Let’s begin at the beginning, even if it’s a little obvious. The classic road movie almost always involves a road trip—that is, a journey by highway. That’s where the word “road” fits into the name, y’know. The road movie is also deeply concerned with freedom—how people die inside without it, but risk getting killed trying to get it. This is a fairly simple blueprint, to be sure, but it allows everything from the earnest social-justice drama The Grapes of Wrath (screening in the series Oct. 27) to Russ Meyer’s deliriously perverse Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Oct. 19). You have to love a genre that does that.
The road trip epic has roots in some of the world’s oldest literature—the Odyssey , the Exodus, “Gilgamesh” are all obvious precursors. Spanish picaresques like Don Quixote were episodic stories of wandering rogues, and they anticipated our latterday obsession with antiheroes. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn brought that motif to the great highway of his time, the Mississippi, and nailed down the basic form that road movies would later adopt—two wayward people make an illegal flight from a corrupt society, and find emancipation (literally, in this case) on the open road.
Social criticism is a vital element here. Contrast that with Westerns, which grow out of the American myth of manifest destiny. You know, taming and colonizing the wide-open spaces. But that’s an essentially optimistic genre. Consider the classic Western hero: the sheriff who brings peace and imposes order on the lawless frontier town. The hero of a road story, on the other hand, is often the guy the sheriff arrests. He rejects society, if it hasn’t already rejected him.
These darker, more cynical tales flourish in the worst of times. The 1930s were especially fertile days, and the road movie evolved into its modern form then, in the midst of socialist grumblings, massive population movement, and a little thing we like to call the Great Depression. It was also when the Western’s central premise/promise failed, in a tectonic cultural shift that divided the Old West from the modern age—the rise of the national highway system. That’s the moment when, spiritually speaking, we ran out of frontier. (Until the Space Race, of course, but that’s another chapter.) By the time highways connected everything, American civilization had achieved a decisive domination over the New World wilderness. The American dream of endless expansion wasn’t endless anymore. The teeming masses yearning to breathe free, who used to just pick up and move when times got bad, were more mobile than ever, but with nowhere left to run and hide. The road movie was what happened when the desperate refugees in The Grapes of Wrath followed the tried-and-true advice to Go West and discovered, with a rude shock, that California was already full of Californians.
We should say here, too, that there is also an inherent connection between the road movie and the coming-of-age story, with its themes of finding one’s true nature and place in life. It’s the common ground between, say, The Catcher in the Rye and Easy Rider (Oct. 28-29). And the road movie often shares film noir’s most defining aspects: the deep pessimism and paranoia, the anti-authority complex, the realistic depiction of violent crime, and the creeping sympathy for the outlaw and the derelict. The road movie is the most anarchistic of genres, embracing rebellion for its own sake.
The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath go through five flavors of hell before they find their promised land, but they get there more or less intact. Most road-movie protagonists have a rougher time, especially at the hands of people who are jealous of their autonomy, or fear their long hair. Hippie-hating townies have murderous contempt for the Easy Rider trio simply because they exist. On the flip side, Robert Blake’s careerist cop in Electra Glide in Blue (Oct. 28-29) finds that corrupt authority is just as soul-corrosive even when you’re on the “right” side of the law. Of course, even when you know the characters are hurtling toward certain, bloody destruction, the trip is often exhilarating; it’s that whole live fast, die young thing.
There’s an unusual subtype that pops up with surprising regularity: the pair of lovers who go hell-bent on a violent cross-country crime spree. The French, with their effete way of inventing a foreign phrase to describe every little thing, call this subgenre amour fou . It first shows up in road movies’ first wave during the 1940s in movies like Gun Crazy (Oct. 21-22), and They Live By Night (Oct. 30-31), and reaches its zenith in Arthur Penn’s 1967 masterpiece Bonnie and Clyde (Oct. 14 and 17), rocketing Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty on a wild bender of bank robberies across the Depression-era Great Plains. Later, the amour fou incorporated psychos and serial killers with Terence Malick’s Badlands (Oct. 14 and 17), and, more recently, Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers .
The divisive chaos around the Vietnam War fueled a renaissance for the road movie—this time typified not by Robert Mitchum’s felonious bootlegger in Thunder Road (Oct. 21-22) but by the Merry Pranksters’ acid tests and day-glo psychedelic school bus. It captured the widespread distrust of authority, and the new tribalism that flowered at Woodstock. Jack Kerouac and his countercultural heirs were big believers in the open highway as a means of rejecting the old society and creating a new one—it’s integral to Beat literature and all that followed it. That’s why the disaster-fated motorcycle trip in Easy Rider works so well in exploring how the innocent dreams of the hippies had, by 1969, gone bad. It is also the quintessential example of the form. When I say “road movie,” you think of Peter Fonda roaring down a desert highway as Steppenwolf erupts from the soundtrack. Despite its disjointed plot and 60s indulgences (like the tiresome LSD sequence) it’s probably the most incisive critique of American culture the genre’s given us since Henry Fonda, Peter’s dad, took his turn as Tom Joad.
That second heyday faded by the end of the 1970s, though the form has never died away completely. New subspecies have developed, like offbeat send-ups such as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Oct. 25-26) and Raising Arizona (Oct. 18-20), and the nightmare surrealism of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Oct. 18-20).
In these days when creeping authoritarianism is (allegedly) the less distasteful alternative to terrorism, and the new information culture trades the car in for the modem as a vehicle for journeying into self-discovery, the road movie is mutating again. But it will never lose its relevance. It too perfectly encapsulates that ornery American belief in the primacy of personal freedom—and that spiritual place where the rubber hits the road.
“Road Reels” screens at Oak Street Cinema, October 11-31.
Christopher Bahn is a contributing editor at The Rake.
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