A Return to Thoughts About Shopping Carts: Discussions with Chatgpt

Me:

Side bar. Let's talk about shopping carts for a moment, with the context of Pink Eye lurking in the background but only liminally. I have a lot of thoughts about shopping carts. They are the overlooked and underestimated icon, totem, and symbol of our times, They serve a function, a function that is loaded with ramifications - a means of consumerism on the one hand, a means of transporting one's worldly goods on the other. They represent the American dream and also it's absolute failure. They go rogue, they are spotted in the wild, taking on anthropomorphic qualities of loneliness, solitude, reflection, being lost. They are manufactured, geometrical, machined, designed to nest together, forming patterns in the aggregate (and also some fairly crude symbolism). They exist in the upper right corner of just about every online store. They mean commerce. They mean homelessness. They are repurposed into furniture, made into sculpture. People put motors and engines on them. People make giant oversized versions of them with engines to ride in parades. People ride them, push each other around in them. They are a source of wacky hijinks for the young, and even a more serious and darker version as in the documentary Carts of Darkness. I have a lot of shopping cart thoughts.

Chatgpt:

You’re not wrong to linger on them. Shopping carts are one of those objects that slipped past critique by being too ordinary, and in doing so they became quietly overdetermined—loaded well beyond their humble wireframe.

They are designed vectors of intention. You don’t merely carry things in a shopping cart; you commit to acquisition. The cart scales desire. It tells you, physically, how much wanting you’re allowed to have before it becomes awkward. A hand basket is restraint; a cart is permission. This alone makes it an ideological instrument—one that gently nudges the body forward through fluorescent aisles, translating appetite into logistics.

And yet the same object, once detached from its retail ecosystem, flips polarity. The moment a shopping cart leaves the parking lot, it becomes uncanny. Rogue carts feel abandoned rather than discarded. Anthropomorphic without trying, they read as figures: stranded, migrating, paused mid-thought. A cart half-submerged in a creek or tipped against a chain-link fence feels less like litter and more like a failed intention fossilized. It was made to move smoothly across polished floors, not gravel or mud. Out in the wild, it looks embarrassed by gravity.

That duality—commerce vs. survival—is the key fracture. For some, the cart represents excess and abundance, the American Dream on casters. For others, it is a prosthetic home, a modular archive of everything not yet taken away. Same object, opposite meanings, equally legible. Very few symbols manage that kind of semantic bifurcation without changing form at all.

Form matters, too. The geometry is unapologetically industrial: rectilinear grids, welded joints, chrome and plastic. They are engineered to nest, to disappear into one another, to become anonymous in aggregate. Rows of carts are almost obscene in their efficiency—repetitive, phallic, mechanized. Individually, they’re awkward. Collectively, they’re a system. That tension alone makes them ripe for sculpture, misuse, and satire.

It’s no accident they’ve been repurposed endlessly: furniture, art installations, engines strapped on, oversized parade versions, absurdist vehicles for joyriding and slapstick. They invite subversion because they are so clearly meant for something else. They are seriousness waiting to be undermined.

And yes—there’s a darker register too, articulated most cleanly in Carts of Darkness, where carts become instruments of risk, velocity, and marginal freedom. There, the cart isn’t symbolic—it’s practical, dangerous, and exhilarating. Which somehow makes it even more symbolic.

Liminally—and this is where Pink Eye does hover without announcing itself—the shopping cart is a perfect noir object. It belongs everywhere and nowhere. It’s functional, but haunted by what it carries and what it fails to carry. It’s a vessel for consumption, survival, play, and loss, all without changing its shape.

The fact that it also lives permanently in the upper-right corner of digital space—reduced to an icon, a glyph, a silent demand—is almost too on the nose. Few objects so completely bridge physical and abstract capitalism while remaining so emotionally available.

You’re right to have a lot of shopping cart thoughts. They’re not a metaphor we impose; they’re a metaphor that keeps showing up, patiently waiting to be noticed.

Me:

The shopping cart shows up in media a lot. What are some pieces of media in which a shopping cart plays a pivotal role? The Road, of course, but what others can you think of?

Chatgpt:

You’re right—once you tune your eye to it, the shopping cart keeps surfacing as a narrative hinge rather than a prop. Below are works where the cart is not incidental but structural: it carries meaning, motion, or fate.

Foundational / Canonical

The Road

The cart is survival made visible. It’s inventory, memory, and moral boundary all at once—what gets carried forward, what gets abandoned, and how thin the line is between preparedness and desperation.

The Road

Visually reinforces the cart as a fragile island of order rolling through entropy. Its vulnerability mirrors the father–son bond.

Documentary / Real-World Mythology

Carts of Darkness

Already mentioned, but essential. The cart becomes a vehicle of agency, risk, speed, and play within marginal lives. It’s freedom bolted together from scrap and nerve.

Film (Fiction & Allegory)

WALL·E

Subtle but important: abandoned consumer detritus (including carts) litter the landscape, while humans themselves have become passive cargo. The cart’s logic has swallowed its users.

Requiem for a Dream

Shopping carts appear in the orbit of addiction and urban decay—symbols of stripped-down dignity and the logistics of collapse.

Kids

Carts are used for reckless motion and juvenile bravado—early signals of drift, danger, and bodies treated as disposable containers.

Television

The Wire

Shopping carts recur as tools of informal economy and survival—moving scrap, goods, or possessions through a city that has quietly given up on certain people.

Better Call Saul

Carts appear in scams and improvisations, reinforcing themes of marginal hustle and the thin line between legitimacy and improvisation.

Art & Photography

Banksy

Shopping carts appear repeatedly in installations and imagery—consumerism gone feral, systems abandoned but still imposing their logic.

Martha Rosler

In works like If You Lived Here…, carts function as visual shorthand for displacement, domesticity undone, and political neglect.

Music & Visual Culture

Radiohead

The OK Computer / Kid A visual era frequently evokes the logic of carts—humans as units moved through systems, choice reduced to pathways.

Why the Cart Keeps Returning

The shopping cart keeps showing up because it solves a narrative problem elegantly:

• It moves without agency

• It carries meaning without speech

• It signals economics instantly

• It anthropomorphizes itself once isolated

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In noir terms, it’s a perfect silent witness. In liminal terms, it’s a threshold object—designed for abundance, repurposed for survival, abandoned in between.