The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning 9780231850889

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SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES

OTHER SELECT TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR AND GOSSIP Kush Varia THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE Daryl Lee INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISON, POWER Sean Carter & Klaus Dodds FILM THEORY: CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR Felicity Colman BIO-PICS: A LIFE IN PICTURES Ellen Cheshire FILM PROGRAMMING: CURATING FOR CINEMAS, FESTIVALS, ARCHIVES Peter Bosma POSTMODERNISM AND FILM: RETHINKING HOLLYWOOD’S AESTHETICS Catherine Constable

THE ROAD MOVIE IN SEARCH OF MEANING

NEIL ARCHER

WA LLF LOW E R LO N D O N a n d N E W YO R K

A Wallflower Press Book Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York, Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Columbia University Press 2016 All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. Cover image: Easy Rider (1969) © Columbia Pictures A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-17647-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85088-9 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

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Introduction: A road map for the road movie

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Looking for America – Part One: The US road movie

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Looking for America – Part Two: The Latin American road movie 41

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The Automobile and the Auteur: Global cinema and the road movie 59

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From Parody to Post-postmodernity: New directions in the road movie 81 Conclusion: Born to be wild, again Bibliography Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks above all to Yoram Allon, Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, for taking the time to hear my improvised book proposal for the ‘Short Cuts’ series one morning in 2014, and then asking me to go ahead and do it. It’s been an honour to add my own contribution to this great list. Thanks also to Luke Hare and family, whose home-from-home on the Putney Delta during the early 1990s impacted on the ideas behind this book, in ways I’m only just discovering. And finally, thanks to those other once and sometime residents of SW15, Giulia and Noa, for most other things. Noa’s declared pre-school ambition to become a ‘jungle-exploring artist’ has been no little source of inspiration during this writing period. Neil Archer January 2016

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INTRODUCTION : A ROAD MAP FOR THE ROAD MOVIE

Two men on motorcycles cruising the open highway, panoramic vistas expanding around them. An outlaw couple, seen through the windscreen of their open-top convertible, one staring out front with hands clamped to the wheel, the other looking anxiously behind. Or from the reverse angle: the silhouettes of two hot-rodders behind the dashboard, hair trailing in the breeze from the open window, road signs and landscape speeding past their fixed gaze and ours. All three of these examples are recognisably from the genre we have come to identify as the road movie. If the first does not instantly call to mind any number of moments in Easy Rider (1969), the chances are you have not seen it yet. We might recognise the second from somewhere near the end of Thelma and Louise (1991), while the third is a recurring shot from Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Saying these are typical images of the road movie, though, begs the question what it is at all that identifies these films as ‘road movies’. To say simply that we know a road movie when we see one, as the beginning of this book has in fact invited you to do, suggests a very circular logic in the way we identify and discuss genre. At the same time, it is important to work out what it is that instantly suggests ‘road movie’ to our eyes and ears when we watch a film, or conjure up moving images such as the ones described above. But just as importantly, we need to ask what is the point of identifying and naming

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such a thing. If we are going to explore the road movie as a genre, in other words, we need to work out not just what a road movie is, but what it – and the generic terminology around it – actually does. This might sound heavy going for a type of movie which, as the examples above suggest, is frequently viewed and experienced in terms of speed, excitement and freedom. David Laderman’s Driving Visions (2002), one of the first full-length academic works on the genre, opens with a scattering of words and phrases road movies call to mind: ‘rebellion … the unfamiliar … the thrill of the unknown … subversion’ (2002: 1–2); the road itself, the author continues, symbolises ‘the movement of desire … the lure of both freedom and destiny’ (2002: 3). All this may be true, but if we stop at this point (and, needless to say, Driving Visions does not) we leave most of our questions unanswered. What is it, for example, that enables us to take one particular film as a road movie in the first place? And what subsequently binds a set of particular films within this generic framework? What is more, once we can start to say what a road movie is, we then need to ask where it came from. What specific factors meant that at a given time, and not at any other, the road movie came into being as a genre? What do audiences get out of the road movie, and why is the time and place in which genres emerge revealing in this instance? And rather than just acknowledge that the road movie promises the lure of freedom or the unknown, how do we understand the need that the genre taps into – and equally, how does the road movie as a film genre gratify this need? Distinguishing the road genre From one perspective we obviously do recognise a road movie when we see one, but what we are really describing here is the way we place certain films within certain frameworks of understanding, often based on our knowledge of other films. In an influential essay, Rick Altman (1984) outlines what he calls the ‘semantic/syntactic approach’ to film genre. Altman’s essay was important in moving away from the study of genre as a largely taxonomic and ahistorical one: in other words, a study that limited itself to identifying, listing and describing a corpus of genre films – the western, the musical, the thriller, and so on – without necessarily asking where such genres come from and why. Or why, indeed, certain genres have come and gone, and (as is arguably the case with the road movie)

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come back again in a different form. Central to Altman’s argument is the idea that genres can both stabilise and mutate around semantic elements (the ‘stuff’ of a genre, its key motifs) and syntactic ones (essentially, the structure of narrative – from syntax, the order through which language makes grammatical sense – and the meanings or values expressed through this structure). We understand and identify genre according to the points of synchronisation between these two areas. A film with driving in it may intermittently look like a road movie, but we only recognise it as such if the film’s syntax supports it. Drive (2010) begins with some of the most thrilling driving sequences I have seen on film, sequences that owe a lot to the famous car chases in films like Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971); just as Collateral (2004) takes place largely in a car. But it is hard to call Drive or Collateral road movies, not so much because they remain within Los Angeles, but because other semantic and syntactic elements adhere more closely to the expectations of the crime film, the detective film or the thriller. Thelma and Louise is similarly structured around a crime-and-pursuit narrative, though in this case the important thing is to identify the other distinctive choices Ridley Scott’s film makes in its story and setting. Here, the road and the mobility and freedom it offers are seen as a constituent part of the outlaws’ flight from the forces of authority – and in Thelma and Louise’s specific case, from male-dominated cultural norms. We might identify this film as a road movie because we recognise in it the significance of the road and the car, of extended vehicular flight and what it means for the protagonists in the film. Unsurprisingly, central to many writers’ and critics’ conceptions of the road movie is this prominence of the road itself to the film’s narrative development. The road in the road movie is never just a background: it is typically both the motivation for the narrative to happen, and also the place that allows things to occur. Instead of being just a transitional space between A and B, it is this space itself between A and B that becomes the focus of the road movie. As I have hinted here, we also begin to identify genre when we can situate one film’s elements alongside and within a corpus of other similar films. We might most obviously recognise the motorbike allusion as one from Easy Rider, but it could equally be from Wild Hogs (2007); similarly, the outlaw couple is a familiar figure in films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Badlands (1973), True Romance (1993) or Natural Born Killers (1994), and

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we might just as easily identify the hot-rodding point-of-view shot in a film such as The Cannonball Run (1981). We can rightly argue that anyone who watches and enjoys a genre film specifically for its generic character (not here in the pejorative sense of ‘formulaic’, but in terms of it being ‘of a genre’) is engaging in genre criticism, because they are recognising how a particular type of film (the meaning of the French word genre) exists beyond one individual film. This opens up its own further areas of interest to the genre analyst, because it asks us to consider when and why the identification with specific film types comes along at given moments, and indeed why they might persist well beyond the original run of certain films. Studying a genre like the road movie therefore asks us to consider when, how and why we came up with a concept such as ‘the road movie’ to begin with. In the case, say, of Easy Rider, it was not as if its makers suddenly decided to invent the road movie; but somewhere along the way a consensus of opinion has seen this film in particular as a defining moment in the development of the road movie as a genre. The genre critic’s task is to understand the industrial, economic, political and cultural circumstances that, at particular junctures of history, produced particular film genres, and to consider the developments of these genres through different contexts. This book aims to do just this for the road movie. In search of origins One of the paradoxes of genre films is that they can only become genre films once enough films have been produced to generate such a description. As Altman (1999) would go on to elaborate, analysing genre is as much about what we call its discursive qualities: the ways, in other words, in which the genre has been talked about, evaluated and promoted. But Altman also notes the role of reception – what he describes as the ‘pragmatic’ aspect, literally how a genre is ‘used’ by its audiences and critics – in shaping genre. To say that a road movie is a road movie because we call it one may sound flimsy as theory, but there is some truth in it. Or more precisely, when enough people – film critics, fans, academics – start to call something by a certain name, that name sticks. It is interesting, for instance, how often film historians discuss works like It Happened One Night (1934) or The Grapes of Wrath (1940) as ‘precursors’ of the road movie (see for example Costanzo 2014: 304–9), as well as European auteur films

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like Wild Strawberries (1957) and La strada (1954)* (see Laderman 2002: 248–55) when in many respects they show all the hallmarks we have come to recognise in the genre (and I will be discussing the first two of these films accordingly). The point here, though, is that they were not identified at the time as road movies, because the term did not exist: we retrospectively identify in these films aspects of the road movie as it would come to be, and even see their influence on later films, while also recognising these qualities were not always the most significant ones for audiences of the time. It Happened One Night, in the context of 1934, was a comedy adventure pairing up two of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Wild Strawberries, meanwhile, though quite prototypical of the road genre in its story of a car journey through southern Sweden, was and is still mainly viewed in the context of Ingmar Bergman’s directorial work and themes. Equally, many of the very earliest films feature travel: the ability to show other places, and the movement through them, was in fact one of the selling points of the cinema in its first few decades. But even if some of these films share characteristics with later road movies, no one at the time of their production understood them in such terms. By contrast, critics invariably see films like Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and Two-Lane Blacktop as road movies because of the concentration of films around this time depicting narratives of road travel, discovery and rebellion. This organic approach to reading genre rejects the problematic idea that genres were somehow handed down ready-made from on high (or more precisely, from Hollywood movie producers), apparently to give the public ‘what they want’ without asking them first. This is not to say that the economic logic of Hollywood does not play a part in the development of the road movie: as we will consider, the emergence of the American road movie at the end of the 1960s owed plenty to old-school commercial opportunism and business acumen, as much as it did to any broader cultural and political factors. And yet, transformations in filmmaking are themselves a reflection of cultural change; what is more, when a series of films comes to be identified and embraced by filmmakers, audiences and critics alike, this becomes a culturally significant moment in itself, obliging *

Where the English translation of non-English titles is widely used, this is given

and used in references to it. In some instances, for example La strada and Y tu mamá también, I have stuck to the original titles by which the films are commonly known.

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us to make sense of the culture that produces them – and above all, what pleasures and meanings the road movie should offer to its audiences both then and now. Automobility and the kinematic Exactly what these pleasures and meanings consist of will vary according to context, but what binds all manifestations of the road movie is the idea of mobility. As a genre in which people by definition move, this might sound obvious, but it is worth stressing, not only to remind ourselves what it is that makes the road movie distinctive, but what it is that gives it its distinctively cinematic quality. It is notable, for example, how often discussions of the road movie’s historical origins point to its range of literary predecessors (see Corrigan 1991: 144; Laderman 2002: 6–13; Mills 2006: 18; Costanzo 2014: 301–2). These studies identify the narrative heritage of the genre in texts such as Homer’s Odyssey, the Exodus and Gospel narratives in The Bible; Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–1615), James Fenimore Cooper’s novels featuring the ‘leatherstocking’ Natty Bumppo (1823–1827), or Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). There are very few analysts of the genre, meanwhile, who do not identify the importance of post-war American literature, and specifically ‘Beat’ poetry and prose – foremost amongst these being Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) – as having a significant impact on what becomes the road movie (Cohan and Hark 1997: 6–7; Laderman 2002: 9–12; Mills 2006: 35–63). It is important to acknowledge how certain films draw on shared, though often quite broad, semantic and syntactic elements common to these various works, especially to the extent that literature from the Odyssey to On the Road has given shape to the ways we narrate and mythologise our own experience – even if to the rather vague point that every story, and life itself, is a ‘journey’ of sorts. But as the banality of this metaphor suggests, drawing on the canon of past literary texts does not always tell us anything very insightful about the road movie, and may act (though not, happily, in the studies referenced above) as a type of get-out clause that avoids the more challenging task of actually analysing the genre. Moreover, while these literary comparisons highlight the formal parallels and continuities between various texts, they hardly account for their specific effects on readers or audiences: what it

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is, say, that makes watching a road movie a very different experience from reading Chaucer. This is not to say that a study of the road movie is obliged to begin and end with the films. Focusing on what she more broadly calls the ‘road story’ in American culture, Katie Mills (2006) has argued for the idea of ‘the road’, with ‘the rebel’ as its key figure, across a range of products: from poetry and novels, to art works, to film, television and videogames. Mills’ emphasis on the road story as one that is both multi-sensory and transmedia is very interesting, touching as it does on the way our appreciation of the road movie combines different elements within the sometimes misleadingly singular concept of ‘cinema’. Mills’ observation also reminds us that road movies are much more than the exclusively narrative experiences literary comparisons suggest. What’s more, when we talk about ‘watching’ a road movie, we inadequately describe an experience that also involves our sense of hearing in a prominent way – specifically through the musical soundtracks that have become a defining feature of the genre – but also, in a slightly less tangible way, the memory of other senses stimulated by our own recollections of mobility. The road movie is unique as a genre in that its basic form, in terms of the drive, the train ride, or simply the walk, is something we can mostly all replicate in our own lives. Our excitement at the prospect of a road trip or just an outing is the same sense of opportunity and pleasurable movement evoked in many road movies: indeed, the incorporating of music into our own mobility, be it through car sound systems or personal headphones, is in some respects a way of rendering our own everyday experience more cinematic. The potent, trans-media appeal of mobility and/as cinema is such that we can probably all think of things that evoke road movies while having no specific relation to them at all. For me, Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘Thunder Road’ and Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ fit into this category; as do Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance and the videogame Fallout 3. I am not sure quite what it is that makes these non-movies ‘cinematic’, but studying the road movie obliges us to consider the specific impact of the cinema as an invention and art form. Once again, looking for literary precursors of the genre is here slightly beside the point, given that the formative event for the emergence of a road movie was the almost simultaneous invention, at the turn of the nineteenth century, of the automobile and the moving-picture camera (see Mills 2006: 17; Costanzo 2014: 303–4). The

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Lumière brothers’ cinématographe, the machine they invented in 1895 both to film and project moving images, literally means ‘writer (or recorder) of movement’ (from the Greek kine¯ma). This kinetic fact of cinema, its ability to evoke the ‘thrilling sensation of first-hand movement’ (Mills 2006: 17), made it a central feature of what Mills calls the twentieth century’s fixation with ‘automobility’. Early Lumière films such as Train Entering the Station at La Ciotat (1895) and Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1897) (the latter using a mounted camera at the back of a departing locomotive), less than a minute long, were hardly narratives at all, but pure expressions of moving vehicles wondrously revived in moving images. As Mills puts it, this ‘new culture of rampant motion, and this double dose of mobility – both real and represented – offered new ways of situating and experiencing oneself’ (ibid.). What is so perceptive in Mills’ reading of the road movie is that these two sides of mobility – actual, real-life mobility and its audio-visual representation – are marked historically by evolutions in the genre. What we see in the emerging road movie is what happens when particular people at a particular time achieve the means of representing themselves on screen (Mills 2006: 26–7). The freedom or otherwise to move – or the fantasy of movement in a culture where such mobility is prohibited – are so central to our conceptions of identity that it is perhaps unsurprising that the road movie as a genre should lend itself so perennially to stories of (self-)discovery. Taking a leaf from Mills’ study, though applying it here to a more wide-ranging set of global contexts, this book charts the way this most kinematic of film genres has been used, via its representation of mobile subjects, as a form of individual expression, as a way of narrating ideas of identity and place, and as a vehicle for exploring our past, our troubled present, and even our uncertain future. The structure of this book As I will explore in this book, once the road movie assumes an identifiable shape, in terms of structure, themes and motifs, it becomes adaptable across a range of filmmaking contexts. These contexts inform the structure of this study, moving as they do from North America (chapter one) to South America (chapter two), then going on to look at how the road movie has been used by a variety of international filmmakers (chapter three), and finally,

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how it has been taken in new directions in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries (chapter four). Like any genre, I view the road movie as organic and adaptive, and while I am frequently critical of certain films, I do not make any prescriptive or evaluative judgements about the turn the road movie has taken. Some road movie criticism has lamented what it sees as the demise of the road movie since its ‘classic’/‘classical’ period of the early 1970s. I will not do the same, partly because I do not share these critical opinions about the films in question, but mainly because such judgements effectively place a categorical line before and after the preferred texts, designating what the road movie should and should not be. Such an approach fails to consider the possibilities or evolving meanings and values of the genre across different times and places. As this suggests, my own approach to the subject is as flexible as the genre itself, and while there are inevitably many films I have had to overlook, I have tried as far as possible to explore the range of the genre in the contexts of global cinema. Beyond the first two chapters, though, where I see the particular narratives of the road movie as highly specific to conceptions of place and history, I have avoided the temptation to do a kind of road movie ‘world tour’ of different national cinemas. The first reason for this is a practical one. While a study of this type might be welcome, it would require a vastly bigger book than this present one. Any effort on my part to do this here would end up simply listing a set of assumed films without space for any detailed analysis. There is also a theoretical reason, though, related to the fact that the road movie, as a global genre, cannot be so easily tied down to a particular place or national context. This is perhaps a contentious claim, and I do not suggest for a moment that the road movie does not have specific resonances for the various cultures within which it is produced and seen. Yet, as I will explore, the road movie is also strongly tied to the mainly American cinema that produced and produces it. I have consequently focused on films which, whatever their contexts of production, acknowledge the global imaginary of the road movie as part of their form and function. Moreover, and as we will see in chapters three and four, one of the key characteristics of the contemporary road movie is that it is rarely constrained by national borders, either literal or imaginative; to the extent, in fact, that the crossing of these borders, and the national and cultural contexts they contain, becomes the very point of the road movie in the era of globalisation.

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LOOKING FOR AMERICA – PART ONE : THE US ROAD MOVIE

On a visit to the Cinémathèque Française in Paris at the beginning of 2009, I went to see a display of film photos and posters celebrating what the exhibition called ‘Le road movie’. This was put up to coincide with the Cinémathèque’s retrospective of films made by or featuring Dennis Hopper, the director and co-star of Easy Rider. I was interested to see that the exhibition’s accompanying pamphlet listed the road movie’s main examples – in what it noted as the genre’s ‘foundational films’ of the 1960s and 1970s – as almost entirely American works. Coincidentally, the French newspaper Libération had recently run a weekly series of features on le road movie, offering its readers a full collection of the ten featured films on tie-in DVDs. Again, with the sole exception of Radio On (1979), which was filmed in England, this collection consisted wholly of films made and set in the USA. This need not surprise anyone: it is not an exaggeration to say that, for many, the road movie is synonymous with American cinema. We might go even further, suggesting that the road movie is not so much a product of American culture, but to some extent defines ‘America’ itself. Working out why it does this, perhaps more than any other film genre, with the possible exception of the western, requires us to reflect on the particular meeting of cinematic image, geography and ideology at work in the road movie, at particular moments in American history. This will be the main purpose of this chapter.

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Some of the most important studies of the genre have helped perpetuate this idea of the road movie as American. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s anthology The Road Movie Book, despite its very broad title, begins by asserting that ‘the mating of the road and the movies is as enduring as any of Hollywood’s famous couples, and seemingly just as inevitable. The road has always been a persistent theme of American culture’ (1997: 1). The editors of this collection of essays on the road movie, then, which includes two chapters on non-American films, feel no need to qualify or contextualise their almost exclusively American focus. Only on page ten of their introduction do they allude to a more global context for the genre in the form of German director Wim Wenders, who as they say ‘pondered the genre’s essential Americanness through European eyes’ (1997: 10). Laderman’s Driving Visions, meanwhile, is exclusively focused on US cinema until the sixth and final chapter on the ‘European Road Movie’ and demonstrates a similar assumption about the genre when it states: ‘before considering the road movie, let us consider the road: an essential element of American society and history, but also a universal symbol of the course of life’ (2002: 2). As I will explore, even if this sentence separates the two terms, the linkage here of ‘American’ with ‘universal’ ideas of life is a powerful ideological element in the road movie, explaining both its appeal and also its political shortcomings. And yet, we also need to understand what it is about this genre that gives it these specific cultural connotations, and consider – both in this chapter and the rest of the book – what the impact of these associations is on a range of different international filmmakers and filmmaking contexts. What I find interesting about the Parisian examples mentioned above is that they position the genre so clearly within a foreign framework, emphasising its difference from French domestic cinema and its traditions. Looking into what makes the American road movie distinctive, finding out where it comes from, enables us to move beyond vague or often misleading assertions about its ‘Americanness’. If we fail to understand the road movie’s genesis, we risk overlooking the specific qualities that have made the road movie so inextricable from a certain vision of America and American life, for filmmakers and viewers both in the USA and across the globe. In turn, if we fail to understand this, we may fail to understand the motivation for the genre’s wider appropriation on a global scale.

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America, the road and automobility For numerous viewers and critics, the defining moment at which the road movie comes into being is that title sequence in Easy Rider, as Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, to the sound of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’, head out on the highway. As much as its combined associations of motorised mobility, driving rock score and lyrical expression of freedom have been seen as the birth not only of a new genre, but even a specific type of cultural consciousness, we ought to take the time to understand where the film’s protagonists are coming from, where they are going to, but just as importantly, how they are managing to get there. As mentioned previously, the history of the broader ‘road story’ in American life is shaped by different cultural groups getting access to transportation, and to the media with which to tell their stories (Mills 2006: 27). As we will see with Easy Rider and other road movies emblematic of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this representation of generational automobility owes a lot to the economic and artistic opportunities afforded to its filmmakers and actors. But this was only the flourishing of a genre whose American roots lie in the decades prior to and just after World War II, when the contexts of access and mobility changed considerably, from the scarcity of the Depression era to the plenty of postwar development. Much of the reason for this transition, as Laderman explains, relates to major shifts in US manufacturing and its transport infrastructure. As the one superpower to emerge from the war with its industries and economy booming, the 1950s saw ‘the advent of the automobile as a popular commodity on a mass scale’, and with this commodification of individual transport came its customisation (2002: 38). It was this newfound meeting of ‘stylization and accessibility’ (ibid.) in the mass-produced car that paved the way for the road movie’s celebration of motorised individuality and freedom, as well as its fetishisation of the motor vehicle – the motorbikes of Easy Rider, the customised hot-rods of Two-Lane Blacktop – as pop-cultural artifacts. But these highway adventurers also needed somewhere to ride. The famous Route 66 that plays such a significant role in US musical culture, and also (as we will see below) in its nascent road movie genre, opened the same year that Henry Ford lowered the price of his Model-T car, making

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motorised mobility the object of mass consumption (see Eyerman and Löfgren 1995: 56). After World War II, and apparently inspired by the Autobahn system built in Germany under Hitler, US President Eisenhower set about revitalising the interstate highway system, with $25 billion being poured into the construction of 40,000 miles of highway in the 1950s (see Laderman 2002: 39). Ironically, given the frequent counter-cultural connotations of the Hollywood road movie, the new highway system was designed to stimulate the economy further by increasing demand for car production and construction, with the improved infrastructure facilitating the movement of people to the growing suburbs, but also to supermarkets and (eventually) indoor malls (see Dussere 2014: 27). The period that saw the Technicolor emergence of hot-rod culture1 was also, then, that of a burgeoning commuter and consumer culture, fuelled by the US economy’s twin motors of cars and gasoline. As John Urry has pointed out, twentieth-century America’s obsession with the car romanticises what was in reality a pragmatically commercial turn away from more traditional public transport (such as the tram) in the 1920s, when Ford perfected his system of mass production. As Urry describes it, from this point on, and especially when General Motors bought up US tramways in the 1930s just to close them down, the ‘“path-dependence” of the petroleum-based car was “locked in” … by corporation policies’ (2007: 114). As we will see, this tension between the contingent and arbitrary existence of the automobile on the one hand, and its often romantic depiction as vehicle of rebellion on the other, is an ideological issue running through the road genre more widely. As much as films like Easy Rider try to evoke a visionary emancipation from this corporate ‘system’, the dependency on the road and the motorised vehicle (the motorbike in this instance) means they are still part of this system – whether they realise it or not. Once the car-and-petroleum system is ‘locked in’, only to come up in the 1930s against the Great Depression, it is not surprising that prewar precursors of the American road movie such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) treat gasoline, like all other commodities – shelter, food, water – as a precious source. Though essentially a prestige studio film (from 20th Century Fox) made at the height of Hollywood’s ‘classical’ period of production (see Bordwell et al. 1985), The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s novel and directed by John Ford, is distinctive for its long sec-

