Of all the car-chase clichés, none is more durable than the exploding fruit-stand scene. You know the one: Our sideburned hero is powersliding his ’71 Coronet through the old city of Marrakesh in pursuit of some baddies in a Hilux, when BLAMMO—he turns a corner and runs sideways through a vendor’s cart, turning pomegranates into compost. All the other chestnuts of hot pursuit— old ladies on the sidewalk clutching their pearls, baby carriages rolling into the street, hubcaps shedding at the rate of 12 per car—these all pale in comparison to the fruit-stand smash-’em-up. Windshield salad has been featured in everything from Chuck Norris’s Delta Force to Sly Stallone’s Cobra, demonstrating the device’s impressive range.
It’s been said that the first automobile race began the moment after the second car was built. The first car-chase scene through a fruit stand wasn’t exactly contemporaneous with the first filmed car chase, but it was close. Movie critics credit 1903’s The Runaway Match for introducing the staged automotive pursuit. This same cohort of professional sitters pegs the first fresh-produce drive-through to Girl Shy in 1924, predating the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, by three years.
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A good idea then, and a good idea now. Indeed, the exploding fruit cart is celluloid gold: Its contents are cheap, it makes a big mess, and it doesn’t bitch about reshoots. But these are the obvious reasons why the produce-stand scene has become so essential to Hollywood chases. The larger question is, why has the cliché persisted for nearly a century? Haven’t directors run this well dry? They’re not even parodying it yet, suggesting that the destruction of fruit is somehow core to cinema.
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Consider this: Fruit has always been freighted with meaning. In humanity’s earliest nude scene, the one with a snake, the apple served as metaphor. To eat it was to disobey the creator, unleashing a tidal wave of bad shit from which we’d never recover. All our best stories somehow circle back to this tale of original sin. We know somewhere deep within us that when you mess with the fruit stand, there will be consequences.
Long after the Garden of Eden, fruit was still claiming what marketers call “disproportionate mindshare.” From ancient Greece through the Renaissance there was much painting and art about fruit, often depicting the kind of polytheistic bacchanals frowned upon by the church. The aforementioned pomegranate, the Greeks said, grew from the bloody genitals of the wounded hermaphrodite Agdistis. So fruit has always been dangerous, linked to our frail corporeality. The orange spelled the end of Don Corleone in The Godfather, just as the banana choked the tailpipe of Judge Reinhold’s Mercury Marquis in Beverly Hills Cop.
So, again, what does it mean that a car should destroy a fruit cart? It is more than the cheap gag of a society fat with excess produce. The fruit stand is the stand-in for our bodies, present and historical. It means that the car, and by extension the person oversteering it through the cantaloupes, is endowed with fearsome, destructive powers. It means he tangles with the entire history of fruit. In this way, he draws himself level with the gods. He is now in the pantheon, right alongside Gallagher.
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