s 1984 Dune? 😉
‘Cause the sign at the end of the road it says
Next stop, twilight zone
It’s two a.m.
Please don’t be “heart plugs”! Saved from that vision by quilted upholstery.
I went to see Lynch’s Dune in the theater with my brother and my dad, and as we walked out they were muttering about how awful the movie was and I felt shame for absolutely loving it.
I saw Dune when a friend who was spending the night convinced my parents to rent it and a VCR for movie night.
When we got home, after hooking up the VCR, I cracked open the clamshell box containing the movie. A booklet fell out. I picked it up, and the cover proclaimed it to be the dictionary of terms we apparently would need to know when watching Dune.
I opened it, scanned a few pages, tossed it back in the box, and put the tape in.
That was one weird movie. I don’t know if memorizing the dictionary, or at least consulting it, would have made it better or not.
Oh well.
My friend was not allowed to pick movies anymore.
I’m glad you like padded walls, Torch.
That type of quilted insulation was in all the planes I flew in the Air Force. Cheap, easily removed for service and replacement. Not so hot at insulating though. Those birds were cold above 10,000 feet.
Strange since those engines are providing all the waste heat you could ever want.
Generally speaking, that’s accurate. Typically 600 degree bleed air from the engines is fed through a mixing system where half is fed to an expansion turbine and “cooled” to 150-200 degrees (called cool air) and then a portion is cooled even more in heat exchanger to about 35 degrees (cold air) The mixing console allows for blending hot, cool and cold air to theoretically achieve a comfortable temperature. In reality, because of poor insulation and rapid heat loss through fuselage skin transference with outside air, complicated by airframes that are not airtight and leak cold air around door frames and joints, the system struggles to compensate. This also causes problems for pressurization. Below 10k feet it’s less noticeable, but at flight levels above that things get cold fast. Compound that with the huge volumes of internal atmosphere of cargo planes (the types I flew) and it was usually a chilly flight unless you were lucky enough to sit right beside the air outlets.
Here’s my bit of R5 trivia. A little town in Skagit County Washington used them as police cars back in the day. The town was called La Conner and for years there was an old one parked under a carport next to the highway. It’s been twenty year since I’ve been home so for all I know it might still be there, sitting in pea green with Le Car written on the side just below the belt line trim.
Nice, I’ll keep an eye out for it next time I head up that way to see the tulips or the snow geese.
Can you find it with Google Street View? I had to look up La Conner, but didn’t see a proper highway except I-5 which seemed too far away
If memory serves it was just off Highway 20 on the south side of the eastbound lanes before the split to go to either Burlington or Mount Vernon.
So La Conner and a Le Car. Conjugate that ladies and gentlemen!
While scrolling down & seeing that picture from Dune I thought that your 2 a.m. brain’s synapses had grievously misfired and used a picture from STNG. Yeah, today I learned that Patrick Stewart was in David Lynch’s Dune. And it’s still early in the morning so one wonders what other surprises lie ahead the rest of the day.
My plan, if I ever meet Sir Patrick, is to say ‘hey! you’re the guy from Dune’. I would hope that it would draw a laugh and we become best friends.
I learned that this morning too! Guess it’s been a while since I saw that movie.
He was also in Excalibur. Not much of a stretch to think that John Boorman and David Lynch might have shared an affinity for some of the same substances based on these two films.
Since I once owned a first-year U.S.-spec R5, I remember the headliner well. Thing deteriorated after a few years, though, and like every other Renault part in the USA, a replacement was not available.
I really dug the rectangular headlights and the gray plastic bumper we didn’t get, too.
Is that Captain Picard in the second picture from the bottom?
Make it so…
For my money, while Josh Brolin does a good job in the remake, Stewart’s version of Gurney Halleck is the best.
Yes, that’s Patrick Stewart. And on the right we have Jürgen Prochnow (Commander in “Das Boot”).
And Max von Sydow playing Dr. Kynes – and you can take your pick of famous roles of his – the Three Eyed Raven, the first person to die in the Force Awakens, Ming the Merciless, and the main character of The Seventh Seal
And Brewmeister Smith in Strange Brew!
Beauty, eh.
My bit of R5 trivia: we had one when I was a kid. I never felt cooler than I did the day my mom picked me up from elementary school, and I stood up in the front passenger seat through the sunroof and waved to all my classmates as we pulled away.
I was not very cool in elementary school…
But you’re ready to be a B-list dictator, so there’s that.
My one bit of R5 trivia: due to overlapping rear suspension the right side wheelbase is a couple of inches longer than the left side.
Designed for left turns… NASCAR influence.
That’s because the orientation of the transverse torsion bars.
And to add to the Frenchness it’s a mid-engine front wheel drive at least in the first version, like the Renault 16 the engine is longitudinal behind the transmission.
I read that it saved them a gear in the transmission, also the muffler is inside the left hand front fender, I wondered why it steamed in winter and in the rain