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tions of location shooting on the American road: in this case, the Route 66 that takes its Oklahoma Dust-Bowl migrants, the Joads, from the American Midwest to the (mostly illusory) promise of work in California. It is arguably this emphasis on ‘non-narrative road travel’, in the form of montage sequences, reflected images of the road on windshields and mirrors, and the use of subjective driver point-of-view shots (see Laderman 2002: 30) that suggest the film’s affinity with the later road movie, stressing as they do the actual, real-world connection of camera, movement and place. The experience of travel that is so vital to the road movie is nevertheless a complex one in The Grapes of Wrath, as the Joads’ trans-continental road trip is not only made under duress (a response to the banks’ repossession of failing tenant farms, and the consequent loss of livelihood), but at the very real risk of not making it, either through the exhaustion of funds or the breakdown of their well-used truck. The editorial emphasis on road signs displaying the cost of food, drink and campsites at once celebrates these as points along the route, but also reminds us of the dwindling, limited resources of the family obliged to measure expenditure from day to day (at one point in a truck-stop diner, as two drivers eat pie, the Joad children gaze at candy they cannot hope to eat, while their grandfather negotiates ten cents’ worth of bread). This is not so much an aesthetic of consumption, as one of hunger, of need. The trip itself – which, as Bennet Schaber notes (1997: 23), takes on the mythical form of the Exodus, with the persecuted Joads seeking out the Promised Land – becomes in narrative terms something to get through rather than enjoy. It is little surprise that the only moment of really joyful synergy between camera point of view and protagonist is when the Joads, already depleted and tired, gaze from a hillside stop onto the Californian orange groves in a valley below. Laderman may not be overstating the case when he suggests that The Grapes of Wrath ‘balances the dystopian associations of Depression mobility with a utopian sensibility’ (2002: 28) emerging from the encounter with the road. This is because the road, though forced upon its economic migrants, offers in Steinbeck’s terms the possibility of forging communities that are morally and politically transcendent of ‘corporate and government corruption’ (2002: 29); not just in the form of the workers’ unions Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) learns about, and to which, in one of the film’s enigmatic final images, he seems to be going off to help lead. That the film constructs in its images a new idea of America (around the same time as Franklin

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Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was trying to bring the USA out of the Depression) actually gives it some affinity with Ford’s earlier Stagecoach (1939): a postCivil War western in which a cross-cultural group of travellers, including a cavalry officer’s wife, a banker, a prostitute and an escaped convict, travel across a visually awe-inspiring but treacherous desert landscape inhabited by Geronimo’s Apache tribe. The links between the western, Stagecoach in particular, and the road movie, whose respective fall and rise occurred around the same time, have been frequently discussed (see for example Watson 1999). Similarly to The Grapes of Wrath, the film’s journey through a landscape it eventually masters, through the narrative vanquishing of the ‘Indians’, and through the social conflict it effaces, retrospectively defines the American West and the new community of travellers in its celebratory image. Reaching the geographical goal of Lordsberg requires not just luck, but also that the fractured community understand and work with each other. Once more, though in a more nostalgic and romantic vein than in the Steinbeck adaptation, a hostile dystopia is converted cinematically into a utopia of possibility and community. This blending of narration with the construction of nation, which would become a key feature of later road movies, was already rehearsed in It Happened One Night (1934). Most of Frank Capra’s Academy Award-winning film takes place along the route of a cross-state bus and the narrow highways tracing the American East Coast, as heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) flees from her father’s Florida yacht in order to meet up with her new fiancé – a playboy aviator called King Wesley – in New York. Assuming that the safest way for a rich girl to get there incognito is to take the slowest and cheapest form of travel, Ellie boards the Atlantic Greyhound in Miami. It is there that her path crosses with another King (the so-called ‘King of Hollywood’ this time), in the form of Clark Gable’s hard-nosed journalist Peter Warne, who soon identifies both his travelling companion and the chance for a great scoop. As Ellie’s father sends his men out on the road to find her, she and Peter spend a succession of days and nights moving and dodging their way closer to their destination, only to discover, it turns out, that neither of them really want the trip to end. Associated as Capra is with a particular kind of cinematic populism (going on to direct films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1940] and It’s a Wonderful Life [1946]), It Happened One Night has unsurprisingly been discussed in terms of its depiction of ‘the people’; those folk

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encountered along the way, often sharing the public means of transport, motor camps and rest stops: a cultural encounter for which the cross-class protagonists’ blossoming love affair acts as a symbol (see Schaber 1997: 23). This is a more optimistic image of the same Depression period later depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. While never totally romanticising (at one point on the days-long bus trip a woman without money for food faints; both Ellen and Peter have their cases stolen by opportunist road thieves), It Happened One Night allows its audience at least to imagine the romance of the road and its utopian possibilities. Laderman notes though that in It Happened One Night, as well as in The Grapes of Wrath, the protagonists’ mobility contains a critical, rebellious response to the crisis of the Depression (2002: 24). Indeed, as much as the film ‘includes a visual account of nearly every possible means of transportation’ (Schaber 1997: 22), as well as every existing form of communication, it is very specific in its identification with the road. King Wesley flies to his own wedding, but he is clearly a chump, destined to be left standing at the altar. We see Ellie’s father flying across whole states in a private air-

FIGURE 1.1 The Greyhound bus as symbol of community in It Happened One Night (1934)

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liner, and then in the subsequent shot, showing Ellie chatting happily in a motel shack, we hear what might be the same airplane passing in the background. While frequently associated with the emerging genre of ‘screwball’ comedy as much as it is viewed as a road movie, It Happened One Night is mostly resistant to the frantic movement, the back-and-forth of telephones and telegraphs, that surround the couple. Instead, the film is happiest to dwell on the uninterrupted passages of time, the experience of traveling the road, with its attendant opportunities for chance events, conversation and romance. As such – and as we will see at several points – Capra’s film establishes an important structural framework for later road movies. If, as Schaber points out, in the transition to the later road movie such images of ‘the people’ are replaced by ‘a series of catastrophic, even apocalyptic images’ (1997: 30), we might be entitled to ask where ‘the people’ went. Asking what is ‘missing’ in the road movie as it comes to be in the late 1960s and early 1970s is, however, to miss the point that this ‘absence’ defines this phase of the genre itself. Disconnection, fragmentation, isolation: these become the key motifs of the genre in its most classically recognised form, encapsulated in the frequently solitary and often solipsistic figure of the driver on the wide and open American road: a transition from the utopia of traveling communities to the more solipsistic ‘autopia’ of lone drivers and rebellious, criminal duos (see Archer 2013: 34–6). We need though to avoid the danger of suddenly arriving at a fullyformed cliché for the road movie, the origin of which might sometimes be ascribed as much to the feelings it may evoke – rebelliousness, freedom – as to the particular circumstances and contexts informing its development. In some respects what is actually missing in the earlier road films serves as a basis for what we see later on. It Happened One Night’s construction of a popular itinerant sentiment comes at the cost, perhaps inevitably, of all those aspects of American society that might jeopardise it: not only extreme poverty, which the film only lightly touches upon, but also the reality in the 1930s of racial segregation (see Mills 2006: 199). Dispossession feeds into the sentiment of the New Hollywood road movie, as we will shortly see, though even here, race, regrettably, remains rather under-explored in the perennially white American form of the genre, with some notable exceptions through the late 1980s and 1990s. Spike Lee’s 1996 film Get on the Bus, perhaps most notably, takes the ‘popular’ narrative vehicle and setting of the bus, and fills it entirely with African-American men – notably

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absent from the Greyhound in Capra’s film – boarding the bus to attend the Million Man March that took place in Washington DC in 1995. Given that the presence of blacks on American buses was a key point of confrontation in the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, this choice is already a rhetorical one. But beyond this, far from depicting a harmonious jaunt, Lee uses this scenario to explore tensions within the American black community, while also using the trip as an opportunity to construct and draw on collective communal strength (see Laderman 2002: 217–27). Quite typically for the road movie genre, it is also nostalgic, harking back as it does to the Civil Rights movement of the post-war decades, and to the 1963 March on Washington in particular (see Mills 2006: 199). As an exception that mostly proves the rule, Get on the Bus begs the question where black Americans are in the road movie. Answering this question, which also relates to the broader racial composition of the American film industry and its dominant product, is beyond the scope of this study – though as Ron Eyerman and Otar Löfgren suggest, the roots of this absence may also lie in the limited freedoms and sense of anxiety on the road experienced by African-Americans up to the 1960s and beyond (1995: 55). What we see in the 1960s is a refraction of this experience (an often limited and naïve one, as I will point out) on the part of a mainly privileged, liberal white culture; in this instance, in the road movie’s recasting of the white man as outlaw or dispossessed, with its hints towards the social contexts of the Civil Rights movement. Made at a crucial time in this struggle, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a fictionalised re-telling of the career of real-life bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, is often seen as an important transitional film in the emerging road movie genre due to its emphasis on the road as a site of non-conformity. Understanding Bonnie and Clyde’s importance to the genre hinges a lot on the way the attractions of the motor car and the lure of the open highway (Bonnie first sees Clyde from her bedroom window as he tries to steal her mother’s car) are seen as central to the film’s dynamic, rather than simply incidental factors (see Laderman 2002: 51). Hitting the road and driving fast becomes as much the point of the story as a means to an end, underscored by the film’s use of upbeat bluegrass tunes on the music track. But it is also very pointedly a film that looks backwards in order to go forwards. The film begins with a recreation of the old Warner Bros. logo, the studio synonymous with the gangster genre throughout the 1930s, and

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its look and spirit borrow from earlier films noir about outlaw lovers, in particular They Live by Night (1948) and the suitably deranged Gun Crazy (1949) (see Bryan 1999: 50–1; Hughes 2006: 74–5). As Erik Dussere suggests, noir films of the immediate postwar decades frequently oppose their protagonists to the prevailing culture of consumerism: noir, in these terms, ‘becomes the site of an American identity that is asserted as both alternative and original … a retreat that is itself outside the social and imaginative space of postwar citizenship’ (2014: 35). Films like Gun Crazy form a kind of bridge between this noir ethos and the liberating but also dangerous spaces of the road, which becomes a site of refuge and excitement for its socially dispossessed protagonists. In Bonnie and Clyde, finally, we see noir channelled not so much through a ‘hard-boiled’ veneer, but through the nostalgic perspective of the Depression, a period which may be romantically re-positioned as that much more ‘authentic’ than a materialistic contemporary culture.2 As Laderman points out, the acceleration in postwar mobility goes in contradictory ways during the 1950s (which saw not just the emergence of Beat writing but also the biker movie, such as The Wild One [1954]) and the 1960s, offering on one hand the lure of consumer capitalism, but on the other the potential to go off ‘in search of the true America’ (2002: 41). As its tagline suggested – ‘A man went looking for America, and couldn’t find it anywhere’ – this search, and its failure, would be the motor for Easy Rider. The classic(al) American road movie: from Easy Rider to Two-Lane Blacktop ‘Easy Rider was the little road movie that came out of nowhere to change Hollywood forever’. So begins Lee Hill’s book on this hugely-influential 1969 film, though it is important to add the sentence which follows: ‘Or so goes one of film culture’s most enduring myths’ (1996: 8). Such is the remarkable cultural status of this ‘little road movie’, which has become for many not just the defining film of the road movie genre but also of a whole generational moment, that it is often difficult to discern the film through the haze of appreciation – and criticism – that surrounds it. Within the framework of this book I can only hope to touch on a few issues, and so will focus mainly on how we might position Easy Rider within the longer history, aesthetic and industrial, of the American road movie. For anyone interested in the more detailed production history and varied interpretations of the

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film, Hill (1996), Biskind (1998), Laderman (2002) and Mills (2006) all offer significant (and in Biskind’s case, highly colourful) accounts. What is important to note in approaching Easy Rider is that these apparently separate fields of ‘production history’ and ‘interpretation’ are not easily separated. The film’s mythic centrality to the culture of the late 1960s is such that Hill goes so far as to describe it as ‘confirmation that post-war history was at a watershed’, adding that this was the film that showed ‘not only where Heaven and Hell might be located but, more agonizingly, where the Fall had begun’ (1996: 31). Given Easy Rider’s simple, in fact quite schematic narrative – a pair of bikers, Wyatt/Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy the Kid (Dennis Hopper) drive across the country to sell some drugs, meet and then leave a few people, get persecuted by rednecks, and are eventually killed by them – we might ask what the film has done to warrant such a lofty (I might suggest hyperbolic) reading; one which puts this road movie on a par with Dante’s Divine Comedy. Once we take into consideration the affective power of the film, its ability to generate an emotional, kinetic engagement with its protagonists, kicking in with the driving riff of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’, we start to find a way in to Easy Rider’s particular iconic status. The social and cultural meaning of the film lies as much in what it is and does than anything it is supposedly ‘about’. This relates as much to its specificity as a new type of American movie than it does to any cultural circumstances it might be said to reflect; though it is probably true to say that transformations in the movies are in themselves a very visible indicator of the society and culture that produces them. Hence Laderman’s subtle point that Easy Rider’s key claim is to have ‘launch[ed] the American independent narrative film as a successful and profitable reflection of the counterculture’ (2002: 66). Bonnie and Clyde, with its unexpected juxtapositions of violence and romance, and its resistance to condemning criminality, is often seen as marked by aesthetic tendencies drawn from the French New Wave, in films like Breathless (1960) (about which more in chapter three) – a similar influence on the production and aesthetics of Easy Rider. In the emerging road movie, then, rebellion on the part of its protagonists is a manifestation of the films’ own contesting relationship with the style and content of the Hollywood system. ‘American independent film’, to use Laderman’s term, is a frequently imprecise one, so it is useful to clarify what it means here. The film was

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financed by an independent producer, Raybert (later BBS) Productions, for a modest budget ($360,000) (see Biskind 1998: 61–2); though like many independent movies today, it enjoyed a distribution deal with a major studio (Columbia). A common idea in the legend around Easy Rider’s shoot is that its small budget necessitated a more intuitive and improvised approach to filming and editing, certainly in comparison to the more corporate major studio productions that had dominated the cinematic landscape for most of the century. In this respect the ‘almost seamless documentary air’ (Hill 1996: 51) that the film had, which made it not only quite unusual for the contexts of the 1960s, but also helped define the look and content of the road movie, was a virtue born out of necessity. Easy Rider is in turn distinguished by the aesthetic requirements of its production, that have subsequently become hallmarks of the road genre: long travelling shots; panoramic point-of-view sequences; the flash of sunlight flaring in the lens against the rules of classical cinematography; and of course, landscape and road montages, cut to a pop and rock soundtrack. This musical aspect of the film was again, it seems, something of an accident, after the planned score by Crosby, Stills and Nash was rejected. The result, a score made up of various existing songs, again unusual for the time, subsequently became a defining feature of the emerging ‘New Hollywood’ cinema, in films such as Mean Streets (1973) and American Graffiti (1973) (see Biskind 1998: 73). The shift in the power structure of Hollywood, as well as in the form and content of movies being made, is often connected to a generational reshaping of society and creative influence, related in no small part to the era’s political and cultural upheavals: the war in Vietnam, its media coverage and the increasingly negative response to it; the Civil Rights movement; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King (both in 1968); worldwide student and worker protest (again in 1968); the increasing cultural impact of drugs and rock music (culminating amongst other things in 1969’s Woodstock Festival). Overstating the significance of these events (especially within the terms of an America that, in 1968, voted in the Republican President Nixon) is always problematic, but the unprecedented critical and commercial success of Easy Rider – which won the ‘Best First Work’ award at Cannes in 1969, and went on to make over $19 million at the box office, at a time when that was still a lot of money – indicates its significance within the American film culture of the time.

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There is a risk though that the film’s cultural status and celebration of mobility may blind us both to its complexity and problems. Wyatt and Billy, aiming to get rich on the sale of cocaine (produced, we assume, in an economically under-developed Latin America), are not just capitalists, but – a point hardly ever mentioned in discussions of the film – are also profiteering from the USA’s global economic power. As the film enters the southern states, meanwhile, the key focus point at that time for the Civil Rights movement, it seems to make a rhetorical point by gliding alternately past colonial-style mansion houses and comparatively run-down shacks owned by black Americans; yet the film never gets very near to these people (the murder of George, the Civil Rights lawyer played by a young Jack Nicholson, is in some respects the film’s closest engagement with the contexts of racial politics). Laderman notices a similar problem in Bonnie and Clyde, which introduces black characters, but only as ‘voiceless ciphers … watching rather than participating in the action’, reducing them to the ‘adoring audience’ (2002: 65) of the film’s white heroes. Likewise, as a film of its time, Easy Rider draws attention to the problem of race, while still basically being a movie celebrating white men on the road. Perhaps self-consciously, the long shot of Wyatt carefully sealing tubes of drug money inside his stars-and-stripes gas tank fuses together a symbol of gasoline, mobility and exploitative capitalism as a sort of American dream. If this already makes Wyatt an ambivalent counter-cultural figure, to an extent both he and Billy reiterate the type of American ‘manifest destiny’ their hipster talk and posturing superficially reject. Indeed, as Barbara Klinger has argued, the sweeping tracking shots and panoramic point-ofview sequences that are possibly Easy Rider’s most memorable features reiterate ‘immortalized images’ (1997: 189) from the western: the genre that exploited such images precisely to idealise the American landscape and foster belief in the Euro-American frontier narrative. Such shots also serve to obviate the road movie’s doubled technological character (in terms of the technology of cinema itself, and more implicitly the motorised technologies of transport employed) through a visual impression of ‘nature’. Leo Marx’s observation (1964) becomes relevant here, that the fixation in American writing with the ‘pastoral’ (idealised representations of the natural world) only becomes pressing with the expansion of industrialisation and the railroad in American life. The typical road movie emphasis on landscape in films such as Easy Rider, comparatively, can be seen to perform

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the ideological work of renewing America through a pastoral mode, during the period when cars, consumption and suburbanisation were more prevalent than at any point in the nation’s history. Such ideological aims again foster connections between the road movie and the counter-culture, even if only through some representational sleight-of-hand. Easy Rider may truly be a key film of the road movie in its ‘classical’ age, then – the period when the form or ‘rules’ of a particular genre become perfected and identifiable – and in turn a ‘classic’ of the road genre. But we need to be nuanced in the way we understand what this really means, and Easy Rider’s influence on the films that came after it. The road movies made during the early 1970s, with their typical emphasis on more improvised, looser performance styles, different kinds of film star, a frequent emphasis on rural settings and subjects from American folklore (especially outlaws), and a more freewheeling, wandering approach to narrative, to some extent define the aesthetics and themes of the New Hollywood; especially as so many of these films were made by young directors establishing their presence in this post-studio system Hollywood scene. These films included The Rain People (1968), Boxcar Bertha (1972), Badlands (1973), The Sugarland Express (1973) and Thieves Like Us (1974), directed, respectively, by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Steven Spielberg and Robert Altman. With the exception of the slightly older Altman, this so-called ‘Film School Generation’ of directors – so named because they learned their craft on 1960s university film courses, rather than through apprenticeship within the film studios or on television – are often seen to have brought a different kind of filmmaking ethos to bear on American movies, typically viewed as being founded on ‘counter-cultural values, European New Waves [as well as] classical Hollywood’ (Laderman 2002: 127). Exactly why so many of these films ended up as road movies is a complicated issue, though, which the presumed influence of the counterculture and European art cinema, with its open-ended and enigmatic narratives, can only partly explain. No doubt the wide-open spaces, focus on alternative, mobile communities and outlaw narratives in these films plugged into the period’s increasingly prominent concerns with questions of political representation, national identity and direction: there is a sense in many of these films’ passage through the American landscape of trying to wipe the slate clean, to start up again from the roots (even if, as we see in Easy Rider, this is not so easy).

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The tendency within film studies to view these road movies in mainly cultural and political terms stems partly from Thomas Elsaesser’s essay (1975) on the ‘pathos of failure’ in early 1970s American cinema. Elsaesser identifies a cynicism in these films towards the classically American values of ‘ambition, vision, drive’ (1975: 15). Viewing them from the contemporary perspective of political disaffection and lack of direction, Elsaesser argues that these films represent ‘the experience of a rebellion whose impulse towards change aborted’ (1975: 18). A problem though with viewing the early 1970s road movie just from the perspective of the counterculture and political disenchantment is that it overlooks precisely the possibilities for identification and excitement, for the exercising of fantasy through the mobile protagonist, that is inevitably an aspect of these films’ appeal to viewers – and to a significant extent was an entirely intended aspect of their production. Mills’ take on Easy Rider’s notional message is that it is little more than a variation on Peter Fonda’s speech at the end of the biker exploitation film The Wild Angels (1967): ‘We want to be free, we want to be free to do what we want to do … And we want to get loaded’; a ‘critique’ that in Easy Rider, Mills argues, ‘must be so vague as to appeal to the largest possible audience’ (2006: 122). Indeed, what Easy Rider might in theory be about is always counterweighed by its status as (to refer back to Mills’ broader argument) a multi-sensory, multi-media event, oriented largely around its rock soundtrack (and Fonda’s speech from The Wild Angels is perhaps best known, in the UK at least, from its sampling in Primal Scream’s 1990 hit ‘Loaded’). This ambiguity in the road movie – between its notional critique of the dominant culture and its commodification as pop culture – is exemplified by Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Directed by Monte Hellman who, like Peter Fonda and many of the fledgling New Hollywood directors, had worked under The Wild Angels director Roger Corman, the film has two young men, known simply as the Driver and the Mechanic, driving around in their customised ’55 Chevy looking for people to race against. Financed by Universal Pictures, and casting two pop stars in the leads (singer James Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson), pre-publicity for the film anticipated, in the words of Rolling Stone magazine, ‘road racers and their women, cross-country adventure, the Great God Speed’ (in Webb 1999: 82). The fact that a major studio would invest so highly in a road-race movie starring musicians is indication enough that there was a ‘lucrative youth market’ (ibid.) for the road movie, presumably on the back of Easy Riders’ unexpected success.

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The film though is much odder (and, as some critics overlook, much funnier) than its premise. The two men cruise highways that, like other films from the era (not just Easy Rider, but also Vanishing Point [1971], whose crosscountry race against the clock is similar to that of Two-Lane Blacktop), are largely free of other vehicles. In Two-Lane Blacktop, in fact, the only other cars seem to be other hot-rodders looking for competition; most notably in the form of ‘GTO’ (Warren Oates), named here after the Detroit-built car he drives, and whom the Driver and the Mechanic challenge to a race across country to Washington DC, with the winner getting the loser’s vehicle. Not only does everyone in this film want to race; all they want to talk about is cars, to the point that the film’s world is no longer a recognisable place as such (the film rarely dwells on actual place names or state lines) but an almost cartoonish series of petrol-heads, endless roads and hot-rod meets. When we do see non-racers, they are in a grotesquely-staged pile-up that no-one seems in too much rush to deal with (a possible echo here of JeanLuc Godard’s film Weekend [1967], which I will look at later). That the film is largely seen in terms of its ‘existential’ or ‘nihilistic’ qualities (see Webb 1999; Laderman 2002: 93–105) owes much to its refusal of conventional narrative development and structure. The film is rarely dull: its footage of actual hot-rod races, and its frequent use of behind-the-driver point-of-view shots, convey a powerful, even poetic impression of the lure of speed. But such speed in Two-Lane Blacktop is ultimately just the burning of fuel (and in a striking final image, as the film pauses in its final race, the celluloid literally burns up in the frame). Despite setting up a cross-country motor race as its central plot, this race

FIGURE 1.2 A signature driver point-of-view shot from Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

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is for the most part free of event. Most of the time the racers are stopping to fix each other’s cars or have lunch, and in the end, with the Driver and the Mechanic running out of gas money, they appear to forget about the race altogether. The non-professional actor casting is effective here inasmuch as Taylor and Wilson do not (or cannot) really act at all, to the point that they seem barely alive beyond their relationship to the car. As Laderman (2002: 97–103) and Mills (2006: 144–6) both note, the film is also strategic in placing a highly independent hitch-hiking girl (played by Laurie Bird) into this masculine environment. The Girl, restlessly mobile and fluid in her relationships, puts up with these men only to a point, and then – as they sit again at a truck-stop chatting about engine performance (in this film ‘she’ more frequently refers to the Chevy) – wordlessly goes off with a boy riding an Easy Rider-style chopper. Two-Lane Blacktop is in this respect quite knowing about the way the road movie, focusing on male relationships – what, as I will briefly discuss below, becomes known as the ‘buddy’ narrative – disavows its intrinsic fear of women and homoeroticism behind its particular brand of auto-erotica. Unlike Easy Rider though, Two-Lane Blacktop bombed at the box office. The film’s commercial failure was, in Adam Webb’s view, because it ‘alienat[ed] its potential audience’ (1999: 86) through its black comic vision and lack of obvious commercial drive. As we shall shortly see, Webb is mostly right that the American road movie’s turn later in the 1970s, and into the 1980s, would resemble more the film Universal wanted Two-Lane Blacktop to be. But if Two-Lane Blacktop failed to capitalise on the success of Easy Rider by being too weird, too bleak, what does this say about the film it unsuccessfully tried to emulate? Webb’s argument that Two-Lane Blacktop’s commercial failure was an indication of post-1960s malaise, a sign of counter-cultural fatigue, is too convenient here, because it neatly brackets off the films of the 1960s, subjecting them to a different framework of interpretation. Two-Lane Blacktop may well have bombed because, to borrow the parlance of the time, it was a downer. But this also encourages us to recognise that Easy Rider was hardly a hit because in the end everyone died. Maybe it was because, like Bonnie and Clyde before it, the trip itself was a hell of a blast: a rocking ride, to borrow Steppenwolf’s lyrics, full of ‘heavy metal thunder’. This suggests that the distinctions between the American road movie’s classic(al) phase and its supposedly more commercial evolution are not, in fact, so great.

