Mary Shelley is a fascinating person and an extraordinary writer. Rereading her Frankenstein now, I regret that I never read any of her other novels, of which there are a few (though I have set it as a goal to attain and read them in the future). Her writing has just the right proportion of word density and eloquence of phrase to actual movement through the story the words impart and the detail in which the story is rendered. The writing is ornate, but not superfluous. I’m not sure I really appreciated Shelley’s voice and technique the first time I read her book as a teen. In spite of the text being nearly 200 years old, the meaning of all that she wrote is clear and beautiful still. A lot of people never actually read the novel, figuring that between the movies and Halloween decorations, they already have the matter pretty well sorted out. If you’re one of those folks, do yourself a favor and read the book, because there’s so much more to it than just the plot and the creature. But enough of my gushing over literature, we’ve all gathered ‘round to talk about cars… and so we shall.
I kicked this off with Shelley’s Frankenstein for a reason. Today, we’re going to talk about Frankencars… known more commonly as Rat Rods. Though, to even say something is a Franken-anything is a misnomer, because both the book’s title and subtitle, “Frankenstein“, and “The Modern Prometheus” refer to Dr. Victor Frankenstein rather than the creature he cobbled together in his experiment gone awry… Clearly Frankenstein is the guy’s name, but Prometheus was a Titan from Greek Mythology who is credited with being the maker of mankind. Regardless, I’m pretty sure everybody knows what I meant with my use of the term “Frankencar“.
A Rat Rod is not to be confused with a hot rod, which is traditionally a stripped down, souped up coupe or roadster from the 1920’s-1950’s. Hot rods were all about taking an inexpensive old clunker of a car and transforming it by cutting down weight while building up power for cheap speed and fun. So, with a typical hot rod in the most traditional sense, you’ll see things like fenders and hoods removed, and interiors stripped down to basics. You’ll also see some attempt to make the car look good. A traditional hot rod is a do-it-yourself affair, or one that you do with your friends. There’s pride in that work, and so there are also attempts made to elevate the appearance of the end result. Despite how stripped down a hot rod is in terms of creature comforts, there will be paint and some effort to beautify what remains of the body and the interior. Hot rods have evolved a bit since that particular car sub-culture first emerged, but the essence is still there for the most part.
Going back to Shelley’s Frankenstein, a hot-rodder could be looked at as akin to Victor Frankenstein, in that he altered the natural state of things in pursuit of his ambitions. A hot-rodder will alter the “natural” state of an automobile to make it suitable for the desired application, which, in this case, is driving as fast as possible. Originally, hot rodders used what was available and cheap, so you see lots of old Ford bodies that were otherwise just sitting around as salvage. Likewise, Victor Frankenstein salvages parts to build his creation.
Whether you’re building a living being or building a hot rod, it’s a huge undertaking and requires a great deal of focus, work, and determination to yield results. In Shelley’s writing, we first meet with lofty ambition through Captain Robert Walton, whose correspondence with his sister not only lays the groundwork for readers to meet Victor Frankenstein, but also shows us the lengths Walton is willing to go to in order to attain his goal, which is to explore the North Pole and thus gain fame for himself. While not quite as demanding as abandoning everyone and everything you know to hire a ship and a crew to traverse brutal and cold seas on a potentially deadly expedition to the North Pole, there are sacrifices involved with the goal of creating a hot rod: time, chiefly and money secondarily (at least in original hot rods, money was the lesser of the two investments). There’s also the sacrifice of the car in its original state. Compromising or altering the aesthetic and outward design as well as its function could be disastrous if done by somebody who doesn’t have a good sense of what they’re doing. So, in terms of level of risk (of disaster) and sacrifice, a regular hot rod, in Shelley terms, is about the same level or risk as Captain Robert Walton’s voyage. That is, it’s ambitious, but not yet past the point of crazy.
Then there’s the Victor Frankenstein level of risk and sacrifice in the name of ambition. Frankenstein wasn’t satisfied with merely learning how to save and preserve lives in his studies of medicine and science. He wanted to create life…. Not from scratch, mind you, because that would be a little too simple -after all, lots of people have impregnated women, thus getting half the credit for “creating” a life. Frankenstein was more of a builder in that he wanted to reassemble and reanimate his way into creating a whole new being. This level of hacking, dismantling, rebuilding and revival has its automotive equivalent in the Rat Rod. Though, I would venture to say that a Rat Rod looks the way it does much more intentionally than Frankenstein’s creature looked the way it did. Frankenstein set out to create perfection and ended up with a grotesque, whereas a rat rodder’s idea of perfection is a grotesque in the best, most surly, nitty-gritty, rust-busted sense of the word.
