Fast Car

Fast Car is the Tracy Chapman song through which Lene Galtung recognizes her longing to escape a life shaped by shame and by a performed identity. Its imagined journey away from confinement becomes a mirror for the division she feels between the person others see and the person she believes she really is.

The Song’s Escape Story

Lene listens to Fast Car on her iPod in her living room, staring into double windows that reflect her twice. She understands the song as the story of a poor girl who dreams of leaving everything behind in her boyfriend’s fast car: a cashier’s job and a drunken father belong to the life she wants to escape. Lene’s circumstances, she thinks, could hardly be further from the song’s. Yet she feels that Tracy Chapman is singing about her—or, more precisely, about the Lene she might have been and the Lene she believes she truly is.

The Divided Self in the Reflection

The double image gives physical form to Lene’s sense of being split. She calls one figure the ordinary, grey Lene, while describing the two false selves as hating one another. That division has roots in her fear of exposure: throughout school, she dreaded someone entering the classroom, pointing her out as an orphan, and stripping away the beautiful clothes that seemed to conceal her. She watched the door and listened for a change in her friends’ voices that might reveal she had been found out.

Her attempt to protect herself had an unintended effect. Lene knew that her fear and shame could make her seem arrogant, and that she exaggerated the role of the rich, perfect, spoiled, carefree girl. She felt neither as beautiful nor as brilliant as the girls around her, but believed she had to act as if she were. Against that imposed performance, the song offers an imagined possibility of being the one real Lene rather than either of the false people she despises.

Tony, Disappearance, and Repetition

The song’s escape fantasy becomes personal when Lene imagines getting into Tony Leike’s car and asking him to drive them away, somewhere she could be herself. Its promise is not simply to leave a place but to leave behind the identities that have made her feel trapped. The song therefore joins her desire for escape to her hope that she and Tony could reach a destination together.

After a call, Lene feels tears rising and puts her earphones back in. Fast Car reaches its final line, about taking a fast car and disappearing; when the song ends, she presses repeat. That small action makes the song’s imagined flight recur without resolving it. The title’s car remains a vehicle of possibility, while Lene is left listening again to the desire to vanish and begin elsewhere.