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Nostalgia and irony: the post-classical road movie Histories of the American road movie generally agree that something very different happens to the genre after this ‘existential’ cycle of films. As I have suggested, it is difficult to ascertain whether changes in the road movie are the result of wider social and cultural factors, evolving attitudes towards film genres and styles, or simply transformations in the film industry. Most likely, all three elements, rather than any one, contribute to the development of genres, and the road movie is no exception. It has become a received critical idea that the road movie, after its classic period of the early 1970s, and along with Hollywood cinema more generally – with the onset of blockbuster mentality, inspired by the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) – goes into a state of decline. Such an overview sees the commercial imperative of Hollywood reassert itself alongside the return to more traditional, conservative values. Laderman, for example, rather too neatly and judgmentally, sees Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974), about another outlaw couple – one whose aim, in this case, is not a robbing-and-killing spree, but to visit their son in a foster home – as a transitional film in the genre, mainly in its sentimental bonding between the couple and the police officer they initially abduct (2002: 128–31).3 Seeing this as a return to classical Hollywood structure and values, Laderman dismissively sums up a number of road movies made throughout the 1980s – including Lost in America (1985), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Midnight Run (1988) and Rain Man (1988) – as ‘generic skeletons gutted by an “entertainment” mentality’ (2002: 133), approving instead a number of independent postmodern road movies such as Paris, Texas (1984), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), Down by Law (1984) and Wild at Heart (1990). Significantly, these last films are connoted more in terms of their status as auteur films, the first two by non-American directors (Wim Wenders, Aki Kaurismakii), and the last two by Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch, very much off-centre figures within contemporary American film (and I will turn to this idea of the auteur road movie in chapter three). Suffice it to say, though, that if we are to fully understand the road movie as a genre, we cannot prescribe what it should or should not do within the terms of an ideal road movie – which, if embodied by a film like Easy Rider, is already an unreliable ideal to follow.

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Certainly, what was most peculiar in the early 1970s road movie, namely its lack of obvious purpose and resolution, goes out the car window in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In films such as the Smokey and the Bandit series (1977–1983), starring Burt Reynolds, or the two Cannonball Run films (1981, 1983), the vagaries of automotive drift are replaced by the ‘race/chase’ structure, re-affirming, albeit at a faster pace, classical virtues of goal-orientation and narrative resolution. This was exactly what the Universal-funded Two-Lane Blacktop was supposed to be like, and it was actually a change that some American critics welcomed rather than lamented (see Mills 2006: 168–9). Arguably, though, the focus in these films on competition and pursuit meant that ‘the road’ in itself lost its significance as a site of exploration or transformation, a key trope in the road movie as it has come to be understood. This appropriation of road culture by the family-oriented film is a significant event, but it begs the question as to how the road genre more properly speaking might persist in this postclassical context. Though very different from preceding road movies in both their form and ambitions, the ‘entertaining’ films of the 1980s prove equally revealing of their particular time and place. Most notably, the American road movie soon becomes more self-conscious about the presence of cars and fuel consumption within the genre, and in turn, more sceptical about its counter-cultural ‘golden age’. Lost in America stars its writer-director Albert Brooks as David Howard, an advertising executive who gives it all up for a life on the road, traveling cross-country with his wife in a Winnebago. Though his final cap-in-hand return to exec life provides the ‘happy conformist ending’ Laderman critiques (2002: 134), the film is quite specific in showing this return to corporate life as a response to the delusions and misconceptions of a mostly nostalgic radicalism. As a film that specifically references Easy Rider in a jokily imitative way, Lost in America indicates the point at which the familiarity of generic tropes, and the tendency for them to become clichés, begin to lend themselves to parodic uses (see Harries 2000). This capacity for Easy Rider to become a misleading stereotype is precisely the point of Lost in America, which targets the naïve retrospective view of the 1960s. This is especially apparent in the key scene where David’s wife, in Las Vegas, loses most of their $145,000 nest-egg, and he corrects her rose-tinted view that Easy Rider’s bike-riding duo had nothing to live off (see Hark 1997: 213). As David reminds her, they had consid-

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erably more than nothing; they had a bundle of top-notch cocaine – the up-market drug of choice, as it happens, for the materialistic 1980s – the sale of which was intended to set them up for life. Other films are more positive in their backward-looking tendencies, while bypassing the era of Easy Rider altogether. The success of Lucas’s American Graffiti, in which an array of teenage hot-rodders, just before the start of the Vietnam war, cruise around a Californian town to a rock ’n’ roll radio station, showed the value of nostalgia – and a retro soundtrack – to Hollywood’s new commercial aesthetic. American Graffiti has been seen as part of an emerging ‘pastiche’ or ‘postmodern’ style in American film. The film’s appeal (or problem, depending on your point of view) is its ability to (re)create not so much the reality of the past, but an idealisation of that past for a less reassuring time. The apotheosis of such nostalgia would be Back to the Future (1985), a sort of road movie of time and space, where Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) literally drives back to a version of the suburban 1950s in a very 1980s (John) DeLorean DMC-12. The choice of car here is a pointed one: while looking like a space ship, this ambitious venture from the designer of the Pontiac GTO – the same car that burned through Two-Lane Blacktop – was a financial failure, a symbol of bloated 1980s excess.4 The blatant rejection of the modern car would play a part in the more grounded, though no less nostalgic, Rain Man. This Academy Award-winning film centres on the relationship between Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) and his older, autistic brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), as the two otherwise distant siblings are compelled to make contact on a road trip back to Los Angeles from Cincinnati, where both have travelled to learn of their late father’s will. The father’s estate, it turns out, is going to a mental institution, with Charlie getting just the beloved 1949 Buick he once sneaked off with on a joyride. When Raymond refuses to fly home, the vintage car becomes its own time machine, as the road trip home connects Charlie with the family ‘memories’ he never had. A slightly different kind of time travel, this time with America’s folksy past, is undertaken in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, written and directed by John Hughes (who had previously written the comic road movie National Lampoon’s Vacation [1983]). Ina Rae Hark (1997) has identified both this film and Rain Man as films in which ‘high flyers’ are forced to travel together with ‘road men’. In Hughes’ film, an advertising executive, Neil Page (Steve Martin), finds himself travelling cross-country with his social

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nemesis, gauche and garrulous salesman Del Griffith (John Candy), when their flight from New York to Chicago is grounded in Wichita due to bad weather. Planes, Trains and Automobiles plays out Hollywood’s critique of the 1980s’ ‘yuppie ideology’ (1997: 216), as the snobbish, effete Neil finds himself slowly and stealthily won over by the ungainly but more open Del, and learns to enjoy the serendipity of the road over the speedy efficiency of air travel. As Hark argues, Neil’s lesson about humility and judgement, as well as his growing respect for Del – who we learn at the end has lost his wife, and lives constantly on the road – only slightly covers up the fact that the film doesn’t actually criticise the system that produces gold-cardbranding bigots like Neil. The film actually ends with Neil bringing Del home with him for Thanksgiving dinner at his sizeable townhouse, which for Hark ‘undercuts the seeming point of the film, Neil’s learning to appreciate the value of folks outside his hermetic yuppie circle’ (1997: 218). From this perspective, Planes, Trains and Automobiles performs the traditional ideological trick of allowing its audience to have their cake and eat it, offering us a fantasy alternative to our own lives and attitudes while not really criticising them. Hark rather overlooks the fact, though, that the ‘folks’ she refers to are already very much present in what is really the film’s ‘point’, which is the representation of grounded transport: the trains and automobiles (and buses) of the title, its public transport stations and motels. Hughes’ film, as its self-explanatory title suggests, is an affectionate document of the various modes of American travel, and the potential for communication and physical/spiritual transition they afford. As such, the film shows the persisting legacy of earlier films in the American popular tradition, most obviously It Happened One Night. This marketable idea of the road and car as a means of time travel becomes a dominant feature of subsequent American road movies, in which the journey perennially becomes a means of re-connecting with the past. Indeed, far from colonising the American mainstream, the sentimentality of the nostalgic road movie has appealed to some of America’s notionally more edgy, independent filmmakers. David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) tells the (real-life) story of Alvin Straight, the septuagenarian who drove his John Deere motorised lawn-mower 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his sick older brother. Though appropriately the most ‘straight’ film Lynch has made, The Straight Story has moments of oddball wit (a point, for example, where the camera rises from behind the trac-

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tor to take in the road ahead, only to come back down again when the crawling vehicle fails to get into shot); and it should be said that the tale of a man driving a gardening tool across two states is unlikely enough to need much of Lynch’s typical embellishment. Slightly more dry in tone, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (2005) has Don, (Bill Murray) a rich but bored computing magnate, go off in search of a host of former girlfriends, looking for a son he has been told about via an anonymous letter. Perhaps needless to say, in the dead-pan and largely dysfunctional tone we have come to expect from the American independent cinema (and the perennially droll Jarmusch especially), with its frequent inversion of Hollywood structure and motifs, Don finds neither the spiritual renewal, nor, apparently, the lost son, that the trip promised. The middle-age of the road: Alexander Payne’s road-movie cycle Situated somewhere between the mainstream and indie film, the lure of the road as a response to the crises of middle- and old age has become the signature of director Alexander Payne, who found significant critical and commercial success in three literary adaptations – About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004) and The Descendants (2011) – before adding a somewhat different, more low-key addition to this road-movie cycle with the black-and-white Nebraska (2013). Payne has to some extent revived the road movie as both an engaged and popular genre in contemporary cinema (the first three films all passed the $100 million mark in box-office receipts). Critical while not obviously rebellious, cynical yet occasionally sentimental, Payne’s first three road movies chronicle the meaning of the road to middle- and professional-class males trapped not so much by ‘the system’, as by their own conformity to American capitalist values and work ethics. About Schmidt’s eponymous protagonist (played by Jack Nicholson) is a newly retired insurance actuary failing to see any horizon beyond his former workday routine and the wife he no longer recognises, until her sudden death encourages him to take to the road in their new Winnebago Adventurer. In The Descendants, meanwhile, a lawyer (George Clooney), whose wife is critically injured in a boating accident, uses the road trip to sort out the debris of his life; mainly, as in About Schmidt, by trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. About Schmidt is particularly interesting in its relation to an earlier road-movie tradition,

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notably via its casting of the now sixty-something Nicholson. But as in the more parodic Lost in America, Schmidt’s luxury mobile home is a consumerist fantasy of being on the road. Likewise, this road, that takes Schmidt around his native Nebraska, when not totally flat, is a landscape of steak and rib joints, fast-food outlets and chain stores – culminating in a theme-park exhibit celebrating the Midwestern pioneer spirit; a spirit that, the film suggests, is harder to find in the regimented and commodified contexts of modern American life. Sideways also provides a significant addition to the American road movie in its story of two oddly-matched friends on a week-long stag trip through Californian wine country: Miles (Paul Giamatti), a divorced highschool English teacher writing an unwanted novel, and Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a mostly unemployed actor due to marry his wealthy fiancé at the end of the week. Just as Shakespearian comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream use the forest as a magical space of inverted reality, Sideways uses its winding valley roads and lush vineyards as the site for both transformation and chaos. In this case, the picturesque elides neatly into the ‘picaresque’: a type of narrative favoured by many road movies, in which the road becomes an opportunity for unexpected events, chance meetings, but also the upturning of normal social rules (hence the appeal of this kind of narrative to franchises like the Hangover films [2009, 2011, 2013]). Jack’s aim is to have sex as much as possible, leading him into a fleeting and fateful liaison with a pourer at one of the wineries. The much less sober and introverted Miles, meanwhile, seeks his own inspiration from numerous bottles of his beloved Pinot Noir, but also the romantic attentions of an old friend. The popularity of Payne’s road movies owes more than a little to their comic uses of classical road-genre tropes within colourful and appealing locations (and Sideways is, amongst other things, practically an advert for wine tourism). But they mostly avoid their potential reduction to cliché in their ability to break down, and in turn expose, the masculine insufficiencies underpinning their cinematic road trips. About Schmidt avoids sentimentality in part because the journey is not greatly inspiring or revealing, but also because Schmidt is such an ambiguous figure. The death of his wife seems more like a fantasy become awkwardly real, and his taking to the road is motivated largely by his inability to look after himself at home. He is also a culturally and politically naïve figure, revealing at one

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FIGURE 1.3 Male dysfunction on the road: Jack and Miles head for wine country in Sideways (2004)

point that the ‘Red Indians’, or ‘the “Native Americans”, as they now like to be called’ have, it turns out, had ‘a bad time’ historically. Sideways is similarly unsparing in its depiction of masculine weakness and bad faith. Miles, the type of mid-achieving male that is Payne’s preferred character, resorts to stealing from his own mother to help pay for his trip. His easy familiarity with wine country allows him to expand in ways apparently beyond his working routine, though his connoisseurship and love of grapes covers up his condition as a functioning alcoholic, for whom up-market wines are largely a form of solace from his loneliness. Nor, as in About Schmidt, does Sideways spare its wine-country landscape from a cynical eye, as Miles and Jack pass through an array of rustically-styled motels and old-country themed restaurants. The trouble with men, and women in trouble: gender and the US road movie As typified by the mid-life hi-jinks of Sideways, Payne’s road movies may lay bare the genre’s underlying male anxiety while still functioning very adequately as male-driven road movies (Sideways is particularly sneaky in letting its duo eventually get away with everything they do on the trip). Payne’s work is in this respect merely a more critically conscientious version of a longstanding popular form and cultural tendency. In much the

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same way that the American road movie typically fails to reflect the country’s wider ethnic mix, it is also obvious from this outline how it has failed to include women. Coincidentally, the development of the road movie as a popular form in the 1970s and 1980s paralleled the emergence of feminist film theory and history; a key target of which was the way Hollywood film genres tended to organise their narrative and point of view around predominantly masculine protagonists, for viewers who, if not always male, were submitted nevertheless to a masculine perspective. Films like Rain Man and Sideways are characteristic of what Molly Haskell (1987: 361–2) calls the ‘buddy movie’, which to an extent has become synonymous with a type of road movie since the early 1970s, though has precedents as far back as Laurel and Hardy’s films or the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road to… series (1940–1962). Haskell’s observation was that in the buddy film, women were a problem that simply got in the way of a good time. If women were there at all as romantic interest, they often formed part of a triangular relationship that the male duo had to show itself more important than, while also disavowing the ‘threat’ of homosexuality via stridently ‘masculine’ behaviour (as we have seen, somewhat more parodically, in Two-Lane Blacktop). Alternatively, as in Easy Rider, women are simply left behind like dead weight, allowing the men to get on with being together, where it seems they are much happier. In both Rain Man and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as Hark points out, the trick is to explain why the two men have to be in the car, and then show that they aren’t gay (1997: 206), thereby leaving the reassured (straight) masculine viewer to sit back and enjoy the ride they wanted to have in the first place. Consequently, both films’ plots are built around the impossibility of air travel, and anchor their male protagonists in ‘normal’, if mostly unseen, heterosexual relationships. It is for reasons such as this that Tim Corrigan (1991) described the road movie as a genre about male ‘hysteria’; one in which the male subject’s ‘quest’ leads him to evade, through the technology of transport, all those things that prohibit movement, and hence may be deemed too ‘feminine’: domestication, responsibility and the routines of work. Appearing as it did the same year as Corrigan’s essay, Thelma and Louise (1991) looks almost like a filmic response to his critique (see Cohan and Hark 1997: 11). The exceptional status of Thelma and Louise, at least within the history of the Hollywood road movie, makes it a vital if potentially tokenistic point of reference; yet a quarter of a century on it is hard

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to understate its significance. Cohan and Hark are not understating the point when they suggest that Ridley Scott’s film, from Callie Khouri’s script, ‘marked an important turning point in the popular and academic reception of the road film’ (1997: 10). In a similar way to Brokeback Mountain (2006) fifteen years later, that performed another re-working of genre and its gendered connotations, Thelma and Louise’s achievement was to make a mainstream movie with A-list stars the focus of a broader public discussion, not only about cinema, but about cultural attitudes, social freedoms and the politics of identity.5 Central to this varied critical and popular reception was the way in which Thelma and Louise effectively inverted the road movie by putting two women at the wheel of a genre dominated by men: an apparently simple twist that nevertheless ‘shocked viewers in 1991’, showing ‘just how unconsciously audiences followed the unspoken [gendered] rules of genre until this time’ (Mills 2006: 193). Much of the controversy around the film hinged on the way it appeared to give license to a female appropriation of this typically masculine genre. For supporters of the film, Thelma and Louise merely demonstrated how naturalised certain actions are when performed on screen by men; while the film’s critics lamented the way it appeared to offer no real alternative to the genre’s masculine tropes (for an outline of this discussion see Cohan and Hark 1997: 11–12). Whatever your take on it, the film is certainly striking in its efforts to rethink, as Khouri wanted to do in her screenplay, the traditional passivity of female roles in Hollywood cinema (see Mills 2006: 193). But it is also significant in suggesting a possibility for a feminine imaginative investment in car culture, and in the road movie, that both the history of film production and film theory suggested women could not have (see Willis 1993). In thinking solely about the inversion of the gender-genre axis in Thelma and Louise, moreover, we overlook what is specific in the film to the women’s story, as well as its particular qualities as a road movie within the tradition this chapter has discussed. As Alistair Daniel points out, the film ‘does not set out to be a road movie’, but ‘becomes one’ only when Louise, after stopping an attempted rape of Thelma outside a bar, shoots the attacker dead in response to his continued insults (1999: 170). This action, provoking the women’s cross-state flight, is clearly shown to be legally indefensible; not so much because Louise shot the man after he freed her friend, but because no jury, hearing how Thelma had danced and

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drunk with her attacker all evening, would believe the rape claim. The iconic landscapes and generically open highways of the rest of the film, ending in its climactic showdown at the Grand Canyon, are not therefore merely rehashed motifs from road movie history, but rather a specific space to which Thelma and Louise both elect and are forced to turn. Their entry into the role of the road outlaw is determined as much by the gendered forces of law and cultural judgement, as it is by any lifestyle choice on their part. But Thelma and Louise’s flight from patriarchal law (and more literally, the pursuing police) is also meant to be great fun. We are invited to take pleasure in its revitalisation of the American road, in much the same way that the unplanned trip, for its two protagonists ‘turns out to realize the temporary liberation from [the] oppressive, dissatisfying normality’ (Cohan and Hark 1997: 10) they originally sought when heading, at the start of the film, to a quiet lakeside fishing lodge. The key word here, though, is temporary. What makes Thelma and Louise so important for our understanding of the road movie is this recognition that the space and duration of cinematic automotive flight is a fantasy. Indeed, Scott’s effort to recreate the atmosphere of earlier road movies (see Eyerman and Löfgren 1995: 67) highlights the film’s intent to be at once nostalgically appealing and also unreal: an impossible cinematic dream. As Daniel points out, because of Louise’s refusal to go through Texas (the sight, we understand, of her own sexual assault, and therefore symbolic of the patriarchal law from which they are fleeing), their chances of reaching the haven of Mexico become almost nil: consequently, in moving west – and therefore reiterating the same westward movement that underpinned the American nation’s development, as well as many of its westerns – the women ‘try to create their own private “Mexico” en route’ (1999: 176). From this point, the couple is doomed, but we are arguably not in the realm of realism here. As much is emphasised by the film’s famous ending, when the pair, deciding to ‘keep going’, drive over the side of the Canyon rather than allow themselves to be arrested. Freezing the car’s flight at this point (and not, as in an earlier cut, showing the couple falling to their deaths), the film literally suspends Thelma and Louise in a poignant fantasy of liberation, encapsulating in this moment much of the film’s largely self-reflexive, playful, but no less pointed message. As Cohan and Hark note, Thelma and Louise contributed not only to the further academic investigation into the road movie as a genre, but to

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FIGURE 1.4 No way out for women on the road: opting to ‘keep going’ at the end of Thelma and Louise (1991)

its pertinence as a means of personal, and frequently political, expression, especially in terms of the previously ‘marginalized and alienated’ (1997: 12). As central to a particular zeitgeist, it is notable that the early 1990s also saw the emergence of the road movie as a key genre in the New Queer Cinema, typified by films such as My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Living End (1992), which took a playful and often nihilistic postmodern approach to the genre (see Lang 1997; Mills 1997). Thelma and Louise perhaps paved the way too for other more mainstream road movies confident in their representation of ‘gay-themed or queerly inflected’ narratives (Lang 1997: 331), such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Boys on the Side (1995). It also, we should add, gave new legs to an American outlaw-road movie – films such as True Romance (1993), Kalifornia (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994) – somewhat less concerned by issues of marginal representation. I will touch on a number of these films later. As a point of conclusion for this chapter, though, it is worth noting the ways that Thelma and Louise both looks forward and backwards, in its view of the road movie as a type of ‘utopian’ space, a ‘new’ community of travellers, that is also a revisiting and even re-visioning of the American landscape as ‘home’. While we may be sceptical about the film’s efforts to pass its glamorous stars off as ordinary working girls, Thelma and Louise does no less than Hollywood has ever done since its earliest days, when screen kings like Gable and Fonda stood in for regular guys. This, as well as the back-story of social injustice and the narrative of enforced flight, links

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the film to Depression-era road narratives like The Grapes of Wrath, but also to the folksy populism of It Happened One Night; while its efforts to rethink the migratory stories of the American past for new audiences shows Thelma and Louise’s continuity with Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. The contexts and specific content of the Hollywood road movie evolve through the decades, but to a large extent its defining myths and methods remain intact. Notes 1 2

3

4

5

As described, for example, in the titular essay of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965). As Laderman suggests, Bonnie and Clyde ‘spawned a whole series of Depression road movies into the 1970s’ (2002: 65), including Boxcar Bertha (1972), Paper Moon (1973) and Thieves Like Us (1974); the latter a remake of They Live by Night (1948). The Sugarland Express provided the inspiration for Autobus (1992), an ultimately more cynical French film about a romantic boy who hijacks a school bus, in a bid to see his estranged girlfriend (see Archer 2013: 56–64). In light of both Easy Rider and Lost in America, it should also be noted that DeLorean was accused of funding this failed business adventure through the sale of cocaine. Covering the range of critical material on Thelma and Louise could take up a chapter in itself. See Braudy et al. 1991/92 and Cross et al. 1991 for a range of contemporary responses to the film.

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LOOKING FOR AMERICA – PART T WO : THE LATIN AMERICAN ROAD MOVIE

One of the most striking tendencies within recent films from Latin America is the significance of the road movie, both to their audiences, and to the generation of filmmakers associated with this new regional cinema. Central Station (1998), directed by Walter Salles, was for Cynthia Tompkins the film that turned a formerly ‘minor genre’ into a vital one (2013: 39), as evidenced by the appearance, among other films, of the following: Y tu mamá también (2001), from Alfonso Cuarón; Pablo Trapero’s Familia rodante (2004); Historias mínimas (2002), Bombón: El Perro (2004) and The Road to San Diego (2006), all directed by Carlos Sorín; and back to Salles again, with The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), a filmic reconstruction of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s formative bike trip through the continent. As Deborah Shaw writes in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, before we can discuss the significance of such films, the conceptual place which gives her book its title needs to be carefully considered. As much as Latin America defines a continental region, and a shared historical and linguistic basis in Spanish and Portuguese, ‘Latin American cinema’ is ‘a generalized term, which while useful in creating a space in the [global] market for films from the region … does not manage to include all of Latin America’ (2007: 3). Discussing such a cinema from the perspective of international audiences usually involves reducing it to that minority cluster of films that are widely distributed. What is more, our effort to encompass via a handful of films the entirety of a continent, whose identification as

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‘Latin’ overlooks its cultural, linguistic and ethnic complexity, is inevitably problematic and simplistic. Even when we take into consideration the comparatively low budgets of films like Y tu mamá también and The Motorcycle Diaries, such films, by emerging star directors of the global cinema scene,1 hardly represent the ‘common’ Latin American production. Indeed, part of the recent fascination with Latin American cinema is that, until the end of the 1990s (around the time of Central Station’s release), there was barely a global audience for such cinema at all. As Shaw suggests, then, we should talk about ‘Latin American cinema’ not so much as a cinema representing the whole of the continent, but rather a kind of ‘brand’ (2007: 4) comprising a series of films, expressing a particular idea of Latin America. This is only a cynical viewpoint if we naively assume that any practices of filmmaking looking for international audiences, and coming from outside Hollywood, can do so without somehow marketing themselves, and without seeking out necessary funding and channels of distribution. In fact, as Shaw explains, we have a contemporary Latin American cinema to talk about largely because films such as the ones above have skilfully exploited transnational, and frequently USA-based, funding and distribution deals to get themselves made and widely shown (2007: 2). But there is also an important agenda spanning the range of films under discussion here: one which puts this ‘idea’ of Latin America into the foreground, interrogating its historical and contemporary meanings. At points this involves a critical juxtaposition of ‘traditional’ representation alongside images of an increasingly globalised world (a key feature of Sorín’s Historias Mínimas). Alternatively, and in a move consistent with the post-colonial discourses of the later twentieth century and beyond (see Shohat and Stam 1994), these films deliberately play around the historically ‘Eurocentric’ vision of Latin America; calling into question how and in what ways the continent has been, and in some respects still is, viewed through the perspective of its European colonisers. Spanish and English explorers to the ‘New World’ such as Hernando Cortés and Walter Raleigh would establish this view of Latin America through their written reports on their travels. Writing to the Spanish King in 1519, Cortés ‘claimed to be lacking the words to describe the new sights and experiences of this “newly discovered” continent’, with the result that he ‘defined the Americas by stating that they were beyond the limits of European knowable experience’

