Yes, Bill Maher, Driving Is a Skill

On Friday’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the titular host said something pretty dumb about cars, driving, and the stunt driving seen in car chase movies that have graced movie screens for ages.

It’s not the most galactically stupid thing he’s said this year – that award goes to use his use of a racial slur while interviewing a sitting U.S. senator – but it was so off the mark that I felt compelled to rant.

In the interest of disclosure, I generally like Bill Maher. I don’t watch every week, but I catch the show when I can. Politically I agree with him on some things and not others (we’ll leave it at that), but as a TV host I find him to be relatively funny and smart, and I applaud his willingness to invite folks from all political stripes onto his show.

However, he can be smarmy, and occasionally I wonder if his staff has fact-checked something he’s prattling on about. And sometimes he just goes off the rails.

You can watch it here, but during Friday’s show-closing “New Rules” segment, Maher complained about Hollywood’s penchant for car chase movies after he went out to see “Baby Driver.” Specifically, he whined about how the heroes in these movies are lazy, since almost anyone can drive, and that they speak to some sort of male laziness that was behind the actions of powerful men accused of sexual predation — men like Harvey Weinstein.

Leaving aside the fact that sexual harassment is often about power and not about some rich man being too lazy to keep up his appearance, the whole thing felt like a stretch. How do car chase movies have anything to do with Weinstein, other than the fact he may have had a hand in the production of some of them?

Not to mention Maher missed an opportunity to make some points about movies recycling bad plots or not making use of female leads more often (Charlize Theron shouldn’t be the only woman getting all the fun). Most relevant to most of us in TTACLand, however, was Maher’s assertion that the type of driving showcased in these movies is so easy that anyone can do it and that it’s not impressive, as driving itself is so easy that anyone can do it.

Let’s start with the obvious – if performance driving was that easy to accomplish, there wouldn’t be people who make a living as stunt drivers for these movies (and if driving itself were so easy, we wouldn’t have driver’s ed. Or bad drivers). But Maher seems to equate what he sees on the big screen to that jerk who peels out from a light in his Challenger – or at least, he implies this from his rant.

Yes, Bill, it isn’t hard to floor it in a muscle car and leave rubber behind. You’re right about that. But that’s not what’s happening in any of these movies. Or on your average track day, from LeMons on up to NASCAR. Driving fast, whether for stunts or for racing, is hard, and doing it well is harder. Not everyone can do it.

It’s a pernicious myth that goes beyond a smug, rich talk-show host who probably spends most of his time behind the wheel stuck in L.A. traffic. I am a very casual race fan, and when I tell non-car-enthusiast friends I am going to watch the Indy 500 or Daytona, I get dismissive responses. “Sure, I know they’re going fast, but how hard is it to turn left all the time?”

Even in Maher’s rant, he starts off by sarcastically referring to “the elite, mind-blowing skill of driving,” complete with a droll emphasis on the last word, as if we could all do what we see on the silver screen. He also says driving is not that hard — that driving is so easy, cars can now drive themselves.

I think this attitude exists because most of us drive, most of us started doing it as teens, and for some reason, many of us can’t differentiate between our commutes and racing or stunt driving. Maybe it’s because few people have ever driven beyond 4/10ths, or haven’t gone faster than 80 mph on the freeway. But mostly I think it’s because people who don’t know much about skilled driving see it and think, “Hey, I drive every day. I learned how to do it was I was a teenaged idiot. How much harder can it be to drive like they do in the Fast and Furious movies?”

Any one of us who’s ever tracked anything knows going fast isn’t easy. It requires mental focus, good reflexes, smooth hands, and quick reaction time, among other things. You have to know how to situate your body in the seat correctly before you even move the car. You need to be able to coordinate your feet as well as your hands and eyes. And so on.

I suspect the other reason skilled driving is dismissed is that driving fast doesn’t look physically demanding from the outside (Maher uses an X-rated example to dismiss the workout one gets from track or stunt driving in his rant). But it is. Cabins get hot, g-forces push you around, and some cars (mostly race cars, duh) still have manual steering and brakes.

I say this as someone who has never even formally raced. Just driving a production car at 6 or 7/10s at a track event can be taxing. So, if I know all of this from limited experience, imagine how insulting Maher’s inference of driving fast being so easy as to be lazy is to someone like Jack or Mark.

Maybe I should sign Maher up for one of those experiences that lets anyone drive a used race car at a local track, like the one with Richard Petty’s name on it. I was gifted that experience once, and I thought it would be easy – I’d already driven fast in production cars on a road course at private events. Surely any event open to any rube with a credit card, taking place on a track requiring only left turns, would lead to easy driving. After all, an outfit like that can’t afford to have paying customers get hurt.

I was off the mark. The safety briefing was one of the more intense ones I’ve ever sat through. The car vibrated so much at speed that one of my contact lenses came loose (I blinked it back into place at 145 mph), and it was a constant battle to keep the car on the correct line and out of the wall.

I had fun and was happy with my top speed, but easy it was not. So for Maher to sit behind a desk and suggest that the types of driving we see in chase movies is “easy” just because 16-year-olds also drive or because some meatheads on his commute leave rubber at lights is to willfully ignore that there’s a world of difference between street driving and stunt driving or track driving, just to make a weird point and an easy Kevin Spacey joke.

I’ll leave it to political blogs to pick on Maher’s weird setup for his larger point, but a man as smart as he is should know the difference between driving across L.A. and driving at Willow Springs. And if he ignored that difference to make a joke, that’s dumb, too, since he and his writers are clever enough to come up with a better setup for Weinstein jokes.

I know TTAC likely has L.A.-based readers involved in performance or stunt driving. If any of you good folks come across Maher, kindly invite him out to a movie set or racetrack. Maybe the avowed atheist will see religion, at least on this subject, and admit that piloting a car at a level above what’s seen on the 405 is actually a real, difficult skill.

Maher is a smart man who occasionally says stupid stuff. The car guy in me won’t let this particular utterance slide.