Garages on Film and Television

The Fonz lived in the Cunningham’s. Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield disposed of a corpse in Jimmie Dimmick’s. An entire episode of Seinfeld takes place in one. The garage has a rich history on our cinema and television screens.

Often it seems that if a character enters a garage, then something bad is going to happen:

• A woman is trapped in a garage with a psycho in P2
  
• A drug deal goes down in The Dark Knight
  
• A climactic shootout takes place in The Terminator
  
• A car bomb explodes in Arlington Road
  
• Car chases in both Tomorrow Never Dies and The Bourne Identity finish up in parking garages

All this has little to do with our personal experiences of garages (driving to them, parking your car in them, leaving your car there while you do something that you don’t need a car to do, driving off again when you need to get somewhere far enough away that it makes sense to take a car).

The truth behind bad things happening in garages on film is that no film director will include a scene in a garage unless something interesting is going to happen. A director doesn’t need to show someone parking their car they can just cut to the next important scene. Parking a car is boring to watch unless the audience knows a drug deal is about to go down. Driving a car out of a garage is boring to watch unless the audience knows that the baddie has planted a bomb underneath it. And a garage is a cheap location to rent and cheap to rebuild if you want to blow one up.

If you have recently had a shootout in your garage and need a new garage door, drop into our showroom or call us on 01603 787069.