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(Bowers 2004: 36). Raleigh, similarly, would write at the end of the same century about the simultaneously wondrous and monstrous creatures he (apparently) witnessed, striving to describe this ‘alien’ world in tones not dissimilar to later science fiction (see Mirzoeff 1999: 203–4). More influentially, Raleigh’s ultimately fruitless search for Manoa – better known as El Dorado, the fabled City of Gold (see Thompson 2011: 106) – inscribed a powerful mythic impression in the European mind of Latin America’s riches and mysteries. To an extent the pursuit of these same legends underscores the continental journey in The Motorcycle Diaries, though as we will see, the eventual discovery is something very different. It is also notable that the road trip in Y tu mamá también involves two young Mexicans taking their Spanish travelling companion to a non-existent beach whose spontaneously made-up name – Boca del Cielo, ‘Heaven’s Mouth’ – is designed to entice the European visitor with its echoes of paradise. Bearing all this in mind, the key question is what it is that makes the road movie the pre-eminent genre within this new Latin American cinema. As we will see, the potential pleasures of cinematic travel through the continent’s geographical diversity can hardly be ruled out as a motivation for such movies. Yet to see them only in these terms – a viewpoint which, problematically, assumes that ‘world’ cinemas only exist for the touristic benefit of global audiences – would overlook the complex and specific uses of landscape and travel in these films. As already touched upon, what distinguishes these road movies from many of their North American counterparts is their ‘clear sociopolitical agenda’ (Shaw 2007: 4), as seen in the economic disparities Sorín evokes in his movies, the observational voiceover in Y tu mamá también, or Ernesto’s (Gael García Bernal) reflections on poverty and inequality in The Motorcycle Diaries. As Salles has explained, the appeal of the road genre for Latin American filmmakers is the way its mobile narratives ‘show national identities in transformation’ (in Costanzo 2014: 356), and the genre is especially pertinent when these narratives explore new types of movement and migration generated by globalisation. The road movie in these films provides a format through which the country (or multiple countries) can be explored beyond the limited confines of any one place. The tendency towards, and character of, the road movie in Latin America is also informed by a longer, largely literary, tradition of exploration; one that, as we have seen, is partly mapped on to the continent

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through the European imaginary. Spanish picaresque literature such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which a mostly deranged reader of chivalric tales and his servant head off on various knightly quests, established a peculiar blend of romance and realism, as Quixote’s literary visions consistently crash into the harder physical reality of the impoverished Spanish landscape. This tension between the pull of adventure and the gravity of realism underpins many of these films; just as it continues to inform more recent Latin American literature, such as Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives) (1998), in which two aspiring writers go in search of a lost, legendary Mexican poet. Hispanic narratives like Don Quixote have also been seen to inform the Latin American traditions of ‘magical realism’, mostly synonymous with writers such as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, whose novels frequently incorporate fantastical occurrences as part of an unremarked everyday reality. As Maggie Bowers notes, this deliberate confusing of the real and the fantastic is in some respects a self-conscious response to the earlier European descriptions of the continent (2004: 36); though it is also (as García Márquez has suggested) a way of addressing the often repressed or occluded histories of Latin American countries, and a means of representing the more complex, mixed cultural and ethnic contexts in which these histories and stories occur (2004: 39–40). What links this tradition to a number of the films under discussion here is their blend of the imagination and a much more grounded reality. The geographical expanses of the landscape traversed in these films open up an imaginary space that is often brought back to earth; or alternately, the journey throws up chance encounters along the way, offering either instruction or moments of epiphany to its travellers (Tompkins 2013: 39). In either instance, the road movie format here allows an exploration of the unknown, rather than a reiteration of the already-seen. Connections and disconnections in Argentina Sorín’s Historias mínimas exploits the inter-weaving story device used so successfully in the hit Mexican film Amores Perros (2000). Set in the largely barren expanses of Patagonia in southern Argentina – as a travelling biologist jokes, she has come to the worst possible place to pursue her studies – the film moves between three figures at the margins of Argentine society

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(the film’s ambiguous title can be translated as ‘little stories’ or ‘intimate stories’, but also ‘insignificant stories’): a young mother renting a shack who wins a place on a television game show; an old man from the same small town who decides to go and find his lost dog; and a smooth-talking travelling salesman, an acquaintance of the old man, aiming to woo a young widow by bringing a cake for her son’s birthday. Linking these three connected lives, significantly, are dreams of mobility and opportunity that come up against material obstructions. María, the mother, an economic migrant, fantasises about appearing on television and winning one of the top prizes (a food processor or a trip to Brazil), but the two-hundred-mile trip to the studio in the ‘nearest’ city represents a huge adventure. Similarly, the elderly Don Justo, whose fading eyesight has condemned him to a life sitting outside his son’s grocery store, lacks the physical and economic resources to make the trip, and he resorts in the end to stealing his son’s petty cash and walking, before being picked up by Roberto, the salesman. Roberto is in effect living the dream of constant mobility, apparently enjoying non-committal sex and the simple pleasures of hotel bed and breakfast that go hand-in-hand with his job, yet his quixotic efforts to carry a footballsized cake across hundreds of miles, to impress a woman he barely knows, betrays a desperation and loneliness behind his charming patter. While Sorín keeps his characters bound within a landscape that is at once both vast and provincial, physically and culturally miles from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Historias mínimas subtly evokes the effects of globalised culture on this isolated area, representing a contemporary space that is at once geographically remote but shaped and effected by communication technologies. Televisions abound throughout the film. It is the apparently mystical sense of being on TV that leads María to make the trip to the big city, if in reality the show is an embarrassingly cheap lottery programme called Casino Multicolor: María promptly wins the prize of the food processor, only to exchange it for a smaller prize and some cash for food and a hotel, when she realises her home has no electricity to power it. While her friends at home fantasise about holidaying in Brazil, we subsequently see images of the Rio Carnival on the huge TV in Roberto’s hotel. Even a tiny rural doctor’s surgery beams out gaudy adverts for exercise machines, manipulated by models with unrealisable bodies. In the later The Road to San Diego, the title ironically refers not to the Californian city that is a frequent destination for South- and Central

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American migrants, but to ‘Saint’ Diego Maradona, the brilliant Argentine footballer and orchestrator of the country’s last World Cup victory in 1986. The film’s tale of a young Maradona obsessive, trying to deliver a carving of his idol to the hospital where the ailing footballer (in reference to a reallife event) was recuperating, plays parodically on this idea of the secular as religious (the title is also a play on the Camino de Santiago, a route taken by Catholic pilgrims westwards across northern Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela). As Cynthia Tompkins notes, Sorín’s particular brand of comic cinema – which in Historias mínimas focuses largely on the horrifyingly crass game show – has its roots in the grotesco criollo theatrical style popularised in early twentieth-century Latin American modernism (2013: 109–10). The satirical elements of both Historias mínimas and The Road to San Diego may seem to provide humour at the expense of its ‘little’ protagonists, but we should not overlook the way such humour frequently plays, sympathetically, on the way their often unrealistic or misguided fantasies are generated by the gaudy seductions of media culture itself. Central then to these films, often implicitly rather than overtly, is a critique of the society that maintains such ‘marginal’ existences under the illusion of fantasy and an economically unattainable mobility. But, importantly, in their focus on the often unfilmed reaches of Argentina (The Road to San Diego is set in the north of the country, near the Brazilian border), they are also representations of social, economic and ethnic difference. This within a country that, as Tompkins argues, concealed much of its criollo (creole) cultural history behind the ‘foundational Argentine narrative’ of a nation made up of ‘European immigrants’, and an increasingly centralised society equating the capital Buenos Aires with Argentina itself (2013: 116). It is also important to consider the very specific historical contexts in which a film like Historias mínimas was made: most significantly, the economic crisis in Argentina which severely devalued the Argentine peso, leading to runs on banks, civil unrest and mass unemployment. Sorín’s emphasis on itinerant, often impoverished marginal lives is for Tompkins an implicit critique of neo-liberal economic policies (2013: 120): the freeing up of global market structures at the expense, its critics attest, of job stability and worker protection at the level of the state. Indeed, economics and the fraught state of the nation permeate other Argentine road movies such as Familia rodante (‘Rolling Family’), whose deceptively life-affirming narrative of family adventure conceals a much less warm-hearted vision.

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Thirteen members of one Buenos Aires-based family, spanning four generations, embark (not altogether willingly) on a 600-mile camper-van trip to a relative’s wedding in the province of Misiones. An interesting aspect of the film is the way that, contrary to the traditional aesthetic imperatives of the road movie, the sights and sounds beyond the windscreen are hardly dwelt on. The film barely lingers for more than a few instants on fleeting shots of fields and animals, with much of the documentary-style camerawork taking place at night, with only the lights of other cars and lorries for illumination. The potentially picturesque appearance on the nocturnal road of a group of horse-riding gauchos, emblazoned in Argentina football tops and brandishing what appear to be machetes, is depicted as a passing, intrusion. Conversations on the road involve the driver’s constant complaints about the extortionate charges at highway toll-booths; a discussion that spills over into fraternal arguments about the van’s fuel consumption, and the comparative economic benefits of air travel over the road. In place of ‘the road’, then, as a source of visual spectacle, director Pablo Trapero offers us instead an extremely intimate, even claustrophobic set of juddering close-ups from within the van, layered with the incessant diegetic noise of motorised movement. As the enigmatic title suggests, this ‘rolling family’ becomes the real subject of the film. Intentionally or otherwise, Familia rodante in this sense unavoidably recalls The Grapes of Wrath, even down to its obsession with the economies of long-distance travel. Is the film drawing parallels between the two historical and economic contexts of Depression, at the tail-ends of which both films were produced? While Trapero’s film does not give us any clear suggestions, there is possibly a more ironic and covert aspect of critique here, inasmuch as this extended family do not appear to be in the same predicament as the Joads in John Ford’s film, and do not travel as economic migrants. The point may be that this far-from harmonious family – whose lack of togetherness and repressed tensions are teasingly exposed over two days on the road – are already at a loss, having uplifted their wider familial roots and settled in the capital city, falsely constructing for themselves (and, following Tompkins’s earlier point, like Buenos Aires itself) an illusory idea of centrality and cohesion. Fittingly, then, unlike the Joads’ mythical tale of hardship and redemption, Familia rodante’s somewhat reluctant road trip serves mostly to expose fault-lines and buried truths.

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Mapping the political through the popular Set in Mexico at the turn of the millennium, but also at a point of political change, Y tu mamá también (‘And Your Mother Too’) is one of the most striking appropriations of the road movie in recent years. As commentators have noted, Alfonso Cuarón’s film, co-scripted with his brother Carlos, helped (along with films like Amores Perros, directed by Cuarón’s friend Alejandro González Iñárritu) to create a new kind of Mexican cinema whose influences and intended audience were global as much as local. Interestingly for a film that draws on American cinematic precedents – the ‘buddy’ road movie more broadly, but also specific films like the frattish Road Trip (2000) and sex comedies like American Pie (1999) (see Smith 2002: 19; Finnegan 2007: 31) – Y tu mamá también was a massive hit in its native Mexico, as well as on the international festival and art-house circuit. We might simplistically assume that it achieves this impressive feat by dividing its appeal between the local and the global. But Y tu mamá también is actually most interesting for the way it integrates genre pleasures with aspects of specific societal critique, along with a very local tone (particularly in terms of its slangy dialogue), in an entirely cohesive and fluid way that translates across cultural contexts. The film sets itself up as a narrative that plays on clichés of the Latin American odyssey (the search for ‘Heaven’s Mouth’) but is also a cliché in itself: a love-triangle coming-of-age movie (see Smith 2002: 16) between two teenage friends, the upper-class Tenoch (Diego Luna) and his poorer friend Julio (Gael García Bernal), and the older Luisa (Maribel Verdú). What starts off like a sex-comedy fantasy turns into something rather different, as the more experienced and enigmatic Luisa (who is carrying with her a secret only revealed at the conclusion) gradually asserts her influence, sexual and otherwise, on the two boys, bringing out the competition and aggression latent between them. The film in this sense plays out the familiar structure of the road movie journey, while also interrogating its ‘buddy’ codes. This process of teasing out what is bubbling just beneath the surface of the road movie romp is mirrored in the film’s wider relationship to Mexican society and landscape. In a characteristic move of the contemporary road movie (of which more in the final chapter), Y tu mamá también places a significant focus on the documentary aspects inherent to the genre’s form

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and content, while at the same time dwelling on the road movie’s conflict between actuality and fiction. Key to this method is the frequent dislocation of sound and image. Intermittently the film’s diegetic sound cuts out, replaced by an impersonal and unspecified narrator commenting on what we see; sometimes referring to apparently incidental figures or details, to a thought one of the protagonists is having but keeps to themselves, to an event that happened some time ago, or even an account of what will happen in the future. Typically these ‘insignificant’ observations – and as we will continue to see, the insignificant becomes the important in the Latin American road movie – reveal contexts or inter-connections with the film’s central action that remain mostly concealed from its main actors: the details of a fatal road accident, a shrine to which the car passes; the accidental death of a migrant labourer whose body causes a traffic jam; the rural birthplace of Tenoch’s family housemaid, fleetingly passed en route. This technique is visually matched by the tendency of the film’s camera to ‘wander’ from its notional main focus. This camera view (from Cuarón’s regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) perennially leaves the main trio to focus on other unspecified actors within the drama: the phalanx of bodyguards hired to protect the political bigwigs at the wedding where Tenoch and Julio meet Luisa, or the various staff of restaurants and hotels. At times, even, it films no more than an empty room, the camera floating like a ghost. In one characteristically bold long take (a hallmark of Cuarón’s cinematic style), a tracking shot alongside the car, in which the three travellers are talking, suddenly leaves the vehicle altogether and veers away – with the dialogue still going on – only to meet up with the car, and the conversation, later in the scene. This approach, especially in its emphasis on leaving areas of action demarcated by doors and windows (see Finnegan 2007: 40), and most obviously by the car windscreen itself, draws out one of the road movie’s main paradoxes: that it is the most obviously documenting of popular genres, yet frequently seals itself off from the real world behind the glass and metal of the motor car. Importantly, we as viewers are party to all the film’s information, while its main actors remain oblivious to it, putting us in a more critical position with regard to what we see and hear. This rhetorical style has political ends. We hear in a coda to the film, a year on from the journey, that the PRI, the political party that had held power for 71 years, had finally been voted out in favour of Vicente Fox’s

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National Action Party (PAN). This momentous, real-life political shift is mapped onto Tenoch and Julio’s own separate departure for university and adulthood. Cuarón consequently uses a tale of privileged and individualistic adventure to tell what he sees as the story of ‘a teenage country trying to find its identity as a grown-up nation’ (in Smith 2002: 19). But it does not do this at the expense of the genre’s intrinsic pleasures. The boys make it to ‘Heaven’s Mouth’, even if by accident (lost in the night, Julio optimistically turns onto a dirt road which leads them to a secluded beach). Once there, it is Luisa, the European, who proposes a toast to ‘beautiful and magical Mexico!’ Looking at this from my perspective as an international viewer, I suspect that, along with my exported tequila, I am supposed to take this with a pinch of salt. And yet, while we should also be wary of taking Cuarón’s carefully orchestrated fragments of ‘real’ Mexico as the genuine article, the film strives to offer an idea of diversity and even magic beyond the touristic image on which Luisa, and possibly the film’s viewers, are initially sold (and it is notable that Luisa, still under the false allusion that she is at the Boca del cielo, experiences a sincere sense of transformation once she gets to the beach, where she in fact remains). The ambivalent and ultimately ‘unstable’ image of Mexico constructed by the film (see Finnegan 2007: 30–1) may in this sense be the point: what we have actually experienced is not, after all, prescribed by teenage fantasy or a purely romantic European view; but the intention of the film is that we come out of the trip with our eyes and ears more open than before. Beyond the travelogue Y tu mamá también appears in between the two road movies directed by Salles, both of which, while different in approach from Cuarón’s movie, share its thematic concerns. Set in Rio de Janeiro and the rugged sertão of Brazil’s rural northeast, Central Station, the story of an orphaned boy trying to find the father he has never known, blends a documentary approach with a melodramatic narrative. This blend proved hugely successful, sparking the global interest in Latin American cinema which to some extent culminates in The Motorcycle Diaries. Both films openly embrace genre structure and uses of landscape, exploiting attractive and accessible cinematic modes that no doubt help to ensure wider international

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FIGURE 2.1 Josué, Dora and the spectacle of the sertão in Central Station (1998)

audiences; The Motorcycle Diaries in fact makes this ‘travelogue’ aesthetic (see Williams 2007) central to its representations, while Central Station’s often dramatically picturesque use of the sertão revises a landscape often associated with aridity and poverty, especially in earlier Brazilian cinema. Central Station has indeed been discussed in light of some of the more formally challenging and politically direct films it shows some continuity with, most notably the sertão-set films associated with the cinema novo of the 1960s (see Nagib 2007). Once again, though, we limit our understanding of these films once we reduce their exploitation of genre and landscape to ‘populist’ style and global commercial strategies. Central Station’s visual contrast between the hectic, crowded spaces of Rio’s main railway station (from which the film gets its English title) and the expanses of the northeast are specific in their efforts to devolve a sense of the country from its urban centre to its more abandoned rural spaces. Filming in the station, Salles frequently opts to shoot his protagonists – the boy, Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira), and Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), the old lady who eventually helps him get to his father’s town – amidst the blurred rush of commuting bodies in the foreground and background. Questioning its status as the centre of the country, as the original title suggests, the film emphasises an urban modernity that is at once abundantly populated (passengers here literally leap through carriage windows to get seats on crammed trains), at the apparent cost of communication. Appropriately enough, Dora, a retired teacher, earns money by writing letters for illiterate people, shown at the beginning of the film in a montage of non-professional performers, with addresses from

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across Brazil. As we see, though, Dora rarely bothers to send the letters entrusted to her. In our contemporary era of mass communication and apparent global connectivity this practice seems other-worldly – as indeed does the idea of mass illiteracy in a country increasingly regarded as one of the world’s strongest emerging economies. But this fits the film’s didactic aims. Not only is communication scarce in this urban centre, but so is the possibility of real mobility, with rural migrants confined to the city, and the economically bereft – like Josué, after his mother is accidentally killed in a road accident – given no hope of escape. Leaving Rio and heading north, first by long-distance bus and then by hitchhiking, becomes then a journey taken under extreme duress. Dora flees with Josué after initially selling him to what she believes is an adoption agency, but what she later understands to be an organ-selling operation (a truly horrific strand of the story this particular film opts not to pursue). This journey to find the boy’s father, consequently, and Dora’s enforced role as guardian (especially after they lose all their money), becomes part of a narrative of re-engagement on the part of the cynical Dora, paralleled by a story of cinematic re-enchantment, through the literal opening-up of vision to the spaces of the road and the sertão. As we see throughout The Motorcycle Diaries, Salles’s documentary methods and interest in the chance encounter (random people met and filmed, for example, en route; an actual religious pilgrimage that was incorporated into the script at the last minute [see Tompkins 2013: 98]), provide the encounters with the ‘unknown’ and the resultant ‘epiphanies’ Tompkins identifies as key in the Latin American road movie (2013: 39). As William Costanzo suggests, Central Station’s parallel stories, of ‘Josué’s search for his lost father and Dora’s search for her lost feelings’, represent a form of ‘modern Odyssey about the voyage home’ (2014: 359); adding, however, that the film can also be seen as highly allegorical with regard to Brazil’s contemporary direction. Central Station proves interesting in the way it encourages sentimental investment in its story without (quite) providing the requisite closure. Josué’s quest leads to several dead-ends: finding that the ranch where his father supposedly lives is now owned by someone else, the boy walks off, framed through the doorway in an apparent visual allusion to the end of John Ford’s The Searchers (1957), where John Wayne’s solitary cowboy wanders off into the desert. It turns out that the father had actually left for Rio in order to find Josué’s mother, but has

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not come back. Waiting for his return more in hope than expectation (the father’s name, Jésus, helps conflate religious faith with secular desire, though in a possibly critical way), Josué ends up staying with his two halfbrothers, carpenters like their father, who he meets on the trail of their missing parent. Tompkins observes that in Central Station there is semantic and linguistic play, as the search for the father (in Portuguese, pai) is also a search for the country (pais) (2013: 104), though it is significant here that the father’s return is probably less relevant than the country’s (re)construction. Despite the film’s affirmative ending, it is not totally clear how the brothers will endure, squatting on government-owned land, in a town described by one character as ‘the end of the world’. Salles’s tendency to sweeten the film’s more bitter themes means that it may also weaken its political urgency (see Nagib 2007). Yet the film’s emotive approach leaves us in little doubt where its sympathies lie. While in some respects a very conventional road movie, The Motorcycle Diaries is also another intriguing mix of documentary and narrative impulses. While the film makes important use of what theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1960) called ‘found’ film, those things randomly encountered and recorded in passing (and which, in Kracauer’s terms, would reveal a greater reality to the camera), The Motorcycle Diaries is also a carefully constructed re-creation of a prior journey, filmed chronologically across numerous locations: in this case, Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado’s 1952 road trip along the western length of South America, from Argentina to Venezuela. Watching some of the relative physical hardships endured by cast and crew – dangerous or poor roads, heavy snows and violent winds, mountain climbs – represents a fusion of the factual and the fictional, as we find ourselves watching a cinematic re-tracing of the original route, filmed in sequence over an 84-day period. While embracing many of the cinematic pleasures of the road genre, then, with its highway scenes of the travellers’ speeding motorbike, sumptuous long shots of the changing landscape, and panoramic point-of-view sequences – as Costanzo notes, the film shares many aesthetic and structural similarities with Easy Rider (2014: 388) – The Motorcycle Diaries is also intent on registering the endurance and extremes involved in such a trip. And yet, the challenges facing its two protagonists, both of them educated and privileged members of the Argentine professional classes, let alone the temporary suffering of its two main actors, are only part of the

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point. In this film, the main focus is on what it is that transforms a slightly callow and asthmatic medical student into the eventual revolutionary and war tactician (and accidental fashion icon) known as Che Guevara. García Bernal’s casting here owes perhaps more to his emerging star status than it does to any physical resemblance to Guevara; but his presence also offers an inter-textual link to the earlier Y tu mamá también, a companion movie of sorts. In line with Salles’s rhetorical use of genre structure, The Motorcycle Diaries also shares Cuarón’s interest in road movie archetypes. In this instance, the two young men engage in a journey whose motivations are largely touristic, even exoticist (at a time when, before globalisation and ubiquitous television, travel to and extensive knowledge of other Latin American countries was still rare), and indeed sexual (and not only for the more experienced and overtly womanising Alberto). The parameters and aims of the journey are nevertheless altered along the way: firstly, by the loss of their motorbike, affectionately named la poderosa (‘mighty one’), that gives up the ghost in Chile; and secondly, by encountering victims of economic hardship and capitalist abuse – rural Peruvians evicted from their rented lands; a communist couple forced into exile and itinerant labour – typically at the hands of landowners and multinational companies (such as the pointedly English-named ‘Anaconda Mining Company’). These encounters shift the ‘buddy’ dynamic that informs the film’s opening sequences, distancing Ernesto ideologically from the more cynical Alberto, and constantly deflecting the traditional male-driven road movie trajectory away from its motifs of adventure and sexual conquest. The Motorcycle Diaries consequently develops its narrative along progressively revealing and political lines, as the physical and social realities of the journey are gradually exposed, alongside Ernesto’s increasing recognition of his own privileged position and growing political commitment (a typical stylistic motif is to show the exchange of looks between Guevara and the men and women he passes en route; or to film this relay of looks from a privileged vantage point, such as the trucks on which the pair hitch a ride). As we saw previously, Y tu mamá también did a similar thing, but tactically concealed this revelation from its protagonists. Salles’s film opts to confront its protagonists immediately with a political consciousness Cuarón’s two travellers are left to work out (or not) for themselves. This political approach is not, however, without its pleasures. As Claire Williams notes, The Motorcycle Diaries’ qualities as a ‘Pan-American

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travelogue’, ‘an almost comprehensive introductory travel guide to Latin America’, may largely explain ‘the film’s transnational appeal’ (2007: 23), adding that versions of the same journey were now being offered as forms of tourist package trip. This touristic-educative aspect of the film is not entirely surprising for a film package put together by a variety of transnational production sources (including the UK’s Film4 and the executive support of Robert Redford), and with an international cast and crew. Landscape has a very different set of connotations here, though, from the potential commodification of the national past we saw in a film like Easy Rider. More than just pictorial, the film’s insistent use of the long shot creates visual disparities between the notional subjects (Ernesto and Alberto) and the gradually discovered physical spaces of the continent that emerge as ‘integral parts of the drama’ (Costanzo 2014: 389), inasmuch as the sights and sites themselves are catalysts for political engagement. This comes to a head at Machu Picchu, the remains of the mountaintop Incan city in Peru, where Ernesto’s astonished gaze is cued (through a shot/reverse-shot structure) to reflect our own assumed wonder at this ancient site (see Williams 2007: 20). The choice of location is strategic, though, as it is the devastating impact of Spanish colonialism on the Incan civilisation that sparks Ernesto’s reflections on both history and (future) political power, and shapes his eventual ideas about the continent he has traveled through (the film visually underscores this by cutting abruptly from a view of Machu Picchu to the flat and unflattering urban sprawl of Lima, Peru’s colonial capital city). At the beginning of the film, the two white metropolitan travellers of European descent explain their desire to see a Latin America so far only read about in books – presumably by other European descendants with European perspectives. The emphasis in this film on pre-European civilisations and its implicit attack on European imperialism, as well as its explicit condemnation of Anglo-American and multi-national neo-colonialism, exemplifies the tendency in these Latin American road movies to explore the socially and economically marginal and under-represented (just as Central Station’s focus on the Brazilian northeast touches upon the unique ‘syncretism of indigenous, Portuguese and African peoples’ [Tompkins 2013: 116] that for much of the continent’s history, until the 1960s, was downplayed in mainstream representation). In a gesture that in some respects speaks for the film’s whole enterprise,

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FIGURE 2.2 Travel as political: Ernesto and Alberto at Machu Picchu in The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

(see Williams 2007: 21; Costanzo 2014: 390), Ernesto later describes his emerging belief in Latin America as ‘one single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographic similarities’. As a concluding thought, it is to the credit of The Motorcycle Diaries if, in watching the film, we forget we are also watching a period drama, about events happening fifty years previously. This would largely be down to the sense of spontaneity and immediacy created through the filming style, and especially the moments of improvisation at work in the film’s making. The interesting point though is that these moments of apparently spontaneous contact and interaction – and we are led to believe that much of the film’s interaction took place between the actors and people they simply came across while filming – come not from the 1950s but the 2000s. Salles’ film consequently collapses past and present in order to make Ernesto and Alberto’s trip feel as vital today as it would have been half a century before. It was perhaps inevitable that on the back of this film, then, Salles would be asked to direct the much-anticipated adaptation of another 1950s travel narrative: Kerouac’s On the Road, the film which finally came to light in 2012. The results of this venture – as we will see later – proved very different, in ways that shed light on the contemporary relevance of Kerouac’s novel, as well as on the particular character, and above all the political nature, of the road movies considered in this chapter.

