The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning

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

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.

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85088-9

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)

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A road map for the road movie

1      Looking for America – Part One: The US road movie

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

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

4      From Parody to Post-postmodernity: New directions in the road movie

Conclusion: Born to be wild, again

Bibliography

Index

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

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 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) 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 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