Arts

Wrong! Meghan Eckman, a filmmaker and 1990 University of Virginia grad, had a friend who worked at the little Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville, which is located directly across from the university and behind a bunch of downtown shops—and one day he said to Eckman: “You’d better come and film me, because I’m about to lose it”—“it” being his mind.

In January of 2007, Eckman did start filming at the parking lot, and interviewing its group of iconoclastic, overeducated, philosophical attendants—and the result is the proverbial gem of a movie. "The Parking Lot Movie" essentially deconstructs an American parking lot through the insights of the self-styled “ragtag group of poets” who worked at the lot during filming. And we are not talking minimum-wage, low-education layabouts; this being Charlottesville and UVA, we’re talking about individuals who have degrees in archeology and philosophy, who are artists and musicians and intellectuals, with, yes, the odd marginal character or two—and for 78 minutes, we listen to these men talk about their job in the lot, and their customers, and the meaning of cars, and capitalism, and it is utterly fascinating. “I thought it would be a short film, but then I started doing interviews with the attendants, and I could tell it would be a feature because they were telling a much larger story.” Indeed, it is almost an existential film—it is a very French take, really, on a very American subject.

Indeed, in some ways this movie might be called "Revenge of the Parking Lot Attendant," because the attendants spend a lot of time venting about customers and cars and America’s absurdist consumer society in general, and the fact that parking-lot employees get little respect. As attendant Harper Hellems puts it: “No parent looks down in the crib of a newborn child and says, ‘Gosh, I hope he or she grows up to be a parking lot attendant.” Attendant Scott Meiggs says that they all have the potential to do great things, but “we’re all too arrogant and hard-hearted to achieve them.”

We hear the attendants heap scorn on the ginormous SUV’s who come into the lot and try to squeeze into tiny spaces. We hear them complain about attitudes of drunk students and rich parents who want to argue about whether they owe an extra 40 cents or not. Says attendant Tyler Magill: “My first reaction to seeing a trustafarian getting out of a $40,000 car that gets eight miles to the gallon is, ‘I hate you.’”