Life is Like a Parking Lot...

Last night I managed to finally get to a film that's been burning a hole in my Netflix Instant Queue: The Parking Lot Movie. It's no secret that I really like documentary films, and I've watched plenty on seemingly droll subjects. Dana and I watched an entire doc about a typeface, for instance. This fell into that category, but I'd heard good things, so I figured I'd sit down and watch the 70ish minute film.

The Parking Lot Movie explores a lot in a short time, and managed to relate it all to the titular parking lot. Said lot is the Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia, right across the street from a University of Virginia campus. As one might expect, this means that the vast majority of those who staff the parking lot are [poor] college students or [poor] college grads. As the movie spins it, the folks who end up working at the Corner Parking Lot tend to view themselves as misfits - disillusioned philosophy, anthropology, and sociology majors that graduate and use their illustrious degrees to sit for eight hours a day in a small booth.

The most interesting (and, in the end, the most overarching) point the film makes is about the separation people seem to experience when dealing with parking lots and driving in general. If the internet allows people to say what they truly think about topics and real life makes people hold back, the car is somewhere in between. It offers enough separation and enough protection that people feel free to flip one another off and honk when they never would face-to-face. The car offers not only a way to get from point A to point B, but it allows us a mobile space that is closed off from the world at large. It has a controllable speed, controllable music and sound, and even a manipulable local climate.

The current and former staffers of the lot wax philosophic about how this affects people. It makes people feel entitled. The separation, as well as the usual "rules" of society, tend to make people think that they are owed a parking space after purchasing their $45,000 luxury SUV. It's inconceivable to them that after driving down a "free" road and getting out of a car that they own, that they also have to pay for the privilege. This leads to my favorite part of the film - a montage of arguments with drivers over a few dollars and people fleeing without paying. Of course, the staffers have plenty to say about these people. It seems pretty common that someone driving a car worth more than some houses refuses to pay a $2 parking fee. When someone decides to flee a sub-$10 ticket, we see one of the workers chase after the car, kicking and punching it as it stops at an intersection and waits to turn. It's pretty clear that the damage done to the cars (plus the subsequent police fines) are significantly more pricey than the fee.

The whole movie is a good reminder that people are people, no matter where they work or what their socioeconomic status might be. People have personal struggles of various magnitudes in their lives, but everything is relative. The least we can do is at least treat one another with a little bit of civility, whether the person you run into the street is a high powered CEO or cleans toilets for a living. In the end, that's probably the most human thing about us - actually treating one another with a little humanity.