The History of the American Road Movie

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The “road movie” has been an important part of American cinema almost since its inception, becoming synonymous with both American culture and the image of America to the world at large. Whilst not a genre of film per se, it is an identifiable “type” of film, with all road movies having in common two things: a road and a reason for travelling upon it. Here I will look at the idea of the “road movie”, analysing its conventions and critically examining its developments from the mid 1960’s onwards by focusing on three films; Easy Rider (1969), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Thelma and Louise (1991).

When the term “road movie” is referenced the image that springs to mind for most people is that of an individual or small group of people journeying in an automobile, often to try and discover themselves or improve their situation. The history of travelling in pursuit of social or economical freedom comes from an area of American tradition that reaches way back before the invention of cinema or cars however. From the time when persecuted Europeans first escaped their countries in search of religious freedom and finally settled in a vast new land across the Atlantic Ocean, through the times of the frontier and the Wild West cowboy, the idea of leaving a place and setting off for pastures new has been an important factor in helping to define American culture. In the early twentieth century the mass produced car became available to the average American, enabling the vast landscape of the nation to become more accessible than ever before and therefore the tradition to continue on a much larger scale. The advent of the motion picture allowed journeys across America to be depicted visually, in a way further opening up America and allowing people who could otherwise not experience it to view large areas of the country.

The criteria for identifying a road film is often open to debate. Road movies can encompass many other film genres, for example horror, romance, crime, comedy; or any number of combinations of genres. They tend towards an episodic structure; within each episode there being a challenge to be met, although not all of these challenges will be met successfully. In most of these episodes some of the plot is revealed, new allies are met or new knowledge is gained. It Happened One Night (1934) with its tale of a socially mis-matched twosome journeying across the country could be said to be an early example of a road movie, as could John Ford’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), which, staying to true to John Steinbeck’s novel for most of the film, documents the Joad family’s journey to find work in California during the Great Depression. Arguments exist for many traditional “Western” pictures such as The Searchers (1956) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) to be included under the umbrella of the road movie, as many of the essential ingredients are encapsulated by such films. Here though I will eschew such films simply due to their lack of a discernable road and will start by looking in detail at Easy Rider, a film which itself could be said to be a modern take on the traditional Wild West tale.

At its essence, Easy Rider is the story of the search for the American Dream during one of the most interesting yet tumultuous times in modern American history. As the film’s tag line says, “A man went looking for America…and couldn’t find it anywhere!” The film as an example of a quintessential road movie situated within its own time allows the viewer to grasp how the road film, in particular its obligatory journey through landscapes and territories, participates within broader creative and cultural efforts to define the nation.

Although the 1960s are now fondly remembered for 1967’s “summer of love” and “flower power”, the political and social situation at the time was not so rosy. The American public at large were divided in their opinions about the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination was still fresh in everyone’s minds and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King would act as a catalyst for some of the worst race riots ever seen in America. At the time Easy Rider was created in 1969 a new youth culture had been established in many of the major cities such as New York and San Francisco centring around the trinity of “sex, drugs and rock n roll”, which confused and scared conservative mainstream America. The optimism of the counter-culture at the time is suggested as being, in hindsight, “akin to a brief, promising mirage like oil shimmering on the road’s horizon” by the author Lee Hill in his 1996 book on the film.

The film’s protagonists, Wyatt and Billy, played by Peter Fonda (son of Grapes Of Wrath star Henry Fonda) and Dennis Hopper respectively, are two 1960s counter-culture figures named after two classic American characters, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp, who travel from their home in California, through America’s south-west in order to experience the Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans. They travel on their Harley Davidson chopper motorcycles and have funded their journey by completing a large cocaine deal, which we see happening in the film’s opening scene, the money from which they keep concealed in Wyatt’s motorcycle gas tank. On their travels they encounter a diverse range of characters, each symbolising the contradictions of the deeply sought, yet highly elusive American Dream. Some of these characters are helpful and friendly, whilst others treat them with hostility, which increases the further they get on their journey.

