How to Watch Drive as a Crime Fiction Writer

Drive is a study in American rugged individualism.

The term is often admired in art more than practiced in life. Strip it down, give it a getaway car and a license to kill, and you have Driver: a lone man governed by an internal code, navigating a corrupt social order.

Like classic hardboiled fiction and film noir, Drive centers on the solitary protagonist facing layered antagonistic forces. In that sense, Driver is less a modern criminal than a modern cowboy.

His car is his horse, and the bleak Los Angeles cityscape is his frontier.