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Note 1

Walter Salles would eventually direct a starry version of Kerouac’s On the Road (2012); Cuarón had already directed a Hollywood adaptation of Great Expectations (1999), and would go on to write and direct Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013).

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THE AUTOMOBILE AND THE AUTEUR: GLOBAL CINEMA AND THE ROAD MOVIE

In 2009, writer-director Dev Benegal made a film about a young man, Vishnu, who embarks on a road trip across the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Entitled simply Road, Movie, it chronicles Vishnu’s journey in a Chevy truck, accompanied by a pile of old Bollywood movies in the back and an assortment of passengers met along the way. Screening these films in makeshift cinemas dotted across the landscape is for the film’s protagonist a means of survival, as, like Scheherazade’s stories in The Thousand and One Nights, they become a source of entertainment and diversion for the potentially hostile forces Vishnu encounters. But this act of moving through a landscape showing old films also invites us to determine the links made in the film between travel and memory: the possibility that a cinematic homecoming sometimes involves traveling far away from home, as well as far into the past (see Costanzo 2014: 326–7). Road, Movie is a useful place to start this chapter because, in many ways, it brings into focus the complexity of the road movie as an international film genre. The film’s title cleverly alludes to the way the very term ‘road movie’ transcends cultural, national and linguistic borders, to the point where the meaning and resonance is assumed far beyond its presumed geographical origins in the United States. But Road, Movie’s subtle change to the phrase suggests that it cannot be a simple facsimile of an American film, however much its basic structure and motifs – the lone male protagonist, the Chevy, the journey – may remind us of one. There is,

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the film’s title suggests, a road; and there is also a movie. The connection between the two is for us to work out. The linking of movement and memory are also central to Kings of the Road (1976), the German title of which, Im Lauf der Zeit, literally means ‘over the course of time’. Time is here something that can be passed through, and in Kings of the Road its two travellers, Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler) and Robert (Hanns Zischler), use their journey along the border of what were then West and East Germany as a means of exploring both the history of the region and their own relationship to their time and place. Notably, as in the later Road, Movie, much of the film centres on old movies and movie theatres – Bruno is a projectionist and cinema restorer – and therefore forges a similar link between travelling and cinema. The men’s journey is a journey through the memory of movies, which here becomes inextricably bound with the perception and identity of actual places. Once more, this imaginary is complicated by its American origin, in the middle of a German landscape: as Robert famously says in the film, ‘the Yanks have colonized our subconscious’; an idea which partly explains the film’s English title, taken from the Roger Miller track (‘King of the Road’) Bruno plays in his truck. The fact that the film’s director, Wim Wenders (of whom more below), would subsequently call his production company Road Movies indicates how much the influence of American culture, and specifically its iconic cinematic genre, is an important subject in his films. Both these films give a sense of what is in play when the road movie travels beyond its more traditional iconographic connotations, and is appropriated and explored in different contexts. As noted in the introduction, I am unable here to give what would be an exhaustive list of films designated as road movies, from every possible national context. For the purposes of this present chapter I am going to limit my analyses to certain films which, international in production background and geographical scope, show an awareness of the road movie’s dominant generic origins and influence, while also reworking the genre in interesting ways. As we saw in the last chapter, the road movie’s status as an increasingly ‘global’ genre is highlighted by its use in transnational productions intended for international audiences. The films under discussion in this chapter are similar in identifying the global appeal of the road movie as a type of cinema. Influence plays a large part in these films, which frequently encourage an inter-textual and reflexive approach; a dialogue

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between a film and its predecessors. Where, and by whom, these films are made is hardly irrelevant. But as I will suggest here, their status as ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘Japanese’ or ‘Iranian’ is counterbalanced by their positioning within the history of the road movie genre, and their extension of the genre’s possibilities. Jean-Luc Godard: Pierrot le fou It seems appropriate to begin with Jean-Luc Godard, whose work both as a film critic (at the journal Cahiers du cinéma), and subsequently as a prolific film director in the 1960s, engaged so consistently with the influence of American cinema and culture. Much of Godard’s critical writing and earliest films are peppered with allusions to the classical Hollywood cinema that, for many Europeans of his generation, was a main staple of cinematic consumption. In many Western European countries, as part of the USAfunded Marshall Plan, the aftermath of World War II saw a form of cultural ‘invasion’ on the part of Hollywood movies and American products that had been unavailable for several years (in France, for example, as it was in Germany and Italy, the exhibition of Hollywood movies was part of the economic trade-off for reconstruction). Godard’s early film work is shaped to a large degree by this American cultural imaginary. At the beginning of his debut film Breathless (referred to briefly in chapter one), a young man, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), steals an Oldsmobile in Marseille. In a sequence of jump cuts culminating in a police chase and fateful shooting, he drives the stolen car to Paris in a bid to find his American girlfriend. While there, and with the police closing in on this young cop-killer, Michel steals some other cars, including a Ford Thunderbird, rather lazily fails to flee to Rome with his girlfriend, and is shot in the back by the police. While not obviously a road movie (although see Orgeron 2008 for a discussion of the film as such), Breathless highlights not just the impact of American movies on the emerging nouvelle vague (New Wave) of French filmmaking, but also the fascination with the American automobile: a powerful symbolic image for a post-war France moving from austerity to modernisation (see Ross 1995). Breathless sketches many of the key motifs of Godard’s early cinema, in particular its willingness to take apart the illusion of a believable diegetic world, showing cinema as a series of images put together to make

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up a fiction. Yet these films are still interested in the narrative idea of what happens when the imaginary of cinema takes over ‘reality’: hence, Michel in Breathless is ultimately both a comic and tragic figure, because he remains true to his doomed role as the outlaw in a police thriller. This sense of a film and its protagonists acting out pre-determined roles from American culture is central to Pierrot le fou (1965). Belmondo is here the melancholy Ferdinand, drawn from his comfortable bourgeois marriage by old flame Marianne, and finding himself fleeing Paris for the thrills of a life on the road. As they speed away, to a passing shot of the replica Statue of Liberty on the Seine, Belmondo’s voiceover states that the monument ‘waved goodbye to her two children’: ambiguously, as this could refer to the couple both as Parisians but also as Americans, given that the original statue, a gift from France to America, is best known as a symbol for the promised freedoms of the New World, rather than Europe’s Old Continent. This tension between the American expectations and characteristics of genre, and Pierrot le fou’s ‘other’ origins as French, shapes the film’s narrative and ideas in ways that become familiar to our later understanding of the ‘European road movie’. Based very loosely on Lionel White’s novel Obsession (1962), the film’s structure is in some respects pure pulp noir: respectable husband re-encounters attractive but shady girl who turns out to be a femme fatale (Marianne’s Paris flat has a dead body in it; it later appears she has connections with arms trafficking in Africa). Godard’s characteristically inventive approach to this basic material is to make it a drama about movement and inaction. Marianne dreams of a life on the road through places like Chicago and Las Vegas: Ferdinand, by contrast, longs to see ancient European cities such as Florence and Athens. On the road to the southern Riviera, the pair literally ‘cross France’ (as per the voiceover), wading across rivers and hiking through woods, but they ultimately cannot resist stealing a 1962 Ford Galaxy left at a garage. Once they reach the coast, though – where Ferdinand drives the Ford directly into the Mediterranean – the film quite purposely does not know where to go. Having escaped with Marianne, Ferdinand is happy to live out an idyllic ‘island’ dream with his books and a parrot, catching fish and writing in his journal, and the film effectively stops moving with him. Marianne’s response is that she is simply bored and wants to move on. Maybe this is our gut response too; but what does this say about cinema? One of Pierrot

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le fou’s many points is that cinematic narrative needs emotion (Godard even has director Sam Fuller, one of his venerated Hollywood auteurs, give this as cinema’s definition in an early cameo). Emotion at its purest involves motion; and Godard is both smart and prescient in recognising that the dynamics of automotive flight will always hold an attraction for film viewers. But what are the implications of this? This reflexive approach to film narrative reaches its apogee in Weekend (1967), at once the most significant and also problematic example of Godard’s relationship to the road story. Focusing in theory on a mutually unfaithful and homicidal bourgeois couple hitting the road with the aim of getting money out of the woman’s rich mother, the film, like Pierrot le fou, follows the skeletal structure of films like They Live By Night and Gun Crazy. It nevertheless resists any possibility of identification by making the couple as vicious and unattractive as possible, and by sporadically interrupting their mobile trajectory; be this with random figures from history or literature making an appearance, workers making political speeches, numerous inter-titles, and most infamously, a ten-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam, revealed at the end to be caused by a horrendous multi-vehicle pile-up (one of the many fatal ‘accidents’ that litter the highways of this film). As Laderman observes, both the moving camera mapping out this long sequence, and the general inter-relation of travelling and point-ofview shots with the movement of the car and its drivers’ vision, establishes ‘the mechanical and ontological kinship between cinema and cars’ (2002: 256): a relationship, Weekend suggests, that is violent in its shared appetite for consumption; the drivers effectively eating up the road, just as the viewer craves more and more images (a craving which Godard, in his use of interruptions and static long takes, mostly frustrates). Laderman’s suggestion that Weekend’s ‘radically politicized cultural critique … turns the road movie on its head’ (2002: 255) is intriguing, given that the road movie as a genre properly formed is only emerging around this same time. Parallels with Bonnie and Clyde, which came out the same year as Weekend, are in fact not so surprising: Godard was one of the filmmakers asked by Bonnie and Clyde’s screenwriters, acknowledging the influence of his earliest work, to direct the film (see Newman and Benton 1972). As the truly nihilistic, de-romanticised take on the Bonnie and Clyde myth, Weekend is certainly in touch with the emerging road movie as it was being shaped in the USA. Split somewhat hysterically, though, between

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its desire to lecture and its visualised appetite for destruction, Weekend does not offer any obvious trajectory for the road genre. The film’s final words, left on the screen, are FIN DU CINÉMA – not just the ‘end’ of the film, but of cinema itself (and following Weekend, Godard’s work, often made for television and video, would mostly reject the narrative fiction film altogether). Godard’s ultimate contribution to the road movie therefore remains a qualified one. Agnès Varda: Vagabond Like her contemporary and adopted compatriot (Godard grew up in Switzerland), though sometimes misleadingly associated with the New Wave he exemplified, Agnès Varda is another French filmmaker who has engaged with the road movie in a complex and no less experimental way. Her highly independent and multifaceted fifty-year career is almost bookended by two significant films about mobility: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), chronicling the ‘real-time’ wandering, driving and tram-riding of a young woman in Paris as she waits the outcome of a potentially life-changing medical report; and The Gleaners and I (1999), a sort of experimental road movie-documentary about waste and its uses, in which Varda herself travels around France meeting and filming people who ‘glean’ from the land. The Gleaners and I illustrates Varda’s sensibility with regard to film technology, content and form, as the filmmaker relishes the freedom and portability of her new digital video camera. Here, the itinerant and associative structure of the road documentary is perfectly suited to her often placeless and marginal subjects, just as the film embraces DV’s less restricted character to move freely around France (see Archer 2013: 136–44). Made around the middle of her career to date, Vagabond (1985) is something of a precursor for The Gleaners and I. As a film about a young itinerant (Mona, played by a teenage Sandrine Bonnaire) who is not only on the margins of society but also female, it is something of a celebrated and central text in studies of the road movie, French cinema more broadly, and feminist film theory in particular (see especially Flitterman-Lewis 1990; Hayward 2000; Laderman 2002; Archer 2013). In portraying one of the first female road movie protagonists, rather than just a passenger or accomplice, Vagabond already deserves our attention, but the film is most significant in its efforts to question what this means in cinematic terms.

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While Vagabond has been celebrated for its performance of feminist and social identity politics, in the way it inverts the road genre’s masculine associations (see Hayward 2000), or represents the diverse and often unseen strata of French life (see Flitterman-Lewis 1990; Forbes 1992), it is also interested in questioning the ways we engage and identify with characters onscreen, and especially female ones. Mona moves from place to place, living off what she can find, beg or steal. The episodic plot has her meet various characters: fellow wanderers, occasional men, and at one key point an academic (a specialist in tree disease) who tries and fails to make a connection with the girl. Varda’s camera rarely strays from Mona, often following her closely in controlled tracking shots (and Mona’s name, with its connections to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, establishes her from the off as a figure ‘to be looked at’ [see Mulvey 1989]). This kind of aesthetic approach traditionally works to construct identification with a protagonist; though early feminist theory would qualify this, to the extent that this is what happens with a male protagonist. Whether as an object of spectatorial identification or desire, though, Vagabond seeks to disrupt this by making its young protagonist resist her reduction to ‘visual pleasure’ (ibid.), mainly by making her progressively more filthy as she goes along (Mona never changes her functional clothes and boots, which become progressively more ragged; the tree specialist elsewhere refers to Mona’s stench). But the film’s representations also test our ability to identify with her, inasmuch as Mona shows virtually no sense of ethics or emotional allegiance, using people and places as required, whether for shelter or sex (or even – the film is never clear about Mona’s desires and motivations – using the latter to get the former). Playing with the appeal of the road movie’s representation of freedom and rebellion, then, Vagabond takes this to its logical extent by constructing a central character whose freedom from constraints extends to the boundaries of ‘civilised’ behaviour, and even to our own possibilities for empathy. That such a radically ‘other’ protagonist is in some senses beyond representation is also inherent to the film’s structure and mise-en-scène. The first time we see Mona she is actually dead: a frozen corpse in a farmyard ditch. How she got there is the question the film tries to answer, via a series of first-person recollections that build up to reveal a fragmented chronological narrative of a death foretold (a structural approach the film actually shares with Citizen Kane [1941]). While set in the southern region of

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Provence, meanwhile, the film’s wintry timeframe and drained colours, and the absence of any affirmative music track, strips the landscape of any picturesque or mythical qualities we might otherwise associate with the road movie form. The ‘countryside’ is in this film little more than a set of shapes and forms, not the pleasurable object of a tourist gaze (see Archer 2013: 48–9), replete with random objects that may or may not provide food or shelter (see Smith 1998: 31). Vagabond is in this sense an innovative road movie in the way it attempts to evoke not so much a romantic idea of the road experience but a physical impression of it, in all its potential hostility. Ultimately, the fact that Mona’s trajectory is seen to lead inevitably to her death makes Vagabond a ‘highly pessimistic’ film (Forbes 1992: 94). It is certainly a testing one in terms of its provocation and teasing of our thresholds for sympathy and judgement. Its bleakness aside, Vagabond remains politically radical in implicitly advocating Mona’s itinerant life, albeit free of our efforts to like or even make sense of her. It does suggest, nevertheless, that the conventional frameworks for the road movie are inadequate, at least to fully represent the type of rebellion and cultural oppositions it often pretends to espouse. Wim Wenders: Alice in the Cities As noted above, the German filmmaker Wim Wenders is, along with Walter Salles, one of the international filmmakers most clearly associated with the road movie as a genre, through films such as the previously mentioned Kings of the Road, Wrong Move (1975), Paris, Texas (1984) and Until the End of the World (1991). Wenders’ work frequently engages with ideas of American-ness, and his protagonists’ complex relationship to it, within which the road movie as an American genre plays a key structural and semiotic role. Of all the directors associated with the so-called New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s (see Knight 2004), who like many of their European contemporaries grew up between American cultural influences and the difficult histories of their respective lands, Wenders was the most overt in his efforts to make ‘the Americanization of Germany’ the ‘underlying current’ of his films (Sandford 1980: 104). But Wenders’ choice of the road movie relates as much to his own philosophical and theoretical preoccupations with cinema and its possibilities, as it does to a specific generic reference point. Wenders’ German road movies are consequently

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distinctive in the way they engage with the American connotations of the genre, while in the pursuit of a peculiarly European vision. Alice in the Cities (1973), as Alexander Graf suggests, is the first film in which Wenders felt free to express ‘his personal film aesthetic’ (2002: 72); and it is significant that this film should also be his most concise and lucid response to the idea of the American road and the road movie. Starting on an American beach, with its protagonist, journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Volger) singing an accented version of the Drifters’ ‘Under the Boardwalk’, the film moves along with Winter’s car in a largely aimless and unmotivated fashion towards New York. Disenchanted with his efforts to write a magazine article about (as his New York editor calls it) ‘the American scene’, Winter decides to fly home to Germany, but not before meeting nine-yearold Alice with her mother at the airline office. When Alice’s mother fails to take the flight back to Europe, Winter reluctantly agrees to escort Alice home; first to Amsterdam, and then back to Germany, and an apparently fruitless search for the girl’s grandmother in the cities of Wuppertal and Gelsenkirchen. As Graf points out, Alice in the Cities contains as much inaction as obvious action. Much of the film consists of ‘dead’ time in which its protagonists drive around, take bus and train rides, wander about, or simply wait in transitional spaces like airport lounges (2002: 84). The idea that nothing in the film conveys anything so clear as narrative cause-and-effect, character motivation and goal-orientation – the hallmarks of classical Hollywood narration – is underscored by Wenders’ tendency to let sequences enter and fade out, any ‘link’ between them subsumed by the film’s episodic approach. Wenders’ method is informed by the idea that ‘story’, in the sense of a prescribed beginning, middle and end, is too determining and limiting. In line with film theorists such as André Bazin (1967, 1971) and Siegfried Kracauer (1960), who saw the photographic capture of ‘real life’ afforded by the movie camera as both its aesthetic uniqueness and ‘redemptive’ quality, Wenders favours a more drifting and open approach to constructing film, one with stronger links to the more unmediated forms of documentary. As Graf suggests, these conditions for Wenders’ filmmaking lend themselves ideally to the improvisational and less structurally constrained form of the road movie (2002: 48–54). But in Alice in the Cities the road movie form also specifically engages with the nature and meaning of images. Wenders’ films can be seen in

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terms of the emerging interest in the ‘postmodern’, and its concerns with the possibility of locating reality within a culture of reproduced images. Fredric Jameson (1991) argues that the late-twentieth-century era of ‘late capitalism’ is one in which traditional ideas of space and worldly order, built around city centres and nations, gives way to a more diffuse and decentred experience; one dominated by the consumerist images of multinational capitalism, and its colonisation of culture itself. Expressing this anxiety at the film’s opening, the stack of Polaroid pictures Winter accumulates instead of writing point to his uncertainty in the face of what he sees. The film’s beginning is in fact an apparent end to his journey to ‘find America’. But in sitting under a boardwalk, singing a song about doing the same thing, Winter’s quest merely leads to replication of what he already knew, rendering the mythic American landscape, to use a suitable German word, ersatz: a poor copy of the ‘real’ thing. More concretely, the film is also concerned with television; an object that appears constantly, and not reassuringly, throughout the film. American television’s development in conjunction with advertising means that the capacity for ‘seeing’ in the television image is always constrained by its economic imperative, including the need for programmes to compete for our attention alongside other channels (see Graf 2002: 29–30) (in the film, when his viewing of the 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln is interrupted by commercials, Winter responds by trashing the TV set). Relatedly, the combination of television’s reduced size and its need to grab our attention meant that, from the 1960s onwards, many filmmakers shot and edited their movies to better fit the squarer aspect ratios of old television screens, employing faster cutting rates and more close-ups to stop the ‘distracted’ television viewer from flipping channels (see Bordwell 2006: 148–51). Young Mr. Lincoln was directed by John Ford (who also made Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath), whose obituary Winter is reading in the film’s final sequence (the heading in German pointedly translating as ‘A Lost World’): these reference points evoke the aesthetic of longer takes and long shots synonymous with Ford’s work, but now out of favour in popular cinema. Cinematographer Robby Müller’s use of black and white film stock to create luminous night-time scenes, high contrasts and magical depths of field – capturing the saturated American landscape of neon advertising, gas stations and brilliant cities – is Alice in the Cities’ attempt to revive the visual spirit of Ford’s cinema. But we can also see this approach as a

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FIGURE 3.1 Ways of seeing: Alice and Philip on the road again in Alice in the Cities (1973)

form of what Jameson would call ‘cognitive mapping’: one of the processes through which contemporary film could try to make sense of and negotiate the often bewildering spaces of postmodernity. We should nevertheless be wary of Wenders’ own claim that the film’s plot is little more than ‘a hook for hanging pictures’ (in Graf 2002: 88). Alice in the Cities has an unusual narrative structure, as it seems to begin at the end, only to go back with no obvious goal in mind to some original point of departure. But the film’s episodic style carefully conceals a narrative journey which, if not always clear throughout the film, makes sense by its conclusion, when we see Winter on the train with Alice going to find her mother in Munich. Winter’s assertion that he is now ready to finish his story – the one about America – underscores the film’s point that his true journey is in fact to Germany, by way of America, as he seems to find himself only when he re-encounters American culture in his native country. In a café in Wuppertal, he watches a boy softly singing along to Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’, sitting snuggled against the jukebox ‘as if the machine were his mother coaxing him to sleep with a lullaby’ (Garwood

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1999: 235); an image which evokes a possible image of Winter’s childhood, just as the song also promises the lure of travel. Shortly afterwards, we see Winter smiling at a Chuck Berry concert, as the old rock’ n’ roll star performs ‘Memphis, Tennessee’. The ‘Yanks’ may have colonised the post-war German subconscious, but Wenders’ film is all about bringing this subconscious to the surface (see Sandford 1980: 104), which means finding it nearest to home. Berry’s song, about a father pleading with the telephone operator to connect him with his six-year-old daughter, poignantly underscores how Alice in the Cities is also, without offering anything so neat as narrative closure, about the journey toward adulthood and responsibility. Wenders’ bold move to rethink the dynamic of the road movie duo in terms of a man and a nine-year-old girl (as many critics pointed out on the film’s recent rerelease, such a story would be impossible to film now), while having them still go through the same act (squabbles, fallings-out and makings-up), relocates the perennial Hollywood road narrative of courtship or male friendship within a story about leaving solipsism behind. From the moment Alice first catches Winter in a set of revolving doors, he is stuck with her until coercion eventually becomes complicity: towards the end of the film, in fact, when Alice sneaks off from the police in Wuppertal, they effectively become a pair of outlaws on the lam. Appropriately, this journey toward maturity is also a journey into a very particular and internationally less familiar German landscape, with its disappearing architecture and distinctive public transport (I like to think Wenders shot in Wuppertal merely so he could film its wonderful suspended railway). But in its passage through the largely industrial region of Rhine-Ruhr, the film also traces a path into the realities of modern Germany that, for the proponents of the New German Cinema, was its principal subject matter.1 Chris Petit: Radio On While British pop music in the 1960s conquered the world by recasting American rock ’n’ roll in a domestic idiom, British cinema has been mostly uninterested in pursuing this aspect of the native imaginary. Notably, recent British takes on the road movie have been parodic in tone, playing with the archetypes of the genre to often comic or unsettling effect. In Sightseers (2012), a couple’s caravan trip around Derbyshire and North Yorkshire

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becomes a murder-trip in the vein of Natural Born Killers, though without ever really shifting from its downbeat, realist vein: a similar quality to the earlier Butterfly Kiss (1994), directed by Michael Winterbottom, about a female duo randomly killing along the bleak roads of the English midlands (see Picken 1999: 227–9). Both these films highlight the geographical and representational disparities between the road genre’s global imaginary and the flatter realities of the country and culture in which they are set. So, in a similar way, does Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010); a film (and alternately, BBC television series) charting the road trip of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon around the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales. Here, as in its sequel The Trip to Italy (2014), the comedians’ romantic idea of themselves as travellers, on the trail of the poets Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, constantly runs up against the prosaic realities of modern travel: the difficulty of finding mobile phone coverage, the constant negotiation of traffic and hotels, and the recognition that your ‘exclusive’ experience is shared by thousands of like-minded tourists. All these films dwell on the tensions between the road movie and the British context, and may be seen in light of British cinema’s dominant traditions of social realism and irony. But an earlier example suggests a different, more European source of influence in the cinematic effort to represent British space. Co-funded by Wenders’ company Road Movies Produktion and the British Film Institute, Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979) is a memorable exception to the rules of the British road movie. America does not figure too prominently in Petit’s film, in which the quietly-spoken Robert B (David Beames), a DJ for shift workers at a Gillette factory, drives from South London to Bristol to look into his brother’s recent death. When America does appear, it is in the form of an idle guitar-strumming garage attendant (played, improbably, by Sting, lending the character a suitably unreal aura) obsessed by Eddie Cochran, the American singer who died in a car crash in England in 1960. The two men’s rendition of Cochran’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ is a momentary oasis of nostalgic Americana in a film fixated with the violence of contemporary Britain: prior to this meeting, Robert has just managed to get rid of a psychologically troubled soldier, deserting after his latest tour with the Army in Belfast, who let himself uninvited into Robert’s car; later, Robert will confront the fact that his brother may have been involved in a criminal pornography ring, before he himself is subjected to prejudice and abuse in his wanderings around Bristol.