Near the beginning of the film, the two join a rancher and his family for dinner. Though the appearances of Wyatt and Billy are unusual for the time the rancher has no apprehensions about inviting the two to eat with him. He practices a simple, conservative life modelled

around traditional values and embodies freedom and responsibility which is untainted by irrational prejudice, hysterical fear of the unknown or hypocrisy. The commune that the duo visit can be seen as a realistic representation of the idealistic views of freedom which were at the core of the hippie movement; whilst the commune members are doing their own thing in their own time, the society is far from perfect, the crops are failing and tension exists over whether they will be able to harvest any food.

As the two get further south they encounter ever increasing hostility from the locals. When they are arrested and thrown in jail in a Texan town and we are first introduced to George Hansen (Jack Nicholson), the police show hostility towards Wyatt and Billy due to their appearance. After Billy is rude to the hung-over George, one of the officers comes in and gives George an aspirin. George is known to the police as a local lawyer and also as a consistent drunk, whose drinking has landed him in jail before. Billy asks the policeman for a cigarette, to which he replies, “You animals ain’t smart enough to play with fire.” Billy does get a cigarette though thanks to George, who diffuses any tension and convinces the officer to give him a smoke, becoming friends with Wyatt and Billy in the process.

The enmity reaches a peak when the newly formed trio (after donning his old school football helmet for the journey, George has now joined Wyatt and Billy on their trip) stop at a small town roadside diner. As they enter the sheriff and his gruff companion take a look and instantly remark “troublemakers”. The locals anger seems to grow as these “troublemakers” start to get some attention from some excited young girls who are also in the diner, and who have probably never seen men like Wyatt and Billy before. As the insults become louder and the threats less veiled, the three leave the diner but unfortunately do not get too far and George pays with his life for his brief friendship with the duo, when he is murdered by the locals as the three sleep under the stars, in a self-made camp not too far from the town.

Easy Rider’s depiction of the rift between the counter-culture and the mainstream, done through an American geography politicised according to the radical movements of the time, is its most important contribution to the road movie genre. In the film the Southwest is the area most idealised. The iconography of the area is an important factor within the hippie movement with the land once being home to Native Americans, whose buckskin clothing and naturalism were adapted by hippies. In the Southwest, Wyatt and Billy enjoy the freedom of the road, its magnificent barren surroundings captured through sweeping long shots. Also, they are treated hospitably by those they meet. In the South however, the opposite is true. The Deep South is shown to be an area of racism and ignorance which spawns violent hatred of that which is different. They are jailed and berated for their long hair, insulted in the small town Louisiana café, attacked in their sleep which leads to the death of their new friend and eventually killed themselves when they are furthest south, shot off their bikes by hick locals.

This depiction of regionally segregated America had not been seen in previous road movies such as It Happened One Night. The idea that is presented in Easy Rider and which is articulated so well by George in the camp-fire scene before his death is that the images of non-conformity and experimentation which Wyatt, Billy and the rest of the time’s counter-culture portray threaten the convention limits of freedom in a capitalistic, material society.

Aside from the political and social messages of the film, it is evident from its popularity, both in its own time and in subsequent generations, that it can be enjoyed simply for its depiction of a motorcycle journey across the United States. This is helped massively by its inclusion of a pop/rock music soundtrack, another development which the film brought to the road movie. The film’s soundtrack includes songs by Jimi Hendrix, The Electric Flag and of course Steppenwolf, who contributed the film’s famous anthem, Born to be Wild as well as the film’s opening song, The Pusher. The montages as Wyatt and Billy ride coupled with pop music act as interludes between important parts of the narrative and tell the audience that it is time to simply enjoy the spectacle of the film. The inclusion of the pop music soundtrack in Easy Rider was also an influence on future superstar directors such as Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone, as well as the road movie genre as a whole. I will now discuss the impact and developments of a road movie made twenty five years after Easy Rider, Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

