Three figures are sitting inside a car, next to
a lake. The car will not start, and they cannot go anywhere. Most importantly
it seems that they fail to understand why their will to leave is not enough to
make the car moving.
The work refers to society’s failure to take its deadlocks
and crises (environmental or others) seriously; an impasse that Chomsky has
named as humanity’s ‘drive to species suicide’. The type of thought that
supports this impasse is a combination of infantile denial and of popular metaphysical
psychology (culminating in prescriptions of the type “believe and will become
true”).
As the protagonists’ drama unfolds, it appears
that they prefer to drown in the water of the lake than do anything which might
change their circumstances. At the end, as they find themselves at the bottom
of the lake, they utter their final words: “Damn it”.