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Radio On shares in this respect a similar concern with the later British road movie, in terms of its questioning of the meaning of ‘country’. As we have seen, a significant feature of the classic American road movie is its reiteration of a pastoral ideal. A similar distinction between the modern industrial city and its pastoral opposite, the country(side), as Raymond Williams explores in The Country and the City, is a dominant feature in English literature; so it is significant that, in the recent British road movie, the possibility of the pastoral is so frequently undermined. Williams’ concluding observation, though, is that this idealised and conservative configuration of city and country, with everything (workers, landowners, farmers and peasants) in its ‘proper’ place, could only be maintained by the force of an imperial power (1973: 279) – something which Britain once was, but by the late 1970s could no longer claim to be. Robert’s immediate encounter with the countryside, taking the form of a violent deserter from Britain’s military force in Northern Ireland, is a telling reminder of the diminished status of ‘Great Britain’ at this time. Cochran’s violent automotive death is also the kind of mechanised fusion of celebrity and atrocity that fascinates English author J. G. Ballard in his novel Crash (1973); a book that, though (in)famous mostly for its fetishistic blending of eroticism, cars and high-impact collisions (a main focus in David Cronenberg’s 1996 film of the novel), is also very much about the concrete industrialism of London and its environs, its brutal architecture and new high-speed roads. Some of these would find their way into Radio On, with its lingering point-of-view shots and smooth tracking sequences of London’s south west.2 Petit’s trick is to render these not only in a stark monochrome, but also through the aural framework of an unexpected soundtrack; most prominently in the form of German group Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’, the synthetic, pulsing lyricism of which provides an evocative counterpoint to the urban landscape beyond the windshield. Petit (2007) has talked romantically about the way the invention of the in-car cassette player represented a new way of seeing the world cinematically. The inherently filmic nature of this fusion between (car) screen and soundtrack is obvious, and Radio On becomes in part a film about the cinematic nature of this driving experience. On the level of the audio track, for instance, the film retains the noises of other passing vehicles alongside the score, blending the physical reality of driving with the imaginary spaces of the music. Elsewhere, Petit dwells on long sequences of driving

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for expressive or emotive effect: having escaped from the hitch-hiker, for example, we sit with Robert in a long take as he speeds away back onto the West Country road, the violence of his previous encounter giving way to the illusory calm of the passing countryside unfurling before him and us. As a film that explores so finely the aesthetic possibilities of a film about driving, though, it is significant that the increasingly despondent Robert eventually turns away from the car. Driving to the edge of a quarry, he leaves the car there with the doors open, Kraftwerk’s ‘Ohm Sweet Ohm’ playing on the stereo, and walks to a country railway station to get the train home (at a time before privatisation, when British Rail was still a properly national system). This is an enigmatic ending, underscored by the dryly humorous choice in music (a German band, singing about an English nostalgic sentiment, through entirely electronic, synthesized instruments). Perhaps taking a leaf from Alice in the Cities, Petit’s film ends with the suggestion that the increasing individualisation of road travel is also part of an increasingly impersonal tendency in the world more broadly. Just as Robert encounters and hears about hostility throughout his trip, his hermetic journey is its own form of aggression and resistance to being in the world. From this perspective, Robert’s decision to abandon the car and take the train, though only involving a short walk across the tracks, is also a leap of faith. Whether or not this British train will arrive on time is, let us say, an added part of the new adventure. Takeshi Kitano: Kikujiro A prolific writer-director, as well as artist and media figure in his native Japan, Takeshi Kitano also frequently appears in his own and other people’s films under the name Beat Takeshi (deriving from his early professional outing as part of a comedy duo called The Two Beats). Since coming onto the global film scene with films like Violent Cop (1989) and Sonatine (1993), Kitano has established himself as a key figure on the festival circuit and the wider distribution of international cinema. His work has distinctive auteur appeal in the way it returns to similar thematic concerns, via a very distinctive filmmaking style built around Kitano’s performances. Like Kikujiro (1999), his films are best understood as explorations of Japanese traditions and popular filmmaking practices, told through an often experimental form.

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Kikujiro is in some respects a quite conventional road-movie, focusing on the journey of a young boy, Masao, to find his biological mother. Living with his grandmother in Tokyo, Masao’s unlikely traveling partner is the Kikujiro of the title (Kitano), an apparently no-good waster whose first act as chaperone is to take the boy to the cycle races, where he promptly loses, then wins back, then loses again, the money given him for the trip. Obliged then for the most part to walk the country roads or hitch rides (and at one point steal a taxi), the pair make it to the mother’s house, where Kikujiro sees her getting into a car with a husband and two little children – a new family unknown to the boy. Preferring not to tell him the truth, Kikujiro pretends the mother has moved away, and the pair head home, only to start a new set of adventures with the unlikely group of friends they meet on the way: a bohemian artist travelling by camper van, and two very unthreatening Hell’s Angels on a bike trip (perhaps a jokey reference to Easy Rider’s much more macho pairing). As Isolde Standish has shown, Kitano’s wider output connects him to particular generic traditions, especially those of the ninky0 films, built as they often were around ‘chivalrous’ male protagonists (the common translation of ninkyo) fighting injustice within the criminal underworld (2005: 293). But an equally important context for reading Kitano’s work is that of the lone ‘wanderer’ or ‘drifter’: a figure exemplified by the itinerant ronin of numerous tales, films and manga, and most prominently the Zatoichi series of films (1960–1989) about the eponymous wandering swordsman – a figure that Kitano himself brought back to the screen in 2003. Kikujiro is a different kind of figure, but like the chivalrous heroes of these other films, he is also on the margins of society, both in professional and economic terms, and in his association with Tokyo’s more working-class districts and the local festivals (matsuri) he attends with the boy (see Standish 2005: 326). As Standish also observes, Kikujiro, typically for Kitano’s characters, cannot actually drive (in a country whose economy, like that of the USA, is heavily dependent on car manufacture). After he steals the taxi, for example, which he can barely get going, the film cuts abruptly to a shot of the car wrecked by the road side (2005: 325). The pair’s consequent obligation to travel on foot, to get by on their wits alone, learning hard lessons about people on the way, places Kikujiro very much in the picaresque, realist tradition of ‘low’ itinerant characters and their instructive encounters en route. But it is also implicitly critical of the type of

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‘ideal’ family unit, car included, that the boy’s mother has constructed for herself, ironically excluding her son in the process. The final sections of the film, in response, show a kind of alternative (though, it should be noted, exclusively male) family of fellow-wanderers, as they make camp by an artificial, fishless lake and engage in a series of protracted games, with no obvious purpose but to amuse themselves and us. This willingness to simply fool around cinematically links Kikujiro to a film like Pierrot le fou, whose own seaside hiatus has its protagonists stop to deliver monologues to camera or, for no obvious reason, burst into impromptu song-and dance routines. The anxiety Godard ultimately brings to his cinematic holiday, though, is absent in Kitano’s film, where having nowhere important to go, and no constraints on one’s time, become the true goal and end-point of the story. Shinji Aoyama: Eureka The idea of alternative travelling communities also shapes Shinji Aoyama’s remarkable and lengthy Eureka (2000), set on the director’s native Kyushu (the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands), and in some respects a return to the location and theme of his debut feature Helpless (1996); a tale of a gangster returning home from jail to a society ‘populated by alienated youths, listless wanderers and outsiders’ (Mes and Sharp 2005: 215). Eureka starts with the random hijacking of a bus and the shooting of all on board, except for a teenage brother and sister, Naoki and Kozue, and the bus driver Makoto (Koji Yakusho). From this senseless opening trauma, the rest of the film’s three-and-a-half hours follows the immediate fates of the three survivors. Makoto disappears for two years, before coming back to take on construction work. Following the enigmatic disappearance of their mother, meanwhile, Naoki and Kozue’s father is killed in a car accident. No parental figures emerge, however, to care for the now virtually mute siblings, left alone to live by themselves in their spacious home.3 As such, Eureka follows Kikujiro in its implicit critique of the traditional family unit, seen to fail its younger generation in much the same way that the burst economic bubble at the start of the 1990s left the 1980s generation – to which Aoyama belongs – without clear prospects and direction. The foursome of the traditional family (the Japanese word for four, shi, sounds like the word for ‘death’) is therefore replaced by a new grouping, as the siblings are joined both by their slacker cousin Akihiko, and Makoto, who,

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alienated from his suspicious family and estranged from his wife, moves in to look after Naoki and Kozue. Eureka only becomes a road movie in its second half, when Makoto buys and renovates an old bus. From this point on, the film pursues a largely episodic, itinerant route, the mountainous Kyushu landscape viewed in Masaki Tamura’s vibrant sepia photography through lengthy driver pointof-view sequences, or extreme long shots that minimise human presence against the timeless geography. Aoyama has cited the influence of John Ford on his film, especially The Searchers, the final line from which is lifted for Eureka’s own conclusion.4 Like Ford (and like Wenders after him), Aoyama likes to linger on the monumental qualities of both mountain and plain: Eureka is in fact shot in the widescreen Cinemascope format, almost extinct in Japanese filmmaking since the 1970s (see Mes and Sharp 2005: 227). But unlike in Ford’s films, we are never quite sure what kind of overall place and idea is being conveyed through such images. Without any accompanying music soundtrack or relation to an obvious narrative goal, shot and edited at a pace that obliges us to surrender to its slow rhythms, we are for a large part merely observers of this landscape and its accompanying sounds, re-visioned through its aesthetic techniques of representation. In a film where no one says a great deal, and which offers no easy solutions or homilies in the face of random violence and loss, Eureka mostly invites us to venture outside the confines of the stable and familiar. The experience of movement itself is here linked to a process of change and renewal for its self-protective and introspective protagonists. Abbas Kiarostami: 10 The celebrated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has long shown a fondness for the cinematic potential of cars, making the road journey central to both Life, and Nothing More…(1992), about a father and son’s journey to the site of a recent earthquake, and also Taste of Cherry (1997), in which a suicidal man drives around Tehran looking for someone to help him die. Kiarostami has suggested that the ease of conversation while driving a car seems to afford its passengers, but also its capacity, especially in busy cities, to create tension and arguments, makes it an interesting dramatic space. As Geoff Andrew has added, the car interior is also an unusual space in that it is both public and private at the same time (2005: 59–60). Filming

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FIGURE 3.2 The female driver and the passing male gaze: driving through Tehran in 10 (2002)

in cars is consequently a means of exploring intimacy between people outside the domestic sphere, where the protagonists are also free to look out – and also, maybe, to be looked at. Freed from the static interior, beyond its seated passengers, the road movie also offers a constantly replenishing backdrop as the car moves through the city or the country. This aesthetic is taken to its limits in 10 (2002), which was shot almost entirely through two digital cameras fixed to the dashboard, directed at the two front seats. Unlike most road movies, we do not see the driver’s point of view, just the driver and the passenger, and the passing of the Tehran streets behind them. By removing himself from the immediate filming process, and allowing his mainly non-professional performers to get on with driving and talking, Kiarostami aims at achieving a more natural freedom of conversation and expression. But 10 is more than an aesthetic experiment, mainly because the driver during all ten journeys in the film is a woman (Mania, played by artist and filmmaker Mania Akbari); this is not only a significant departure in terms of Kiarostami’s road narratives, but also significant in the contexts of an Iranian cinema with stringent rules about the representation of women (see Farahmand 2002).

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The political nature of this casting is reflected in the film’s structure, which centres mainly on the relationship between the driver and her young son (in life as well as in the film), Amin. Despite being the only child in the film, Amin’s status as male means he assumes for himself an almost patriarchal power over his mother (notably, the first fifteen minutes shows us only the boy arguing, before finally cutting to Mania, who has up to this point been represented only by her voice). This relationship forms the background to a subsequent series of exclusively female conversations, as Mania gives rides to a number of women: her sister; a friend mourning the end of a relationship; a prostitute (whom we hear but do not see); and an old lady – apparently picked up by chance – on her way to prayer. Such practices of ‘found’ filmmaking (see Kracauer 1960) collapse the boundaries in 10 between fiction and documentary, just as at other points the real world intrudes in telling ways; for instance, when we see men in passing cars gazing at the stylishly attractive Mania, gesturing or making comments in her direction. While at first glance 10 seems like a formal experiment in a kind of hands-off filmmaking, it assumes its own necessary logic, as the choice of car as setting allows the unpredictability of reality to shape the finished film in productive ways. But as Andrew notes, the restrictions on what could legally be shown in Iranian film at the time, especially the insistence that women could not be filmed without the covering of the chador (headscarf), means that intimate conversations in domestic interiors could not realistically be shown. Consequently, because it shows women in public wearing the appropriate attire, 10 is both realistic and acceptable within the codes of Iranian cinema (see Andrew 2005: 60). And yet, from the relative intimacy and freedoms of the car, the film’s various protagonists can speak without constraint, and be themselves – or at least, semi-fictional versions of themselves – in ways that would be less straightforward in any other location. For this reason if nothing else, 10 remains a striking example of the road movie’s aesthetic and representational possibilities. Notes 1

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It is perhaps intentional that Winter lists Oberhausen as one of the cities they will visit in their search for Alice’s grandmother, as this was the site of an annual independent film festival which eventually gave

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rise (in 1962) to the Oberhausen Manifesto: an important declaration of cinematic intent behind the emerging New German Cinema (see Sandford 1980: 13–14). Petit would go on to collaborate with writer Iain Sinclair on the film London Orbital (2002), about London’s M25 ring road (the site of genuine Ballardian nightmare for many London commuters). The figure of the abandoned but independent child is something of a trope in modern Japanese film and fiction, featuring prominently in Haruki Murakami’s novels Dance Dance Dance (1988) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), and also Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2004 film Nobody Knows. It is also a significant motif in many Studio Ghibli animated films, such as Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Spirited Away (2001). As outlined in the director’s comments, featured on the Artificial Eye DVD of Eureka.

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FROM PARODY TO POST-POSTMODERNIT Y: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE ROAD MOVIE

As historians of the US road movie have noted, by the 1980s and 1990s the genre had moved on from its earlier connotations of counter-cultural rebellion, existential drift and national remapping. The genre in this period, according to this view, leans toward irony, cynicism and self-parody, or ‘simple tongue-in-cheek cool’ (Laderman 2002: 133). Or, with nowhere specific left to go, it becomes closer to sci-fi, heading into the ‘outer space’ (Corrigan 1991: 154) of a landscape cut off from the historical past and future. The movement of genres from their classical high-point towards selfreflexivity and self-parody is often seen as a natural evolutionary one, as generic familiarity, along with changing attitudes and revised historical views, gradually undermines the verisimilitude that maintains our belief in a film’s world. But this late-twentieth-century tendency in the road movie is also synonymous with the cultural phase widely understood as ‘the postmodern’, and its related practices of postmodernism. As observed by theorists both sympathetic to this tendency and more critical of it, postmodernism is typically characterised by its referential use of past texts and its recycling of history. For its supporters (for example Hutcheon 1989), postmodernism is characterised by a parodic and reflective use of prior forms through which we can critically approach the past in relation to the present (or vice versa); for its opponents, the recycling of older artworks is less a critical work of parody than it is the more ‘blank’ and historically disconnected practice of ‘pastiche’ (see Jameson 1991).

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So it is that postmodern road movies such as Wild at Heart and Natural Born Killers, though both in the vein of outlaw road movies such as Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, eschew some of the more realist, documentary qualities of these earlier films in favour of a more special-effects driven and often deliberately illusory representation of ‘America’. The country here becomes less an actual physical place and more an imaginary or totally fantasised one, replete with stylised, parodic performances and borrowings from The Wizard of Oz (Wild at Heart), or with a self-conscious, media-saturated mise-en-scène dominated by anachronistic and unrealistic rear projection (Natural Born Killers) (for a detailed analysis see Laderman 2002: 184–204). It would be misleading to suggest, though, that this was purely an invention of the 1990s. As Tim Corrigan has noted, both Badlands and the pastiche-like Bonnie and Clyde set a precedent for this postmodern road movie. Badlands is also a period film of sorts, set in the late 1950s (the film takes its story from the Charles Starkweather murders that took place in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958). This world of a near but almost alien past is filmed in dreamlike colours, as if evoking a faded America of the mind. Its main protagonist and road-killer, meanwhile, a James Dean look-alike called Kit (Martin Sheen), goes so far as to model his looks and mannerisms on his double, even at the point of capture and arrest (and eventual execution) (see Corrigan 1991: 151–2). The naturalistic focus in Terrence Malick’s film, however, along with the voiceover of Kit’s accomplice Holly (Sissy Spacek) – a narration that is as flat and distant as the Midwestern plains they drive across – adds a counterpoint that puts the duo’s actions into a bigger Earthly context: a quality mostly absent in its postmodern emulators. The often nihilistic, end-of-history type rhetoric of postmodern thinking (especially philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s [1988] conceptions of America as ‘hyperreality’ or ‘simulacrum’) hardly represent the horizon of our possibilities, though. Very postmodern in its mixture of textual allusion (appropriating the plot and dialogue of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays) and visual illusion (mannered framing of landscape, distortions of colour and film speed), My Own Private Idaho is a key film for its exploration of identity, marginality and mobility, as well as for putting the New Queer American cinema somewhere near the mainstream. The film follows the efforts of a young narcoleptic hustler, Mike (River Phoenix), to find his lost mother, who he believes to be in Idaho. As the film’s title suggests,

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this is a place more imagined than real, further emphasised by its highly subjective visual depiction. Mike’s unsuccessful journey eventually takes him as far as Italy, before he winds up back home in the Pacific Northwest. His quest has nevertheless reinforced his idea of himself in relation to his world, and that of others, ending with a vibrant acknowledgement of the marginal, alternative culture he set off from. My Own Private Idaho, then, as Laderman observes, ‘invokes classic scenes from the road movie’s past’, mainly through its Midwestern iconography and narrative structure, while also offering ‘dramatically new configurations’ of the genre and its associations (2002: 205). While only a portion of My Own Private Idaho takes place on the road, it is a key transitional film in the genre for the way it reflects upon the relationship of self to geographical ‘place’, at the point when the meaning of this place is less stable. One of the significant impacts of postmodern thinking is the idea that, along with a questioning of history and legend, and what François Lyotard (1984) calls the ‘grand narratives’ that formerly shaped our view of the world, the identity of places (cities, landscapes, countries) becomes equally unstable. The idea that we understand space in immediate, ‘real’ terms has in turn been questioned, an emphasis instead being placed on the way geographies are as much perceived in a ‘virtual’ and mediated way, by various forms of textual representation – including cinema itself. The ‘Idaho’ of Gus Van Sant’s film is from such a view a mythical construction of geography and memory; not imaginary as such, but an ‘imagined’ State that is closer to ‘a state of mind’. Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli’s innovative work on the postmodern configuration of modern Europe (2003, 2006) has emphasised the impact of economic and cultural globalisation, and especially migration, on cities and countries whose boundaries, population and identity were once (supposedly) clearly defined. It is important to note as well how, within these postmodern terms, previous and persistent visual images – from movies, television, painting, tourist publicity or postcards – feed into the way we look at and define the places around us, or those we visit. This also has an obvious effect on how the road movie signifies within such circumstances. As a genre traditionally associated with the relationship between individual journeys and physical ones, where changing locations and eventual destinations are linked to processes of narrative development and realisation, what happens once we start to question the mean-

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ing of the routes and sights so central to the genre, as it has so far been defined? An example of this type of postmodern road movie identified by Mazierska and Rascaroli is Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s The Adventures of Felix (1999). In many ways the film draws on a similar quest structure to that already exploited in My Own Private Idaho, as well as its central concern with postmodern identity as a form of self-fashioning. Félix (Sami Bouajila), a young mixed-race man whose father is from North Africa, has grown up in the north of France with his white mother. He decides to travel south to Marseille, intending to find his estranged father, his ‘memories’ of whom are limited to a few old photographs. As is typical for the quest narrative, the goal is less important than the process, and Félix’s hitch-hiking journey takes in a varied range of French cities and countryside, as well as providing opportunity for a series of encounters. Through brief titles, the film marks these random meetings in terms of Félix’s ‘family’: a sexually adventurous teenage boy, with whom Félix (who is also gay) forms an emotional but not sexual connection, becomes his ‘little brother’; an elderly lady who puts him up for a night is his ‘grandmother’; a rail worker with whom he has a brief fling is described as his ‘cousin’. Crucially, this construction of the family as communitarian and allegorical extends even to the main object of the journey. The ‘father’ is an older French-Algerian man with whom Félix strikes up a conversation, just outside Marseille. Afterwards, the two of them fly the rainbow-patterned kite Félix has carried all the way across France, presumably with this moment in mind. Consistent with the rest of the film, this presumably symbolic parent replaces the actual one, who is quickly forgotten once Félix reaches Marseille and reunites with his boyfriend from home. The Adventures of Felix is in this sense an ambiguous film in terms of the possible value and meaning of the quest narrative, replacing the notional search for paternal origin with a more figurative family embodied through transitory encounters. The film has for this reason come in for some criticism, most notably in terms of its refusal to let Félix’s identity as beur (a term denoting French immigrants of North African descent) be explored at length. Similarly, critics interested in the exploration of gay identities on screen have targeted the film’s apparently conservative espousal of normative familial values (for an outline of these various criticisms see Archer 2013: 76–83). Indeed, by introducing its protagonist as HIV-positive, and

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having him confronted early on with racial hate crime, The Adventures of Felix flirts with these wider issues, only to leave them dangling in a story whose most obvious template is (like Wild at Heart) The Wizard of Oz (and Félix’s rainbow kite, as much as it might identify him with the international symbol of gay culture, also acknowledges the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ from that particular film). Critical responses to the film are consequently revealing in their frustration at the film’s tone and refusal to take its wider themes more seriously, and valid in questioning its apparent acceptance of the social status quo. But as a postmodern road movie, not being serious is itself a serious point. If the film refuses to let the rather ‘quirky’ Félix (one translation of the French title, Drôle de Félix) follow more preferred routes towards his identity as both beur and gay, it is also emphasising the right of its protagonist to choose and determine this path for himself. As Michael Gott and Thibault Schilt have discussed (2013), this possibility of choosing one’s identity within a transnational cultural context is central to a significant number of recent films made in French, though set on the route between France and the predominantly North African countries that were its former colonies. Focusing, like The Adventures of Felix, mainly on the children of immigrants, or (in some cases) those of a French colonial generation, these films offer ‘a specific manifestation of what it means to grow up in a multicultural context in French society’ (Vanderschelden 2013: 217). For Gott and Schilt, the road movie provides an ideal form for exploring such ideas, given its ‘border-crossing inclinations’ in a transnational context, and its consequent tendency toward a form of ‘polyglot’, central to the theme of cultural transition and meeting-points (2013: 3). Exactly why the road movie should be exploited so frequently and so specifically within the French/North African context is interesting, as France’s colonial history is hardly exclusive: the UK, most obviously, has a similar colonial history and multicultural society, though cinematic explorations of these circumstances have rarely, if at all, used the road movie format. The slightly different, frequently troubled political and social contexts of multiculturalism in the French Republic (see Gott and Schilt 2013), as well as the relative proximity of France to North Africa, may have contributed to the urgency and viability of this recent French-language road movie. Whatever the reason, the number of films touching on this theme certainly testifies to the importance within this particular context of cultural ‘roots’, and the desire to stretch the boundaries of identity in a transnational world.

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Both Mehdi Charef’s Daughter of Keltoum (2002) and Tony Gatlif’s Exiles (2004) are more realised variations on the ‘origins’ road movie that The Adventures of Felix toys with but ultimately rejects. Daughter of Keltoum narrates the journey of a young Swiss woman to find her biological mother in Algeria, a journey that brings her into close and sometimes unsettling contact with different attitudes and gender politics. Exiles follows the journey of its ‘exiled’ young couple: a child of pieds-noirs parents (French citizens who returned from Algeria in the early 1960s, after the independence war) and a beurette (a daughter, in this case, of Algerian immigrants). From its potentially sentimental starting point, Daughter of Keltoum becomes almost as questioning of the origins narrative as The Adventures of Felix; or at least, it does once we find out that the soughtafter mother is not the mother after all – and who turns out, in an interesting twist, to be the unassuming woman who has been the traveller’s guide for much of her journey. In Exiles, meanwhile, the precise aim and resolution of the journey – motivated, somewhat obliquely, through a series of old photographs from Algeria – is ultimately less important than the exuberant representation of travel and cultural discovery, culminating in a fervid expression of Algerian music and dance. Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand voyage (2004) is a slightly different take on the origins story, in which a young, westernised French beur, Réda, with no obvious affiliations to the place of his parents’ birth, finds himself driving his elderly father on his hadj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. In contrast to both to Daughter of Keltoum and Exiles, Le Grand voyage initially undermines the romanticism of ‘return’ by making Réda – about to take his baccalauréat exams, and hung up on his white, non-Muslim girlfriend – totally uninterested in the trip, involving as it does an arduous car journey across southern Europe and the Middle East, with a man to whom he is seemingly linked only by blood ties and little else (see Vanderschelden 2013: 219). Perhaps inevitably, Réda’s apathy dissolves somewhat when forced to engage with the estranging but also overwhelming occurrences of the journey; whether this be when father and son are forced to shelter from a snowstorm during a mountain passage, or when the fateful conclusion to the father’s journey takes place amongst the two million pilgrims thronging Mecca and captured, documentary style, in startling sound and image. Any sense, though, that this represents a homecoming for Réda is nuanced by the film’s final sequences. When he wistfully writes his French

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girlfriend’s name in the sand, Le Grand voyage suggests that the journey (or in terms of the hadj, more literally an ‘effort’) is not the end in itself, but a difficult process through which we can properly return home; and at the end, Réda, though now more reconciled to his father’s previously distant beliefs and values, pragmatically sells his old car and buys an airline ticket back to France. Considering these films within the broader terms of ‘postcolonial journeys’, addressing, ‘in a variety of forms, issues of social integration, ethnicity [and the] construction of identity’ (Vanderschelden 2013: 219), we can understand why not having any specific goal, or even clear discovery – as in the case of Le Grand voyage – does not undermine their possibilities as road movies. This is because, even in journeys such as Réda’s, the ‘origin’ is less some physical place that holds no personal associations or memories, but rather a more profound sense of the historical, social and cultural forces that produced him and shaped him (even to the extent of his rejecting this history). Daughter of Keltoum and Exiles offer more literal end-points; though as I have argued elsewhere, to see their ends as the meaning of the cinematic journey is to overlook the way both films, in a move that is defining of the road genre, spend a considerable amount of time getting there; all of which suggests that even in these films, the act of leaving, and the possibilities of transition, are more important than the destination (see Archer 2013: 83–4). One of the attractions of these films for global audiences is that they offer the vicarious experience of movement and encounters beyond the familiar, creating in the process forms of transnational experience that are at the same time central to the films’ ideas. Form and theme, in a way we saw in many Latin American road movies, neatly coincide here. Exiles is directed by Tony Gatlif, many of whose other films, such as Gadjo Dilo (1997) and Transylvania (2007), adopt a semi-documentary, travelogue approach to their subjects. Gadjo Dilo, in which a music student from Paris travels to a Romani village near Bucharest, is typical of Gatlif’s films in positioning the nomadic European traveller as the cultural ‘outsider’ (the ‘crazy stranger’ of the film’s Romani title) (see Costanzo 2014: 321–2). As with Exiles, intricacies of narrative are secondary to the expression of cultural difference and contact, whether in terms of language, custom or, most of all, music. But in Gatlif’s brand of road cinema this visual and aural experience of otherness is, it seems, the point itself (see Blum-Reid 2013).