At it’s time of release in 1994, Natural Born Killers caused a storm of controversy due to its unrelenting and indiscriminating portrayal of violence, even getting banned here in England. Unlike Easy Rider it comes from a tradition of road movie which features male and female couples journeying or escaping, a tradition that can be traced all the way back to It Happened One Night. NBK however has more in common with 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, due to its depiction of an “outlaw” couple on the run. Mickey and Mallory, both victims of abusive childhoods, are a couple of Southerners who after meeting and falling in love, go on a psychopathic mass murdering rampage across the United States, simply for the thrill. The fact that their killings lack any motivation (aside from the atrocious nature of their upbringing) makes the violence seem all the more horrifying. Along the way they are made world famous by Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), a ratings obsessed television reporter, who follows their journey and reports their exploits on his top television show, “American Maniacs”.

The heterosexual outlaw couple road film which was spearheaded by Bonnie and Clyde went through something of a renaissance in the early to mid 1990s, with what could be termed the violent postmodern road movie. NBK is probably the most extreme example of this sub-genre, which also includes Wild At Heart (1990), Kalifornia (1993) and perhaps most importantly Thelma and Louise, which I will discuss shortly. Such films could be said to represent twisted solutions to the dilemmas faced by working and middle-class people who wish to be free but do not want to abandon their faith in companionship and in many cases including NBK, romance and love. In NBK, Mickey and Mallory’s murderous journey portrays a perverse, portable domesticity; for example the two get “married” in a self-contained ritual on a bridge, where the only people present are Mickey and Mallory and a quickly passing car of youth whilst on the road.

The message of the film is less concerned with romance and perverted domestic bliss though, than with the dangers of modern Western media culture. In the second half of the film it breaks with the standard convention of the outlaw couple road movie when the duo are captured and from here on in it focuses on the exploitation of violence by the media, the power of modern celebrity and the dangers of the cult of stardom. As the couple become famous due to Gale’s following of their crimes, they amass a group of fans, who, along with paparazzi, group outside the courtroom where they are to be sentenced. The fact that the couple are famous for the wrong reasons has particular resonance today in the age of Big Brother and other reality programmes of its ilk, where large portions of society are hell-bent on getting their “fifteen minutes of fame”. Mickey and Mallory’s popularity is unimaginable outside of their interdependent relationship with the mass media, specifically “American Maniacs” and Wayne Gale.

Ironically, in the scene in which a collection of fans from different nations are proclaiming their love of the couple, two fans from London say that Mickey and Mallory are “great figures from the States”, naming them alongside popular American icons. Among those mentioned is Jack Kerouac, whose novel On the Road (1957) is a literary classic hailed by many as an inspiration for the new wave of modern road movies that sprang up in the sixties, including Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde.

The way in which Mickey and Mallory’s journey is portrayed cinematically also adds to the film’s critique of modern, throwaway star culture. The couple travel through a back- projected “mediascape” consisting of images of highways, dirt roads and newspaper headlines that they have garnered, rarely is an actual road seen and there is certainly none of the sweeping landscape shots of Easy Rider. The Emphasis on the cult of superstardom enables Stone to criticize the negative effects of the mass media on our collective sense of right and wrong and Mickey and Mallory’s trip and its crimes are shown as inseparable from contemporary media communications. They do not travel down motorways and back roads, they surf this “mediascape”, revelling in the publicity which their cold-blooded antics garner.

The only killing that Mickey and Mallory seem to express any regret over is that of the Native American man who they encounter when they run out of gas. Although they do not speak the same language, the man and his grandson take the couple into a wooden tent, where they give the couple food and where neon words and phrases appear on the killers chests, such as “demon” and “too much TV”. In the surreal scene that follows Mickey goes into a hallucinatory trance, seeing images of the abuse he suffered as a child before becoming hysterical and shooting the Native in an “accident”. As the Indian slowly dies he says “Twenty years ago I saw the demon in my dreams. I’ve been expecting you”. Mallory is angry and upset at Mickey for the murder saying “You killed life!”, suggesting that the other people they have murdered up until that point do not constitute life. Like in Easy Rider, here the Native American culture is held up at something wholesome and spiritual. The killing of the man can effectively be seen as Stone making a comment on the death of the idealism that was thought possible by the “Easy Rider generation”, which was prevalent “twenty years ago” and makes a critical social comment on the capitalistic, media obsessed modern world. The fact that Mickey the murderer is a Southerner also seems important when discussed alongside Easy Rider, as NBK efficaciously demonises (quite literally in the scene) the South once again.

