The white Beetle with blue and red stripes, the number 53 painted with clumsy hope on its sides, has become an icon. An icon of that American sentiment made of disarming optimism and miraculous mechanics. Herbie, the automobile. His saga is a tale of family, of races won against all odds, of an animation born not from the screen, but from the viewer’s desire. Yet, in that journey, there exists a comma, a musical pause. In the series’ third act, “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” in 1977, the rebellious heart of the Beetle experiences the unthinkable: it falters. It falls in love. Its object of desire is not another Volkswagen, but an Italian line, a wedge of sky-powder-colored metal called Giselle. A Lancia Scorpion.

Here, collective memory stumbles. Many remember Herbie, few his romantic counterpart. Giselle is the apparition, the elegant ghost that crosses the celluloid only to dissolve into the void of commercial oblivion. Her story is a fragment of cinema and industry, a bridge thrown between two worlds that would never truly meet: the machine of Disney family entertainment and the esoteric engineering of a struggling Italy. The Scorpion, in reality, was the American version of the Lancia Montecarlo, a name changed to avoid challenging Chevrolet Monte Carlo’s hegemony on US soil. A mid-engine car, designed by Pininfarina, sold for only two years. Exotic, but not too expensive: the perfect candidate for a film in search of a mechanical heroine with a foreign accent.

The Stuff Gazes Are Made Of

In the film, Giselle is not a mere extra. She is a character. Driven by the determined Diane Darcy (Julie Sommars), she competes in the Trans-France Race. Her bond with Herbie is born from a recognition among peers, an elective affinity between two creatures who share the mystery of their own consciousness. The narrative reaches its sentimental peak when Giselle, after a crash, ends up in a lake. Herbie, in a choice that betrays every competitive instinct, turns back. He saves her. It is an act of automotive chivalry that overturns hierarchies: it is not the human who saves the car, but one machine saving another, while the humans are mere, astonished passengers.

Top Gear’s Richard Hammond, speaking of the Scorpion, confessed: “It was so pretty I wanted one more than I wanted my next breath”. In this statement lies the entire essence of Giselle’s character: she is not an object of erotic desire, but of aesthetic and sentimental desire. She is inanimate beauty that evokes a vital yearning.

The production used three specimens. Of these, material history has been merciless: two are believed to have been destroyed, erased from physicality to remain only as image. The third, the sole survivor, has lived a parallel life, an existence as a ghost awaiting its ending.

The Market of Ghosts: An Auction for Two Destinies

Giselle’s afterlife is an economic tale with melancholic undertones. In November 2015, the auction house Bonhams offered the world a rare piece: the surviving Lancia Scorpion “Giselle”, restored to its cinematic livery, complete with Walt Disney Productions license plates. The estimate was between $40,000 and $50,000. In the same room, one of the original Herbies from the film was being auctioned. The Beetle, modified to “drive itself” with a system of levers and lowered seats, reached the sum of $86,250. Giselle found no buyers.

The silence of the gavel on that lot is more eloquent than any treatise on fame and value. It tells how nostalgia has a precise price, and how it is determined not by the intrinsic beauty or rarity of an object, but by its ability to function as a universal icon. Herbie is an archetype. Giselle is a footnote, however sublime. Her wedge-shaped elegance, her powdery blue, the carefully placed number 7, speak a language too specialized, too tied to a connoisseur’s knowledge. It is the difference between a poster hanging in a child’s bedroom and a painting by an artist recognizable only to a select few, displayed in a gallery.

• The Gap of Memory: Herbie lives in a perpetual cultural present. Giselle exists in a conditional past, an “if only you remembered.”
• The Materiality of Myth: The former was paid for in hard cash, the latter was valued in silence. The market has certified the mythological hierarchy.
• The Survival: Herbie has been collected, celebrated. Giselle, after the inglorious auction, faded back into the shadow of a private collection, a relic for the initiated.

Today, her spirit resurfaces in miniature form. Specialty companies offer 1:18 scale models of “Giselle”, reproducing the number 7 and livery details with “surgical precision”. It is a form of alternative preservation, a defeat and yet a victory. The real car may not find a home, but its image, its stylized essence, becomes an object of desire for those who want to keep on a shelf not a toy, but an entire forgotten chapter of film history. It is the melancholy poetry of things that were important only for a moment, and yet in that moment, made an entire generation’s heart beat faster, and a Beetle’s too. Their love story, like all great stories, was never really about first place, but about the detour, the return, the unexpected gesture that defeats the logic of the race. And perhaps, in this, Giselle won a race for which no one was keeping score.