Cars in Clips – Holden Commodore and Powderfinger

Like many people, I’m a big fan of Aussie stuff; Aussie music, Aussie cars, Aussie… things. So what happens when you combine all of this Aussie-ness? You get a highly mesmerizing and kind of anxiety-inducing video clip.

My Kind of Scene features on the 2000 album Odyssey Number Five, and was used to promote the movie Mission: Impossible 2.

In addition to featuring the band, the video also features a couple of other star performers – two Holden Commodores. Spoiler alert!!! One of them doesn’t make it out alive.

Mesmerising but anxiety inducing

Lead singer Bernard Fanning is driving erratically down a typical country road (straight, unsealed and quite frankly probably a little boring, surrounded by yellow, bone-dry fields) in what I think is a VC Commodore (Commodore nuts correct me if I’m wrong), when he pulls his hands off the wheel in sheer resignation and lets the car crash off the road.

As a Commodore fan, watching it crash in slow motion into a bunch of white road marker poles before it flips and slides down the road to come to a stop, smoke spewing out of its exhaust, is the anxiety-inducing part I mentioned before.

I know it is art, but what a waste of a perfectly good Commodore! I’m sure Ford Falcon fans would beg to differ.

The rest of the band are trailing in a VL Commodore, which disappointingly isn’t written off, because out of the two it’s not my favourite model.

Then as the band approach the crash scene it fades to black and it’s all over red rover.

I love the way this is filmed

The saturated colours and golden glow, with the whole thing in slow motion gives it a surreal feeling, and really captures the mood of the song.

There’s something compelling about watching those white poles explode off the front grill of the car; it’s unnerving and creepy yet strangely satisfying all at the same time. Don’t know what that says about me!

I wonder, though, how I’ll feel about it in another few decades when that dead Commodore is worth an exorbitant amount of money and is considered a collectable?!