In Victor Frankenstein’s case, the sacrifice proved to be too much, and what he got in return for all his hard work and sacrifice horrified him. The creature Frankenstein created was giant in stature due to the extremes the doctor had to go to in assembling and attempting to balance the pieces he had to some human like proportion though its overall scale ended up skewed toward the gigantic end of things… which would have been fine, and nowadays probably could have landed the creature a nice contract to play in the NBA.
It was only when this leviathan was brought to life that its terrible artificiality became so shockingly clear to the doctor. Whether it was the eerie pallor the creature’s nearly translucent flesh, the jaundiced yellow of its eyes, or the unearthly hollowness of its gaze, Frankenstein’s own creation horrified him, and he ran, abandoning the very thing he sacrificed so much of himself to create. To bring this back to today’s car analogies, Frankenstein set out to build a hot rod and was terrified to discover that he had instead constructed a rat rod.
For illustration, here are some pictures of 1937 Ford pickup trucks. Longtime readers may recognize the dark cherry one as my dad’s, which is a resto mod. The beige and brown one is restored and the other two are Rat Rod 37 Ford Pickups. Amazing to think that they all started out as identical trucks.
When I was at the car show where most of these vehicles were on display this past summer, I was looking at one of the rat rod 37’s and a couple of guys about my dad’s age were sitting nearby in their lawn chairs next to their perfectly restored vintage autos. They asked me why I was so fascinated by the rat rod truck. Neither could understand what the appeal of the rat rod was. One of the two was even muttering insults about the build and appearance during lulls in our conversation. These guys hadn’t built hot rods, they restored something to its original and intended glory, and they just could not fathom why somebody would chose to leave a form incomplete, unfinished, damaged, mismatched, and rusty, let alone celebrate that state of affairs. These guys were neither Frankenstein, nor Walton in our analogy.. These guys were cosmetic surgeons.
But, we are linking two very different things here. After all, Frankenstein’s creature was alive, with cognition and feeling, and very poor coping skills when it came to dealing with rejection, as it turned out. Cars, on the other hand are sometimes thought of in an anthropomorphic sense… How many people do you know who have named their vehicles? I do it.. I even used to name some of the cars that I would sell back when I was in the car business. Cars are not sentient beings, though… outside of Stephen King novels, that is. Cars don’t have feelings and won’t skulk off all rejected if the person who designed them takes one look at the production model and runs away screaming as Victor Frankenstein did with his creation. Cars won’t hide out in the wilderness to mope, nor will they reach out to strangers in search of acceptance, then go on a murderous rampage when they are once again rejected…. Cars are nice in that way in which unearthly science experiment creatures are not.
But cars do take sacrifice of money, time, effort, and depending on how much time, relationships can be diminished in the process of building or maintaining a car. Modifying a car or making a rat rod also requires the sacrifice of the car at its core. It comes down to what the goal is, what the builder’s abilities are, what resources they have at their disposal, and what they’re willing to accept as completion of their goal.
What one should ask before embarking on an automotive building excursion is what are they willing to sacrifice to reach the final goal? Then, is that goal even worth the sacrifice? Does its creation justify the ruin and neglect of the things that have to fall by the wayside during the pursuit? Victor Frankenstein found out the hard way that it wasn’t. His failing was that in his relentless pursuit of pushing the boundaries of what he could do, he never stopped to consider whether it was something he SHOULD do. After that, the question became which of the two was the real grotesque, the creature or its maker? In that same vein, does having the best hot rod in the world justify going to extremes like draining retirement savings, neglecting relationships, or destroying the original intent behind what might have otherwise been a perfectly nice vehicle to create it? It’s a balancing act.
So, whether we’re talking pristine restorations, perfect preservations, resto-mods, Hot Rods, Haught Rods, Craft Rods, or nitty-gritty, outlandish Rat Rods: all deserve to have some acknowledgement of the sacrifice involved in their existence... and all have their admirers, even if those groups and sub-groups have radically different aesthetic sensibilities. I love 'em all.
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