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“For every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), American essayist
Road rage (def.): “violent anger caused by the stress and frustration involved in driving a motor vehicle in difficult conditions.”
The 2020 film “Unhinged” is the story of what can happen as a consequence of road rage.
An impatient woman driver (Rachel, single mother) leans on her horn behind burly truckdriver Russell Crowe at a stoplight when the light turns green and he doesn’t respond immediately. He seeks to pour oil on troubled waters by telling her she didn’t need to do that. A light horn tap would have sufficed. He admits to having a bad day, and wonders if she might be, too.
But Rachel will have none of it. With terse voice, she tells her son, in the back seat, to roll up his window and not look at Crowe, who by this time is in an adjacent lane.
She thinks she may have escaped any consequence of her action. But she is wrong.
Crowe decides to share some of his unhappiness with Rachel. He feels she needs to be taught a lesson.
Is that lesson disproportional to the horn honk? And how.
The movie is fictional but does not necessarily strain credulity. It gets violent in a hurry and does not…