The release of Thelma and Louise in 1991, three years before Natural Born Killers marked an important turning point in the popular and academic reception of the road film, and arguably revived the genre. Although not as violent as NBK, the film caused controversy, seemingly due to the fact that it was women who had entered the genre’s previously male dominated arena. After Thelma and Louise Hollywood began to recognise the hospitality of the road to the outcast and marginalised, not just women but also homosexuals and non-Caucasians, as seen in films such as My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Fled (1996), and therefore updated and renewed the road movie’s contemporary value.

In the film the protagonists are two women from Arkansas (again the South of the States) who are sick of their boring, oppressed lives. Thelma is a housewife who is disrespected by and totally dependent on her husband, whereas Louise is a world-weary, self-supported waitress with a boyfriend who although respectful to her, seems uninterested in commitment. The duo decide to hit the road seeking brief respite on a weekend trip away. They do achieve freedom briefly, enjoying themselves on the road and in a bar, but after an encounter with a would-be rapist of Thelma leads Louise to shoot the man dead, their freedom is ended. Deciding that no-one would believe their story about the near-rape they decide to go on the run, deciding to drive to Mexico to escape punishment, with the police chasing them once they become linked to the murder.

Of course, the replacement of male buddies or heterosexual couples by two women characters is a development in itself for road movies. Thelma and Louise plan just a weekend break out of frustration and a feeling of helplessness within the male dominated world in which they live, but circumstance forces them to keep driving, adding a hitherto unseen all female slant to the “outlaw” road movie genre. The controversy that surrounded the film when it was released testifies to its impact in changing the codes of the genre, simply by using women in place of men.

At the same time, the backlash which was generated at what was seen as a feminist appropriation of a previously male dominated genre ignores the basic fact that Thelma and Louise is a story about two women and their car. Through the women’s performance as outlaws, it is true that Thelma and Louise deconstructs the naturalised masculine codes and conventions at work in the road genre but the film has found a following not so much because of feminism, but simply because the road movie when done well appeals to the adventure and longing in everyone, regardless of sex. This can be seen by its hugely successful American box office return of $45,361,000 (the film being budgeted at $16,500,000) (imdb.com).

In countless road movies that have followed Easy Rider, the protagonists rarely arrive at their destination or find out what they are seeking and Thelma and Louise is no exception. Although the duo act as agents of negation and resistence simply through being women in a man’s realm, their fate becomes inseparable from a conventional road movie ending of death, a tradition established by Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. As the final car chase escalates through the desert, police cars corner the two by the edge of the Grand Canyon. Vowing not to surrender, Louise backs the car up and puts the pedal to the floor, sending the car soaring over the cliff. Here the women choose the paradoxical freedom of suicide rather than simply give up and hand themselves to the mercy of masculinity, i.e. the police.

One thing that ties all three of the films I have looked at together is their ability to effectively document the respective times in which they were made, and to put forward social and political messages about the era. Easy Rider, a landmark road movie, tells of the split between the mainstream and counter cultures in 1960s America, which was not just a development for the genre but for cinema in general, and does this by politicising and separating America into “good” and “bad” regions based on the counter cultures political agenda. Natural Born Killers, the epitome of the violent postmodern road movies which were popular in the 1990s, uses the road movie as a framework on which to critique modern celebrity obsessed culture and to effectively “kill off” the idealism which sixties counter-culture believed in. Thelma and Louise, coming in 1991, revived interest in the road movie simply by placing women in roles that had previously been seen as “male”, thus challenging the gender conventions which the road movie had held previously, its success showing that female orientated road movies could be just as popular as their male counterparts, as well as paving the way for road movies involving other marginalised sectors of society.