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As Gott and Schilt suggest, while often alluding to domestic issues of ethnicity and social integration, Gatlif does not try to resolve any of these problems; yet through films like Exiles ‘travel is the answer to the “identity question”, or at least a necessary first step’ (2013: 7), precisely in its bid to dissolve imaginary borders through the positive representation of travel. Two ‘border films’ The title of Gott and Schilt’s Open Roads, Closed Borders suggests, rightly, that the utopian vision of freely moving people within a globalised world is inherently offset by its other side: the figure of the refugee or economic migrant, whose ‘exile’ is compulsory rather than impulsive, and whose movement, unlike that of the privileged Western traveller, is perennially constrained by national boundaries and bureaucracies. As Mazierska and Rascaroli note, the contemporary world picture is no longer so easily conceived in terms of privileged minorities being able to travel: ‘Mobility has ceased to be the exception to the rule, and has itself become the rule’ (2006: 1). It is frequently those upon whom the effects of globalisation impact most abruptly who, paradoxically, find the world much less ‘global’ in actual terms. As much as re-worked narratives of homecoming have become an important feature of the modern road movie, then, so too have tales about the quest to find new homes altogether, focusing predominantly on the journeys of migrants leaving economic or political hardship for the promised lands of the developed West. The emergence of such films is both timely and telling, reflecting the increased visibility of migration as an aspect of the contemporary globalised world, as swelling populations are forced to contend with the effects of economic hardship, climatic forces and war. Such tales of exile and displacement have been characterized by Hamid Naficy as ‘border films’ (2001: 237–42), focused as they often are on the passage across and between territories by ‘interstitial’ protagonists: those without official documentation and therefore identity, ‘in between’ society and the literal or symbolic desert that is its other-world. In This World (2002), made just after the initial US campaign in Afghanistan that initiated its post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’, begins in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, home to an estimated one million refugees, largely in adjacent camps, many of whom previously fled neighbouring

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Afghanistan during the Soviet/Afghan war of the 1980s. A teenage boy, Jamal (played by actual refugee Jamal Udin Torabi), chooses to accompany his older cousin Enayat on the perilous cross-continental journey to London, putting their lives at the mercy of people-smugglers and the potentially – and in one harrowing scene, actually – lethal conditions the clandestine migrant is forced to endure. Made by British director Michael Winterbottom and writer Tony Grisoni, whose screenplay was based on the testimony of various migrants who made similar trips, and shot on handheld digital video, the film follows the travellers across land and the chain of alien cities – Tehran, Istanbul, Trieste – they have to pass through before making the final dash, from Sangatte on the northern French coast, to England. This ‘docudrama’ approach (the film blends in maps, data and a voiceover to underpin its claims to actuality) blurs the borders between reality and fiction. We presume that its non-professional actors are in no immediate danger, yet shooting on the same roads as real migrants gives us a strong sense of the extremes they must undergo. Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography highlights, for example, the monotonous intensity of desert landscapes, or in an eerily illuminated and distorted monochrome, the nighttime passage through snowy mountains from Iran into Turkey. But by showing what a more objective documentary cannot do – these actual, proximate scenes of passage and isolation – docudrama’s fiction achieves a strong reality effect, giving us, in Derek Paget’s words, ‘non-fiction that is always already lived’ (in Bennett 2014: 156). As Bruce Bennett suggests, though, In This World’s appeal to actuality is in some respects subordinate to its emotional charge, often conveyed through the melodramatic device of the innocent and suffering child. This ‘aim to inspire empathy through identification’ (2014: 175) has a strong rhetorical effect in the film, engaging its audience emotionally in the refugee’s plight; though for Bennett it also problematises the film by effectively infantilising its subjects and sentimentalising its narrative, with the result that the film’s mainly privileged Western audience are not encouraged to consider the underlying political causes of such migration. Bennett’s conclusion that the film may ultimately turn its audience into ‘border tourists’, leaving their ‘expectations of easy mobility’ fundamentally unchallenged (2014: 176), is slightly sweeping, though it nevertheless encapsulates the problem in considering In This World as a road movie, highlighting as it does the particular expectations of the genre as a global cinematic product.

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As movies about quest and discovery, accidental or otherwise, the films I have analysed in this book are mostly shaped around the anticipation or pleasurable finding of adventure, on the part of protagonists for whom mobility is not (or is no longer) an issue. Even the American outlaw road movie celebrates, through its protagonists, a freedom to roam that is ideologically inscribed in the USA’s historical narrative of expansion and liberty. Our vicarious enjoyment of the cinematic journey is in turn a key aspect of the genre’s appeal. But what would this mean in the case of In This World? The idea that we might take pleasure from the spectacle of Jamal and Enayat’s arduous journey sits uncomfortably with our awareness that such journeys are not undertaken for fun. The film’s quick, impressionistic editing and cinematography in fact seem intended to destabilise any possibility that we might, as it were, enjoy the view. Sights are fleetingly glimpsed, and rarely cut with the familiar road-movie shot/reverse-shot grammar of observer point-of-view. Nor are there many lingering long takes or opportunities to appreciate the scenery; instead, bursts of often blurry, dazzling city- and landscapes evoke the fleeting sensation of strange places passed through at speed. At the level of its very production, though, the film is shaped by an inherent tension between the mobility of the British filmmakers, able – like the privileged viewer – to move freely from one country to another, and the migrant-performers themselves, whose lack of documentation made the film itself a bureaucratic struggle. This sense of our own position as audiences, watching stories of exile, also comes to bear on The Golden Dream (2014): a similar film to In This World that, in this instance, narrates the journey of three young Guatemalans from their native country to the US border near San Diego. Based again on migrants’ testimonies, the film follows a trajectory of trainhopping and fence-crossing; of dodging both the migra (anti-migration police) and dangerous gangs; and of scraping a living en route before delivering oneself to the uncertain care of smugglers. In some senses we have seen this all before: a similar journey is narrated in El Norte (1983), a landmark in American independent and Spanish-language film that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1985. The Golden Dream also retraces the same path that was taken in Sin nombre (2009), about another group of young migrants making the trip north (and a film which had the two stars of Y tu mamá también, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, as its executive producers). But the persistence and repetition of this journey several

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decades on is partly the point of the film, remaining as it does an insistent circumstance of our age. Where The Golden Dream takes a somewhat different approach to earlier films is in its intensified and – paradoxically – often unworldly realism. Writer-director Diego Quemada-Díez and cinematographer María Secco conjure up vibrant and fertile images of the Central American landscape, evocatively subjective shots from on board the many moving trains, but also – a departure from its traditionally realist vein – inserted and unmotivated dream-like shots of falling snow: perhaps a flash-forward to, or a fantasy of, the ‘North’ that is the migrants’ goal. This renders the film much more obviously picturesque than In This World, raising in the process a similar but even more pressing set of issues to those asked earlier. Possibilities for ‘border tourism’ are even more rife in this film, which in some respects depicts the journey itself as a nomadic idyll in the vein of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, albeit with the same qualified sense of incipient threat: indeed, the migrants’ lives are, like Jamal’s in In This World, frequently in the balance. But equally, by inserting its young protagonists straight into a quest structure fraught with danger, The Golden Dream leaves us even less aware than Winterbottom’s film of the broader geopolitical and economic circumstances that shape their domestic situation and inform the travellers’ desires for a better life. This is only a problem if we fail to note The Golden Dream’s ambivalence towards its eventual destination, as the bleached starkness and abjection of the American Dream as experienced by those who get to the other side – in this film, in the form of a vast and dehumanising meat-packing factory – ironically underscores the partly illusory nature of the migrants’ dreams. The film’s original title, La jaula de oro, translating literally as ‘The Golden Cage’, refers to a ballad about being an illegal immigrant in the USA. But it might also, in the full course of the film, refer both to the dream and ‘golden cage’ of Guatemala and Mexico themselves, which, while home to economic hardship and disparity, appear in this film almost utopian by comparison. The anticlimactic ending here, then, invites us to reflect critically on the motivations for the journey and why it has been (or even needs to be) undertaken. In This World is very similar, in that its archetypal Exodus narrative has no shot of the ‘Promised Land’ as such. Jamal’s eventual arrival in London, a potential source of spectacle, is not shown. Instead, this moment of

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FIGURE 4.1 London as an ambiguous ‘promised land’: the end of In This World (2002)

journey resolution is elided, and we merely see him at work in a café and making a phone call home. Combined with this, the decision to inter-cut Jamal’s concluding walk through a crowded London market with close-ups of the smiling children at his former refugee camp, though again sentimental, rhetorically calls into question the trip itself (it is also notable that, in both films, the travelling communities forged on the road are ultimately abandoned for an isolated and anonymous individual experience). His new western clothes – a branded woollen hat and (apparently fake) Levi’s T-shirt – here also nod to the globalised consumer image culture that to an extent informs the desires and movements of migrants like Jamal. As such, In This World, like The Golden Dream and its ironised land of opportunity, takes a similarly ambivalent approach to the ultimate value of the journey, connoted as both London and California are in terms of a consumer capitalism of questionable worth or authenticity. In such a way, despite their obvious indignation at the plight of such migrants, neither In This World nor The Golden Dream ‘celebrate’ the migrant’s journey, or make the destination a ‘happy’ conclusion to the story. But this is not a contradiction, as such journeys, whether desired or necessary, are doubly scandalous: in the way their travellers, unlike those of the developed world, are less free to travel at their will and without danger; but also because, in an equitable and fair world, such journeys

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would be made through choice, and not through obligation, or would be unnecessary in the first place. Alien Ways: the science fiction road movie As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, the road movie at the end of the last century seemed to be uncertain where to go. Events of this current century, and many road movies made during this time, have suggested that this is not the case; even if what we formerly understood by the road movie has undergone significant change. The ‘driving visions’ of freedom and rebellion that supposedly defined the classic road movie in Easy Rider seem now a product of their particular time and place. The privilege of independent travel – always, as Easy Rider and many subsequent films have reminded us, dependent on economic means – has given way in a number of films, such as those just previously discussed, to stories focusing on obligated movement, or on the itinerary of the nomad uncertain of her place in the world or the possibility of ‘home’. There is an important moment in The Motorcycle Diaries when Ernesto is asked by the politically-exiled Chilean couple why he is journeying around the continent. ‘For the sake of traveling’, he replies awkwardly. When Walter Salles came to direct the 2012 adaptation of On the Road, as he has noted, a key intent was to show how ‘urgent’ the book’s 1950s message is in the twenty-first century (in Matheou 2012: 46). One of the many problems with the finished film (which, besides being a financial flop, was also critically panned) is that it fails in this intent. The good-looking protagonists may act with a lot of urgency (or at least, they take a lot of drugs and have frequent sex with each other), the camerawork is ceaselessly restless, and the fast editing – frustratingly for a movie notionally about the sustained experience of road travel – equally so. But in trying to film an America that Salles admits ‘no longer exists’ (in Matheou 2012: 44) On the Road loses whatever point the novel originally may have had. The semi-documentary approach of The Motorcycle Diaries avoided this pitfall, by somehow suggesting the discoveries of 1952 are still resonant with contemporary circumstances. Significant and influential as On the Road might have been within the contexts of 1950s and 1960s America, by not engaging with the recession-hit realities of the contemporary USA, the film inevitably looks like little more than a glossy piece of period nostalgia.

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I mention the failure of On the Road as the novel is canonical within histories of the road movie. But as a recent film, it also exemplifies the shortcomings of this road mythology in the current era. In the contexts of economic precarity, potentially chronic climate change and dwindling resources of fossil fuels (all mostly mystifying concepts to audiences of the 1950s and even 1960s), how can On the Road be anything but a romance from another age? Should contemporary viewers celebrate the gas-guzzling, climate-wrecking machines so central to Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop? Perhaps this is a question of taste – and I even acknowledge my own sense of nostalgic melancholy when watching films like It Happened One Night and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, hymns to the fuel-packed people-carriers around and through which modern America was built. As I have suggested in this book, though, these movies are to a large extent myths, reconciling us to the world as it has become, and not actually reflections of it. It is interesting therefore to see how a number of recent films combine the road movie with the hypothetical forms of the science fiction genre in order to show alternate, as well as alternative, worlds to the one in which we live. Karl Phillips (1999) has made connections between the road movie and science fiction, focusing initially on films such as Death Race 2000 (1975), Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) (1981) and The Postman (1997); all of which project imaginary futures following sometimes unspecified environmental catastrophe or cataclysmic wars. Phillips notes the significance in these post-apocalyptic films of the breakdown of regulated, ‘civilised’ space (1999: 266–7). The emphasis on movement in these films, and more specifically their ‘sense of wandering’ (1999: 269), rethinks the speculative futures of the science fiction film within the terms of the western, especially through the latter’s emphasis on the pioneer, operating at the limit-point of civilisation. Phillips consequently establishes a through-line from the western to post-apocalyptic science fiction, via the road movie, bound by an overarching mythic narrative of the frontier and the foundations of community. Perhaps consistent with an essay written at the end of the 1990s, though, Phillips is ultimately less interested in these ideas, than he is in pursuing what he calls ‘the “virtual … hyperreal road”’ (1999: 267) of films such as The Matrix (1999); a line of enquiry that stretches the generic concept of the ‘road movie’ to breaking point. I would nevertheless like to think through some of Phillips’ ideas

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about the post-apocalyptic film, with reference to a number of recent science fiction road movies exploring similar themes. As discussed at the beginning of this book, in analysing genre we need to be attentive to the varied ways – aesthetic, contextual, discursive – through which genres are identified and experienced. In exploring the road movie through science fiction, I am consequently wary of taking the genre as carefully delineated through this study, only to lose it haphazardly within the very different content and contexts of this other genre. As we have also seen, though, the road movie is not set in stone, but subject to various shifts: changes that, while altering the look and tone of the genre, still keep in place enough recognisable characteristics for us to read it within the road movie’s terms. It Happened One Night and In This World are in many respects thousands of miles apart, yet I cannot help reading the latter film alongside the former; even if, in this instance, what is important in Winterbottom’s film is how it differs from Capra’s Hollywood movie. As much as genres like the road movie are what we can call ‘institutionally’ marked – that is, described as road movies by the publicity that markets them – it is also the semantic and syntactic qualities within the films themselves that designate them. Consequently, when we see these same elements within films institutionally connoted in terms of science fiction, we may become aware of their unfamiliarity but, in turn, be encouraged to ask what they do within the films in question. The road movie, in this way, comes to inform the science fiction film, in a way that shines light on the meaning and possibilities of either genre in the early twenty-first century. Both War of the Worlds (2005) and Children of Men (2006) are shaped by identifiably sci-fi contexts. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, and the most recent version of this canonical alien invasion tale, relocates its Greater London setting to the eastern USA. When the alien tripods hit New Jersey, Tom Cruise’s divorced dockworker, Ray, sets out to get his son and daughter back to their mother’s family home in Boston. In Children of Men, meanwhile, set in 2027, where an infertile human race has not produced offspring for eighteen years, a disillusioned political activist Theo (Clive Owen), finds himself shepherding a pregnant woman through south-east England. At the now heavilymilitarized migrant-camp town of Bexhill-on-Sea, Theo is led to believe the girl and her baby will be delivered to a political group hoping to form an alternative community away from Britain’s new police state.

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In slightly different ways, both these films employ what literary theorist Robert Scholes, in his definition of science fiction, calls ‘fabulation’. Scholes defines this as a ‘fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way’ (1975: 2). His definition distinguishes science fiction from fantasy by stressing the former’s connections to the real world. While set imaginatively in a context that is not recognisably ours, the worlds of science fiction are recognisable as possible worlds we might inhabit or confront, and which, consequently, ‘return’ us to our present with renewed vision. War of the Worlds, therefore, invites us to reflect on what it would be like if an unstoppable military force subjected America to attack. Children of Men’s very subtle modifications to a depiction of contemporary Britain, meanwhile, and its hints at a possible future – where the impact of depleted resources, war and terrorism is seen as much more significant than its notional theme of infertility – prompt us to think about our present-day circumstances, politics and future direction, given that the potential for this future is largely in our own hands. As the brief outline of both films also indicates, they are structured like road movies, in which the central protagonists embark on a form of quest narrative across challenging terrain. Consistent with the recent ‘post-postmodern’ turn to forms of ‘compelled’ road movies, such as the ‘border films’ discussed above, these journeys are made under duress, by travellers obliged to assume the hitherto unimaginable role of the exile and migrant. The fact that War of the Worlds, with its images of urban destruction, massed crowds of people on foot, and walls covered in posted images of lost relatives, drew on the image bank of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC was not lost on commentators. At the same time, some also saw the film in liberal political terms, inverting the circumstances of the USA’s ongoing ‘War on Terror’ by having Americans made exiles in the face of military invasion. Indeed, Spielberg has claimed that his intention was to evoke something unprecedented, namely an ‘American refugee experience’ (in Grist 2009: 69) – a slightly odd statement, given that an earlier American refugee experience was the same Dust-Bowl migration chronicled in The Grapes of Wrath. In distinction though even to the utopian possibilities of the motor vehicle in Ford’s film, in both War of the Worlds and Children of Men, both protagonists are pointedly deprived of cars: the symbol both of autonomous mobility and

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of the fossil-fuel industrial age. And in a marked link to films like In This World, Theo has effectively to turn himself into a refugee in order to access the Bexhill immigration centre and reach his destination, boarding a bus with other migrants and asylum seekers, forced to pass himself off as an ‘alien’. Looking at these science fiction road movies as ways of confronting present-day issues, however, naturally begs the question why they are not just straight films set in the present day. The fact that science fiction remains a perennially spectacular genre with considerable box-office appeal is naturally a factor, though sci-fi films in the era of the superhero franchise hardly need to embrace such bleak narratives. In responding to this we touch upon some of the same concerns addressed previously with regard to the ‘border films’. As I noted earlier, viewed from the privileged perspective of, say, an art-house audience in the UK, there is always the potential for such films to be enjoyed in a touristic fashion inappropriate to their topic and political urgency. But this could only be the case for a viewer for whom a means of living and personal security is an assumption. The near-future prognosis of a film like Children of Men, though a fiction film, suggests that this position is vulnerable and indefinite. Its shock tactics of representing a nearly-recognisable Britain as a military state, its resources rationed, and its borders sealed against the foreign other, seem intended to create an estranging effect that undoes the complacent presumptions of economic and political stability. In light, then, of the global instability forecast or already brought about by environmental change, the depletion of resources and war, filmmakers have consequently shifted the experience of exile and uprooting on protagonists whose own ‘comfortable’ position reflects that of the films’ own (presumed) audiences. Austrian director Michael Haneke, who has consistently targeted the First World complacency and guilt of his bourgeois protagonists (and implied audiences) in films like the Paris-set Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), took a surprising turn – though from the logic of this chapter, an appropriate one – towards post-apocalyptic science fiction in The Time of the Wolf (2002). In a Europe devastated by an unspecified environmental crisis, the middle-class couple Georges and Anne (the names shared by all the couples in Haneke’s films) are forced to join a fellow band of itinerants when their country house is occupied by hostile strangers. Haneke’s film is characteristically unsparing in its

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representation and outlook, having Georges shot dead and the couple’s young son apparently contemplate suicide by self-immolation. Eventually, by the end of the film, the goods train the migrants have been waiting for arrives; but there is no sense that these passengers, huddled in like the refugees and exiles of another time, are going on to a better fate than the one confronting them throughout the film. The Time of the Wolf seems almost optimistic when compared to The Road (2010), an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, in which an unnamed man and his son wander southwards down the USA’s eastern seaboard, in a world apparently divested of organic life. This is a world without colour, heat or growth, with no animal left alive, beyond the straggle of survivors living on preserved remains from the pre-apocalyptic past, or – in the film’s metaphorical vision of survival at its self-devouring barest – living off each other. John Hillcoat’s film revels in unearthly, almost abstract images of decimated landscapes and infrastructure, subtly enhanced through CGI: a wintry metal forest of collapsed pylons, or an overhead freeway with chunks eroded out of it, stark against the sky. In some respects The Road, with its literary origins, starry cast (Viggo Mortensen in the main role) and high production values, is a middlebrow version of the zombie road narrative made popular in films like Dawn of the Dead (1978), 28 Days Later (2002), and most prominently, in the television series The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–). The latter, in fact, with its episodic and itinerant structure, provides a striking and extended example of the road narrative combined with science fiction themes, as perpetual wandering becomes a question of endurance and survival, within a ‘familiar’ society turned on its head. In contrast, though, The Road offers no real glimmer of earthly hope. Where even the bleakest of the above zombie films retains an idea of its protagonists’, and therefore humanity’s, survival, The Road’s journey, like the eventual future of our planet, can only end in entropy and demise. What its travellers glean along the way – some jarred food, a dusty can of Coke – is hardly the solution to their problems, but the increasingly finite resources that stave off the inevitable for a bit longer. This may well sum up the pared-down, existential notion at the centre of both the novel and the film. From this view, ‘the road’ offers no obvious destination to be reached, one that will magically make the journey meaningfully cohere. This road, rather, is simply the literal or figurative passage undertaken between birth

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and death, the meaning and value of which is down to our actions and what we choose to believe in. The Man’s conviction in the right to survive and protect his son takes on the form here of a creed, an act of faith in a world abandoned by God – even if, we should note, this puts him less clearly on the side of the angels, given that this faith in movement and survival is simply another version of the western pioneer ideology: the subject, as seen throughout this book, of a number of road movies, either through its embodiment or its revisionist critique. But in this same spiritual grasping and moral ambiguity, and in terms of its enquiry into the meaning of the journey as a source of knowledge, The Road exemplifies, perhaps more than any other recent film, the defining, searching ethos of the road movie. A slightly more optimistic ‘end-of-the-world’ road movie is Monsters (2010), an ambitious low-budget debut from director and special-effects designer Gareth Edwards (who would subsequently go on to direct Godzilla [2014]). Set in an alternate near future, Monsters explores what happens when an exploratory space probe, carrying newly-discovered alien life forms, crashes over Mexico. The huge swathes of land south of the now walled and heavily militarised US border are subsequently deemed an ‘Infected Zone’, home to growing and eventually huge squid-like beings, whose frequent incursions over its less fortified Central American border are the cause of increasing panic. Those with money to pay, and who want to make the trip to the USA, take a boat to its West Coast. This is the plan for Sam, an American backpacker and daughter to a wealthy magazine owner, and Andrew, a photojournalist from the magazine entrusted to escort Sam home. But when they lose their money, they are forced to do what only the most desperate migrants do – travel through the Infected Zone itself, entrusting themselves to the uncertainty of the road and to the people-traffickers leading them. As is typical in this spate of science fiction road movies, then, Monsters inverts our cognitive framework by making its privileged Westerners the subjects of this compulsory journey. What might expectedly be an exercise in road terror, however, becomes something different in Monsters, the title of which does not refer precisely to the aliens (referred to in the film only as ‘creatures’), but is just as likely a reference – as indicated by various bits of graffiti seen in the film – to the US military, with regard to their strategic bombing of semi-populated border towns, and the increased reinforce-

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ment of their own border to protect national interests. Edwards’ film ultimately raises questions about the actual threat of the creatures, carrying the film’s allegory towards the contemporary contexts of US ‘Homeland Security’ and global military interventions. In doing this, the point is also to literally alien-ate the film’s protagonists in a double sense: firstly, as travellers and perceivers/viewers of this ‘New World’ previously unknown to them; but also in a political sense, as what they witness on their journey estranges them ideologically from their previously complacent identity as citizens of the developed West. To achieve this, and somewhat like Children of Men, which features director Alfonso Cuarón’s familiar use of long takes, Monsters adopts a documentary-like travelling style. In a similar way to Cuarón, Edwards also makes use of subtly de-familiarising CGI effects, altering the actual landscape (locations in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico and Texas) so that the everyday becomes unsettlingly different to our eyes. In light of this chapter’s discussion, then, Monsters connects the science fiction film’s fixation with wondrous spectacle and the road movie’s own interest in travelling vision and discovery, taking a hypothetical future scenario to reacquaint us with the world in which we live, and also share with others. Its interest in alien life locates it firmly within the traditions of science fiction adventure. But it is its interest in rethinking the terms of this alien experience that also makes it a significant road movie for our times.

