In the last 40 years can you remember an adult lead character choosing to ride a bike as a form of transportation in an American movie or tv series?
If a minor character has a bike and uses it for transportation - it's clear they would like a car but for whatever reason they don't have one. Another character might say to them "Why don't you have a car?" and their reply will be something like "Don't ask."
Last night I watched "Flashdance (1983)". Jennifer Beals plays an 18 year-old who lives on her own and she doesn't have a car. She uses a bike instead.
Brad Pitt's gym trainer character rides his bike to the blackmail-payoff meeting in Burn After Reading but it's played for comedy
Same thing in the movie I Heart Huckabees. Mark Wahlberg is a firefighter who rides a bike because he is an environmentalist and its supposed to be hilarious and SOOOO weird.
Maybe not the best example but 40 Year Old Virgin. Riding a bike to work is meant to symbolise his virginess
I remember Andrew "Dice" Clay had a role in a movie not unlike his stage persona. The character couldn't believe that somebody didn't have a car. He said something like "Even bums don't not have a car!"
It probably doesn't help how car brands notoriously pay for in-movie product placement
I was watching Designated Survivor the other day and one passing shot made me laugh. The characters pull up in a Mercedes-Benz in a typical product placement that's not worthy of me mentioning it. But then there's a gratuitous glamor shot. The lighting is perfect and the car gleams like it's sitting on a showroom floor and it's just been cleaned. The camera is very low so it's in front of the car and a bit to the side. Like a child's eye view. And that POV lasted an extra few seconds on the car for no reason at all.
It was so weird. It looked like a sequence in an ad. I wonder if the director did commercials before shooting tv series.
Bones occasionally had moments where the show fully diverted into being a car commercial, but it was more in the script than the camera work
Probably not the kind of example you're looking for but my first thought was "Premium Rush".
My recall of the movie isn't great but it's about bike messengers, so main character and others choosing to ride bikes to get places fast
Warning, TVTropes:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoBikesInTheApocalypse
That site is so maddening.
The Watsonian explanations can vary.
I know that It's A Waste of Time but Part of Me is still curious about what "Watsonian" means. Yet I Know it's going to be a Great Annoyance and Death by Hyperlink due the site being a Self-Referential Jargon Machine. Furthermore...
I checked and it's just their jargon for "diegetic," for when someone wants to say "in-universe" but in an obtuse and weird referential way instead of just using an esoteric word.
I really wonder if some people at that site, reddit, and similar sites use words like "diegetic" and "in medias res" in spoken speech to sound sophisticated.
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It's a shame TV Tropes probably has 100s of times as much text as it should. Maybe one day somebody will scrape the entire site and stick the text into AI. They'll give AI a prompt like "Remove the wheat from the chaff and convert to everyday English". If that ever happens - man, will the TV Tropes editors be mad!
But Less Is More and Too Clever Is Dumb and Those Are the Breaks.
I mean I use random esoteric words in normal speech, because my brain is broken and when I reach for a word the filter is just "does this match what I'm trying to say" and considerations like "is this is a normal word or something I've only ever seen written a single digit number of times and that I inferred the meaning of from context?", "is this the correct language?", or "did I just synthesize this word from roots just now?" get skipped over until I've already said it.
Call Me By Your Name.
But it was set in Europe so not entirely sure it counts.
Premium Rush is a movie in the early 2000s about bicycle delivery drivers in NYC and I think a dude in particular gets some contraband, resulting in basically a driver movie, but with twinks. It looks kinda silly and fun, though was largely poo-poo'd on by critics. I think it was just Americans struggling to comprehend able-bodied people walking to the store or riding a bike outside of a gym.
I think it was just Americans struggling to comprehend able-bodied people walking to the store or riding a bike outside of a gym.
That's understandable until the MCU introduces a superhero called BikeMan or PedestrianGirl.
It's a book, but the main character of "The Verifiers" by Jane Pek is a cyclist.
It's been two hours and I still can't think of an American example. I'm total crap at any sort of trivia but I'm pretty sure the British spy tv series MI-5 has some bike riding in London. In any case - spies on bikes in the UK wouldn't be unusual. That makes me laugh because in American fiction it would be very weird for anybody riding a bike to work to a three letter agency in DC or Langley. It might appear in a comedy though because it's so wacky and implausible.
Saltburn (they're technically adults, but first year college students biking around campus).
I can appreciate the general lack of carbrain in a lot of anime & manga.
Ooooh i got a new one for ya. I’m watching a tv show called wanderlust and the main character gets hit by car while cycling. It’s a somewhat plot point. But it exists. But it’s a British tv show so not as weird as Americans cycling i guess. Hope?
Tom Hanks uses a bike in The Man With One Red Shoe
Also from the 80s, and his whole character was supposed to be a quirked up classically trained musician.
I can't figure out how/why I watched it in the 1970s. I was an elementary school and middle school then. And I was a dumb kid and I thought subtitled movies were "stupid". The only thing I can think of is that the local PBS station showed it and at that time I thought tv was the only true god so I guess I sat there and watched it and I read the subtitles. I don't remember a thing about it other than it seemed silly and "French".
