It’s Time To Address The Breast-Based Argument In The Whole ‘Pixar Cars Headlights Should Be Eyes’ Controversy

Sometimes, it’s good to have evergreen causes you believe in. Of course, these causes should be ones of deep, ideally global importance, causes worthy of your continual time, effort, and attention. Things that matter. That’s why I decided it was time to take a moment to clarify and expose a common fallacy used to attempt to refute a law of the universe I have chosen to champion, that the eyes of a car’s face should be the headlights, not the windshield. You know, like in Pixar’s Cars series.

Yes, this is a drum I’ve been beating since, jeez, 2011, when I first publicly called out Pixar for their reckless abandonment of headlight-eyes in favor of windshield-eyes. At the time, this view was met with a fair amount of hostility, and understandably so: Pixar is a beloved organization to a vast number of people, and any criticism of their choices can be read as an attack.

Also, Pixar’s motives and reasoning is fairly sound: they didn’t want the faces so low to the ground, to avoid the cars feeling like “snakes,” and I suppose to also hide the interior, which once you realize it may have seats and a steering wheel and other normal car fittings, then brings up all kinds of disturbing and unpleasant questions that everyone at Pixar would rather avoid, and I know because I asked once.

And, yes, I know about Celine Dephare.

Okay, but back to what I need to address today: the recurring argument that, in the Cars universe, headlights can’t be eyes because headlights have been established to be something else. Specifically, breasts.

Yes, breasts! And this all comes from this lightheartedly racy little joke that was in the first Cars movie, which features two Lightning McQueen groupies, who are female-presenting Mazda Miatas named, cleverly, Mia and Tia. In one scene, Mia and Tia flash their pop-up headlights at McQueen, referencing the act of flashing breasts at a race event, which is, of course, a longstanding and hallowed tradition. Here’s the scene:

It’s a funny little gag, I suppose, and it’s well understood to imply breast flashing (to the point that some sites seem to get weirdly worked up about it), especially because the word “headlight” has been used as slang for a woman’s breasts since the 1940s. [Ed note: I am also reminded of this scene from Dumb and Dumber – Pete] And, as I mentioned, references to this are often used to refute assertions that the headlights should, in fact, be the eyes of a car, stating that this scene confirms what car headlights true analogue is: breasts.

The problem here, though, is that this association, outside of its one-time use in the Mia and Tia gag, makes no sense. If headlights are intended to represent breasts, then that means pretty much every other non-pop-up headlight car on the road is exposing their nipples to everyone, all the time.

Sally Carerra, the Porsche-lawyer who was McQueen’s primary love interest in the movies, looks like this:

So, based on the argument that headlights are breasts, does that mean Sally there is just running around topless all the time? And, based on McQueen’s reaction to Mia and Tia, it doesn’t seem like the Cars universe culture is breast-agnostic; he had a reaction to them.

Then does that mean that, somehow, Sally decided to show up to court with her breasts out here:

Of course, it’s not just her; everyone in that courtroom has their nips out, from the cop to the judge to everyone viewing the proceedings. It’s downtown Breastadelphia, Titsylvania in there.

By the logic of the headlights-are-breasts faction, this scene shows a man-car with exposed nipples, one of which has been lost due to injury or neglect, and another wearing what appear to be fake, stick-on breasts:

Clearly, this logic does not hold up.

So, this is all just to say I stand by my belief that headlights remain the preferable anthropomorphized car-eyes, and any argument that Pixar intended to suggest that headlights are breasts outside of one throwaway gag that goes against the entire rest of the established culture and behavior of the Cars universe is inherently wrong.

So there.