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CONCLUSION : BORN TO BE WILD, AGAIN

Monsters is a suitable film with which to conclude this book. As noted in the last chapter, recent developments in the road movie have shown a move towards depicting space as limited, contested and challenging. Freedom, the lifeblood of the road movie, is not a given in these recent films. The classic road movie, we should not forget, was equally keen to highlight the threats and moral boundaries impacting on its protagonists. Yet here the road that is promised is the wide-open vista, an expanding cinemascope site of boundless adventure. ‘Born To Be Wild’ goes the theme song for Easy Rider’s bikers; but as films like In This World or The Road suggest, being ‘wild’ is not always much help. Not, in any case, if being wild simply means burning tyre rubber and gasoline. New times require different ideas about what it means to be ‘free’. As ecocritic Greg Garrard reminds us, the ‘wildness’ that is the trajectory of many road movies ‘is epitomised in the American West, which was assumed to be an untrammelled realm to which the Euro-American has a manifest right’ (2004: 60). ‘Wild’ in fact comes from the Anglo-Saxon word wilddeoren: the place ‘where “deoren” or beasts existed beyond the boundaries of cultivation’ (ibid.). A true encounter with the wild, as Garrard implies, is consequently to move beyond the limits of our traditional cultural frameworks. In a world where the historically European and American trajectories of progress and civilisation have called into question the very definition of these terms, thinking outside of our entrenched consumerist

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worldview may – to follow the thinking of many ecologists – lead us into a more prosperous future. While Monsters, like its classical predecessors, journeys through the New World of the American continent(s), the sense of wild-ness is different here: not the masculine thrusting of Harley-Davidsons or hot-rods, but a meeting with the deoren themselves. The wilds of this new road movie may destroy you; but they may also change the way you think. Edwards’ film, in this respect, far from trivialising the road movie through its appropriation of science fiction tropes, in fact exemplifies a new maturity in the road genre, limited as it might previously have been by counter-cultural clichés, ideological contradiction and the gendered comforts of the male buddy story. But Edwards’ film is also alert – perhaps accidentally so – to the history of the road movie it is reconfiguring. A rich girl and a journalist thrown together and forced to get to know each other on the road? This is the plot of It Happened One Night, perhaps the prototypical road movie. A journey through dangerous wilderness, to reach a safe haven, where the journey becomes more valuable than the destination itself? Ditto, in any number of films from Stagecoach to Planes, Trains and Automobiles. That Monsters retraces the same path already taken, albeit in a real-world context, in El Norte and The Golden Dream should, I hope, hardly need stressing. In its tendency to let narrative impulse drift in favour of wondrous Central American sights, in fact, Monsters looks at points much closer to a film like The Motorcycle Diaries than it does to the science fiction movie that is its notional generic reference point. Monsters even has its own Machu Picchu moment, as Sam and Andrew find themselves climbing a (real) Mayan pyramid, affording them a view of the (CGI) walled US border. Just prior to this, Andrew has jokingly called the forward-leading Sam ‘Cortés’: a reference to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador (referred to in chapter two) whose defeat of the Aztecs led to the collapse of their ancient Empire and the claiming of Mexico for Spain. Andrew’s apparent throwaway comment has significant implications both for the film and the road genre, given that Sam and Andrew are hardly innocent parties. As white Westerners, they descend from the same Europeans that colonised both South and North America; while their money, entitlement and connections leave them theoretically free to ignore, should they wish, the troubles of the Infected Zone and its neighbouring lands. Like the western, and some of the road movies derived from it, Monsters inevitably

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FIGURE C.1 New World travellers: Sam and Andrew head for the US border in Monsters (2010)

runs the risk of repeating this same imaginary re-conquest of America. That it draws attention to this irony, though, and strives to take apart some of the myths underpinning the colonial imaginary, is to the film’s credit. It is also further proof that the supposed superficialities of a ‘postmodern’ road movie, one of quotation, inter-textuality and recycling, do not preclude the possibility of serious engagement with our histories and our futures. More road movies this smart, this inventive, this resourceful? That will do nicely, thank you. I am writing this conclusion on a sunny Friday in late spring. Summarising as I am the past, present and possible future of the road movie, I notice, by happy coincidence, that today is the release day for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015): the long-awaited fourth instalment in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic outback saga. Fixated as this series is with the spectacle of automotive speed and exploding fuel tanks, via a narrative based around gasoline’s future scarcity, the Mad Max series bridges the past, present and future of the genre, as well as its contradictions. But given our growing concern with the world’s climate and especially its fossil fuels, both in terms of their finitude and their climatic effect, Max Rockatansky’s reappearance feels timely. Suffice it to say that only the most masochistic petrol-head would want to live in Max’s future desert world; yet its own unique brand of antipodean wild-ness does, nevertheless, offer a sobering vision of the wrong type of future road map. For that reason, if for nothing else, Fury Road should offer us some form of encouragement. The Mad Max movies, like many of the films I have discussed in this book, are reminders of our uncertain present and world to come. But as

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I have explored, in their search for meaning, road movies can also point to optimistic futures, and not just nostalgically reassuring pasts. They can gift us with fantasies of escape or the romance of mobile communities and friendships; they are a vehicle for images of natural beauty, but can also take us into the disturbingly unfamiliar. They can also make us see and hear anew, through other eyes and ears, inviting us – or compelling us – to reflect on our own place in the world. It is hardly for me to say, or know, what form this world will take in the years to come. As the evidence of this book suggests, though, whatever the case, filmmakers will turn to the road movie as a means of exploring it.

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Stephanie Watson (eds) (1999) Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie. London: Creation, 231–40. Gott, Micheal and Thibaut Schilt (2013) Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie, Bristol: Intellect. Graf, Alexander (2002) The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Grist, Leighton (2009) ‘Spielberg and Ideology: Nation, Class, Family, and War of the Worlds’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7, 1, 67–78. Hark, Ina Rae (1997) ‘Fear of Flying: Yuppie Critique and the Buddy Road Movie in the 1980s’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, 204–29. Harries, Dan (2000) Film Parody. London: British Film Institute. Haskell, Molly (1987) From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hayward, Susan (2000) ‘Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi’, in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds) French Film: Texts and Contexts, London and New York: Routledge, 285–96. Hill, Lee (1996) Easy Rider. London: British Film Institute Hughes, Howard (2006) Crime Wave: The Filmgoer’s Guide to the Great Crime Movies. London and New York: IB Tauris. Hutcheon, Linda (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge. Klinger, Barbara (1997) ‘The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, 179–203. Knight, Julia (2004) New German Cinema: Images of a Generation. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism; Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Laderman, David (2002) Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Lang, Robert (1997) ‘My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road Movies’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, 330–348.

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Lyotard, François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacCabe, Colin (2003) Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury. Marx, Leo (1964) The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Matheou, Demetrios (2012) ‘The Beat Goes On’, Sight & Sound, 12, 11, 44–7. Mazierska, Ewa and Laura Rascaroli (2003) From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema. London and New York: IB Tauris. ____ (2006) Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Mes, Tom and Jasper Sharp (2005) New Japanese Film. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge. Mills, Katie (1997) ‘Revitalizing the Road Genre: The Living End as an AIDS Road Film’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, 307–29. ____ (2006) The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1999) An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Naficy, Hamid (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nagib, Lúcia (2007) Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London and New York: IB Tauris. Newman, David and Robert Benton (1972) ‘Lightning in a Bottle’, in Sandra Wake and Nichola Hayden (eds) The Bonnie and Clyde Book. London: Lorrimer, 13–31. Orgeron, Devin (2008) Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Petit, Chris (2007) ‘Drive-By Shooting’, Guardian, 8 June, http://www. theguardian.com/film/2007/jun/08/1 (accessed 29 May 2015). Phillips, Karl (1999) ‘The Road in SF Film’, in Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson (eds) (1999) Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie. London: Creation, 265–74.

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Picken, Susan (1999) ‘British Road Movies’, in Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson (eds) (1999) Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie. London: Creation, 221–30. Ross, Kristin (1995) Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sandford, John (1980) The New German Cinema. London: Methuen. Sargeant, Jack and Stephanie Watson (eds) (1999) Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie. London: Creation. Schaber, Bennet (1997) ‘“Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long”: The Road, the People’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London and New York: Routledge, 17–44. Scholes, Robert (1975) Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Shaw, Deborah (ed.) (2007) Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ____ (2007) ‘Latin American Cinema Today: A Qualified Success Story’, in Deborah Shaw (ed.) Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–10. Smith, Alison (1998) Agnès Varda. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Smith, Paul Julian (2002) ‘Heaven’s Mouth’, Sight & Sound, 12, 2, 16–19. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge. Standish, Isolde (2005) A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film. New York and London: Continuum. Thompson, Carl (2011) Travel Writing. London and New York: Routledge. Tompkins, Cynthia (2013) Experimental Latin American Cinema: History and Aesthetics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Urry, John (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2013) Studying French Cinema. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Watson, Stephanie (1999) ‘The Western’, in Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson (eds) Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie. London: Creation, 21–42. Webb, Adam (1999) ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’, in Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson (eds) Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie. London: Creation, 81–8.

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Williams, Claire (2007) ‘Los diarios de motocicleta as Pan-American Travelogue’, in Deborah Shaw (ed.) Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 11–27. Williams, Raymond (1973) The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, Sharon (1993) ‘Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?: A Reading of Thelma and Louise’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds) Film Theory Goes to the Movies. New York and London: Routledge, 120–8.

INDE X

About Schmidt 32–4 Academy Award 16, 30, 90 Adventures of Felix, The 84–6 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (novel) 6, 91 Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The 38 aesthetic(s) 20, 22, 24, 53, 65, 68, 73, 77–8, 95; commercial 30; of consumption 15; film 67; techniques of representation 76; tendencies 21; traditional 47; travelogue 51; uniqueness 67 Afghanistan 88–9 African-American 18–19 Akbari, Mania 77 Algeria 86 Alice in the Cities 66–73 Altman, Rick 2–4 Altman, Robert 24 American culture 7, 11–12, 60, 62, 69 American Graffiti 22, 30 American independent film 21 American life 12–13, 23, 33 American road movie 20–35, 72 Amores Perros 44, 48 Andrew, Geoff 76, 78 Aoyama, Shinji 75–6

art-house 48, 97 audience 2, 4–6, 17, 23, 25, 27, 31, 36, 41, 89–90, 94, 97; art-house 97; global 42–3, 87; intended 48; international 41–2, 51–2, 60; new 39; Western 89 auteur 28, 73; European 4; Hollywood 63; road movie 28 Autobahn 14 automobile 7, 13–14, 31; American 61 automobility 6–8, 13–20 Back to the Future 30 Badlands 3, 24, 82 Ballard, J. G. 72, 79n.2 Baudrillard, Jean 82 Bazin, André 67 Belmondo, Jean-Paul 61–2 Benegal, Dev 59 Bennett, Bruce 89 Bergman, Ingmar 5 blockbuster 28 Boca del cielo 43, 50 Bollywood 59 Bombón: El Perro 41 Bonnaire, Sandrine 64 Bonnie & Clyde 3, 5, 19, 20–3, 27, 39, 39n.2, 63–4, 82

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border films 88, 96–7 border tourism 91 ‘Born to Be Wild’ (song) 13, 21, 101 Boxcar Bertha 24, 39n.2 Boys on the Side 38 Breathless 21, 61–2 British cinema 70–1 British Film Institute Brokeback Mountain 36 Broken Flowers 32 Brooks, Albert 29 Buenos Aires 45–7 Bullitt 3 Butterfly Kiss 71 Cahiers du cinéma 61 Candy, John 31 Cannes 22 Cannonball Run, The 4, 29 Canterbury Tales, The 6 capitalism 20, 23; consumer 92; late 68; multinational 68 Capra, Frank 16, 18–19, 95 cars: Buick 30; Chevy 25, 27, 59; DeLorean DMC-12 30; Ford Galaxy 62; Oldsmobile 61; Pontiac GTO 30 Central Station 41–2, 50–3, 55 Cervantes, Miguel de 6, 44 Charef, Mehdi 86 Chaucer, Geoffrey 6–7 ‘Che’ Guevara, Ernesto 41, 54 Children of Men 57n.1, 95–7, 100 cinema novo 51 Cinemascope 76, 101 Cinémathèque Française 11 cinématographe (machine) 8 Citizen Kane 65 Civil Rights movement 19, 22–3 Cléo from 5 to 7 64 Code Unknown 97 Cohan, Steven 6, 12, 35–6, 37 Colbert, Claudette 16 Collateral 3

112

Coppola, Francis Ford 24 Corman, Roger 25 Corrigan, Tim 6, 35, 81, 82 Costanzo, William 4, 6–7, 43, 53, 55–6, 59, 87 counterculture 21, 24–5 Crash (novel) 72 Cronenberg, David 72 Crosby, Stills and Nash 22 Cruise, Tom 30, 95 Cuarón, Alfonso 41, 48–50, 54, 57n.1, 100 Dance Dance Dance (novel) 7, 79n.3 Daughter of Keltoum 86–7 Dawn of the Dead 98 Death Race 2000 94 Depression era 13–14, 16–17, 20, 39, 39n.2, 47; Great Depression 14; mobility 15 Descendants, The 32 documentary 22, 47, 50, 52, 67, 78, 82, 86, 89, 100; docudrama 89; road movie 64; semidocumentary 87, 93 Don Quixote 6, 44 Down by Law 28 Drive 3 Ducastel, Olivier 84 Dussere, Erik 20 dystopia 15–16 Easy Rider 1, 3–5, 11, 13–14, 20–30, 35, 39n.4, 53–5, 74, 93–4, 101 Edwards, Gareth 99–100, 102 Elsaesser, Thomas 25 Eureka 75–6 Europe: art cinema 24; cities 62; descendants 55; immigrants 46; imperialism 55; modern 83; nomadic 87; Old Continent 62; pre-European 55; road movie 12, 62; vision 67; exile 54, 88, 90, 93, 96–8

THE ROAD MOVIE

Exiles 86–8 Fallout 3 (videogame) 7 Familia rodante 41, 46–7 female road movie 64 female roles 36, 65 feminist film theory 35, 64–5 femme fatale 62 Fenimore Cooper, James 6 Ferroukhi, Ismaël 86 films noir 20, 62 Fonda, Henry 15 Fonda, Peter 13, 21, 25 Ford, Henry 13–14, 38 Ford, John 14, 16, 47, 52, 68–9, 76, 96 Fox, Michael J. 30 France 61–2, 64, 84–5, 87; colonial history 85; post-war 61 freedom 2–3, 8, 13, 18–19, 36, 62, 64–5, 77–8, 90, 93, 101 French Connection, The 3 Gable, Clark 16, 38 Gadjo Dilo 87 García Bernal, Gael 43, 48, 54, 90 García Márquez, Gabriel 44 Garrard, Greg 101 Gatlif, Tony 86–7 General Motors 14 genre: American 66; criticism 4; exploitation of 51; film 2, 4, 8, 11, 28; gangster 19; global 60, 89; Hollywood film 35; international film 59; masculine 36; minor genre 41; musical 7; narrative heritage 6; New Queer Cinema 38; road movie 1, 2–5, 8–9, 13–14, 19–20, 22, 24, 28–9, 33, 35, 37, 43, 53, 61, 63–6, 71, 87, 102 ; science fiction 94, 97; transitional film 83; western 23 German road movies 66 Germany 14, 60–1, 66–7, 69–70

Get on the Bus 18–19 Giamatti, Paul 33 Gleaners and I, The 64 global cinema 9, 42, 59–78, 89 Godard, Jean-Luc 26, 61–4, 75 Golden Dream, The (jaula de oro, La) 90–2, 102 González Iñárritu, Alejandro 48 Gott, Michael 85, 88 Grand Canyon 37 Grand voyage, Le 86–7 Grapes of Wrath, The 4, 14–17, 39, 47, 68, 96 Grisoni, Tony 89 Gun Crazy 20, 63 Haneke, Michael 97–8 Hark, Ina Rae 12, 29–31, 35–7 Haskell, Molly 35 Hellman, Monte 25 Helpless 75 Hidden 97 highway 1, 13–14, 16, 19, 26, 37, 47, 53, 63 Hillcoat, John 98 Hill, Lee 20–1 Historias mínimas 41–2, 44–67 Hoffman, Dustin 30 Hollywood 5, 12, 14, 16, 20–1, 24, 28, 30–2, 35, 36, 38, 42, 57n.1, 61, 67, 70, 95; auteur 63; new Hollywood 13, 22, 24–5; road movie 14, 18, 35, 39 homoeroticism 27 homosexuality/gay 35, 38, 84–5; gay culture 85 Hopper, Dennis 11, 13, 21 Hughes, John 20, 30 indie film 32 In This World 88–92, 95, 97, 101 It Happened One Night 4, 5, 16–18, 31, 39, 94–5, 102 It’s a Wonderful Life 16

113

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Jameson, Fredric 68–9, 81 Japan 73, 75 Jarmusch, Jim 28, 32 Jaws 28 Kalifornia 38 Kaurismakii, Aki 28 Kerouac, Jack 6, 56, 57n.1 Khouri, Callie 36 Kiarostami, Abbas 76–8 Kikujiro 73–5 kinematic 6, 8 ‘King of the Road’ (song) 60 Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) 60, 66 Kitano, Takeshi (aka Beat Takeshi) 73–5 Klinger, Barbara 23 Kracauer, Siegfried 53, 67, 78 Laderman, David 2, 5–6, 12–15, 17, 19–21, 23–4, 26–9, 39n.2, 63–4, 81–3 landscape 1, 33, 43, 45, 50–1, 53, 55, 59, 66, 81–3, 90; American 23–4, 38, 68, 91; cinematic 22; decimated 98; desert 16, 89; German 60, 70; iconic 37; Japanese 76; Mexican 48; Spanish 44; urban 72; winecountry 34 Latin American cinema 41–3, 50 Latin American road movies 55, 87 Leaving Jerusalem by Railway 8 Lee, Spike 18 Leningrad Cowboys Go America 28 Libération (newspaper) 11 Life, and Nothing More… 76 little road movie 20 Living End, The 38 London 71–2, 79n.2, 89, 91, 92, 95 Los Angeles 3, 30 Lost in America 28–30, 33, 39n.4 Lubezki, Emmanuel 49

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Lucas, George 28, 30 Lumière brothers 8 Luna, Diego 48, 90 Lynch, David 28, 31–2 Lyotard, François 83 Mad Max 94, 103 Mad Max: Fury Road 103 Mad Max 2 (aka Road Warrior, The) 94, 103 Malick, Terrence 24, 82 Marshall Plan 61 Martineau, Jacques 84 Martin, Steve 30 Marx, Leo 23 masculinity: buddy movie/film/road 35, 48, 54, 102; male anxiety 34; male-dominated 3; maledriven 34, 54; male dysfunction 34; male hysteria 35; male protagonists 35, 59, 65, 74; male relationships/friendship 27, 70; weakness 34 mass consumption 14 mass-produced car 13 Matrix, The 94 Mazierska, Ewa 83, 84, 88 McCarthy, Cormac 98 Mean Streets 22 memory 7, 59–60, 83 Mexico 37, 48, 50, 56, 91, 99, 100, 102 Midnight Run 28 Miller, George 103 Miller, Roger 60 Mills, Katie 6–8, 13, 18, 19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 36, 38 mise-en-scène 65, 82 mobility: actual 8; post-war 20; real-life 8 Monsters 99–103 motorbike 3, 13, 14, 53, 54 Motorcycle Diaries, The 41–3, 50–6, 93, 102 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 16

THE ROAD MOVIE

Müller, Robby 68 Murakami, Haruki 7, 79n.3 Murray, Bill 32 My Own Private Idaho 38, 82–4 myths 20, 39, 94, 103 Naficy, Hamid 88 narrative: American independent 21; buddy 27; chronological 65; cinematic 63; conventional 26; crime-and-pursuit 3; Depression-era road 38; enigmatic 24; experiences 7; Euro-American frontier 23; foundational Argentine 46; grand 83; heritage 6; Hispanic 44; historical 90; Hollywood road 70 independent 21; journey 69; melodramatic 50; mobile 43; myth 94; non-narrative road travel 15; outlaw 24; picaresque 33; popular 18; of road travel 5, 9; schematic 21; structure of 3, 83; travel 56; zombie road 98 National Lampoon’s Vacation 30 Natural Born Killers 3, 38, 71, 82 Nebraska 32 New German Cinema 66, 70, 78–79n.1 New Queer Cinema 38 New Wave: French 21, 61, 64; European 24 Nicholson, Jack 23, 32–3 nihilism 26, 63, 82; post-modern 38 ninkyo films 74 Norte, El 90, 102 North Africa 84–5 North America 8, 43, 102 nouvelle vague see New Wave Oates, Warren 26 Obsession (novel) 62 Odyssey (novel) 6, 52 ‘Ohm Sweet Ohm’ (song) 73

On the Road (novel) 6, 56, 57n.1, 93–4 ‘On the Road Again’ (song) 69 ‘Over the Rainbow’ (song) 85 Paris 11, 61–2, 64, 87, 97 Paris, Texas 28, 66 Payne, Alexander 32–5 Petit, Chris 70–3, 79n.2 Pierrot le fou 61–4, 75 Phillips, Karl 94 Phoenix, River 82 Planes, Trains and Automobiles 28, 30–1, 35, 94, 102 Postman, The 94 postmodernism 30, 68–9, 81–100; identity 84; nihilistic 38; postpostmodern 96; postmodern road movies 28, 81–2, 85, 103 post-9/11 88 post-war American literature 6 Quemada-Díez, Diego 91 Radio On 11, 70–3 Rain Man 28, 30, 35 Rain People, The 24 Rascaroli, Laura 83–4, 88 Raybert Productions (BBS) 22 realism 37, 44, 71, 91; magical realism 44 refugee 88–9, 92, 96–8 religious pilgrimage 52 Reynolds, Burt 29 Rio de Janeiro 50 road men 30 Road, Movie 59–60 road movie, Le (exhibition) 11 Road Movies Produktion 71 Road, The 98–9, 101 Road to San Diego, The 41, 45–6 Road Trip 48 road trip 47, 53, 59, 71; cinematic 33; trans-continental 15

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Rolling Stone (magazine) 25 Route 66 13, 15 Salles, Walter 41, 43, 50–6, 57n.1, 66, 93 Schaber, Bennet 15, 17–18 Schilt, Thibault 85, 88 Scholes, Robert 96 science fiction 43, 93–102 Scorsese, Martin 23 Scott, Ridley 3, 36 Searchers, The 52, 76 Secco, María 91 sertão 50–2 Shaw, Deborah 41–3 Sheen, Martin 82 Sideways 32–5 Sightseers 70 Sin nombre 90 Smokey and the Bandit (tv series) 29 South America 8, 53 Spielberg, Steven 24, 28, 95–6 Springsteen, Bruce 7 Stagecoach 16, 68, 102 Starkweather, Charles 82 Star Wars 28 Steinbeck, John 14–16 Steppenwolf 13, 21, 27 stereotype 29 Sonatine 73 Sorín, Carlos 41–6 soundtrack 7, 22, 25, 30, 72, 76, Spacek, Sissy 82 Strada, La 5 Straight Story, The 31–2 Sugarland Express, The 24, 28, 39n.3 Sweden 5 Tamura, Masaki 76 Taste of Cherry 76 Technicolor 14 10 77–8 Thelma and Louise 1, 3, 35–9 They Live by Night 20, 39n.2, 63

116

Thieves Like Us 24, 39n.2 ‘Thunder Road’ (song) 7 Time of the Wolf, The 97–8 Tompkins, Cynthia 41, 44, 46–7, 52–3, 55 Train Entering the Station at La Ciotat 8 Transylvania 87 Trapero, Pablo 41, 47 travel/travellers 5, 16, 18, 22, 29–30, 38, 42, 44–5, 47, 49, 53–5, 59–64, 70–1, 74–5, 84, 86–93, 96, 98–100; aesthetic 5; American 31; air 31, 35, 47; cinematic 43; eco-travel 47; on foot 74; independent 93; narrative 56; road 5, 15, 73, 93; Spanish 43; time 30, 31 travelogue 50, 87; PanAmerican 54–5 Trip, The 71 Trip to Italy, The 71 True Romance 3, 38 Turkey 89 Twain, Mark 6, 91 20th Century Fox 14 28 Days Later 98 Two-Lane Blacktop 1, 5, 13, 20, 25–7, 29–30, 35, 94 ‘Under the Boardwalk’ (song) 67 Universal Pictures 25, 27, 29 Until the End of the World 66 Urry, John 14 utopia 15–17, 88, 91, 96; solipsistic 18; space 38; of traveling 18 Vagabond 64–6 Vanishing Point 26 Van Sant, Gus 83 Varda, Agnès 64–6 Verdú, Maribel 48 Vietnam war 22, 30 Violent Cop 73

THE ROAD MOVIE

Walking Dead, The (tv series) 98 War of the Worlds 95–6 War of the Worlds, The (novel) 95 War on Terror 88, 96 Webb, Adam 27 Weekend 26, 63–4 Wells, H. G. 95 Wenders, Wim 12, 28, 60, 66–71, 76 White, Lionel 62 wild 101; wilderness 102 Wild Angels, The 25 Wild at Heart 28, 82, 85 Wild Hogs 3

Wild One, The 20 Wild Strawberries 5 Winterbottom, Michael 71, 89, 91, 95 Wizard of Oz, The 82, 85 Woodstock Festival 22 World War II 13, 14 Wrong Move 66 Y tu mamá también 5, 41–3, 48–50, 54, 90 Zyskind, Marcel 89

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