Road Movies: From Muybridge and Melies to Lynch and Kiarostami

Road Movies

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Road Movies From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami Devin Orgeron

road movies Copyright © Devin Orgeron, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60127-7 ISBN-10: 0-230-60127-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orgeron, Devin. Road movies : from Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami / Devin Orgeron. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60127-8 1. Road films—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.R63O74 2008 791.43'62—dc22

2007014500

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Parts of Chapter Six were first published as “Revising the Postmodern American Road Movie: David Lynch’s The Straight Story,” Journal of Film and Video 54, no. 3 (Winter 2002): 31–46. An early version of the epilogue was published as “The Import/Export Business: The Road to Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry,” in CineAction (June 2002): 46–51.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Nicholas Ray, whose deep (perhaps painfully so) understanding of mobility in the name of stability is most perfectly expressed in five words uttered by Sterling Hayden, who plays the title character in Johnny Guitar (1956). Their spirit runs through these pages: I’m a stranger here myself

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Contents

List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Road Work Ahead

1

1 2

3 4 5 6 Epilogue

Early Cinema and the Mobilization of Narrative

13

Highways and Trails: Postwar American Cinema and the Journey Home in Detour and The Searchers

47

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and the Road to the Road Movie

75

Misreading America in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider

101

Kings of the Road: Wim Wenders and the Mobile Home Movie

129

Road Movies as Another Century Turns: Oliver Stone and David Lynch

155

New Directions and Intersections: The Road Reworked and the Case of Abbas Kiarostami

183

Bibliography

201

Notes

209

Index

233

Figures

1.1

The Automobile Accident

29

1.2

A Trip to the Moon

34

1.3

A Change of Heart

43

1.4

An Interrupted Elopement

45

2.1

Detour

57

2.2

Detour

60

2.3

The Searchers

71

3.1

Breathless

86

4.1

Easy Rider

111

6.1

Natural Born Killers

161

6.2

Natural Born Killers

165

6.3

Blue Velvet

171

6.4

The Straight Story

173

7.1

Ten

198

Acknowledgments

am grateful to the three universities that I called home as I assembled these ideas: The University of Maryland, where, under the unfaltering eye of Robert Kolker, they first took shape; The Catholic University of America, where I taught a senior seminar on the road movie that allowed them to expand; and North Carolina State University, where a Humanities research grant funded a journey to the Library of Congress that revealed the history lurking behind them. I owe a considerable debt to nearly a decade’s worth of students at all of the above-named institutions for whom Easy Rider, I hope, is no longer simply a relic. Thanks to the many eyes that perused iterations of this study, especially those of Peter Beicken, Linda Kauffman, Robert Kolker, and David Wyatt. I am also grateful for the camaraderie of my colleagues in Film Studies at North Carolina State University—Joe Gomez, Andrea Mensch, Maria Pramaggiore, and Tom Wallis. Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Julia Cohen at Palgrave Macmillan provided encouragement and guidance as I prepared the manuscript, and my editors made the process run smoothly. Thanks, also, to The Journal of Film and Video and CineAction for publishing my work while it was on the road to becoming a book and for giving me permission to reprint it here. Fred Orgeron’s love of all things automotive and Brenda Orgeron’s love of all things cinematic ignited my own passions, and I thank them for this and for more years of school than I’d care to enumerate. Finally, this book would not exist were it not for the tremendous and sustaining support of Marsha Orgeron.

I

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Introduction

Road Work Ahead

The Seduction of the Century Where the others spend their time in libraries, I spend mine in the deserts and on the roads. Where they draw their material from the history of ideas, I draw mine from what is happening now, from the life of the streets, the beauty of nature. This country is so naïve, so you have to be naïve. Everything here still bears the mark of a primitive society: technologies, the media, total simulation (bio-, socio-, stereo-, video-) are developing in a wild state, in their original state. Insignificance exists on a grand scale and the desert remains the primal scene, even in the big cities. Inordinate space, a simplicity of language and character . . . —Jean Baudrillard, America1

audrillard’s words, themselves the rambling and ecstatic product of road travel, begin to articulate many of the themes that run through Road Movies. His America, first published as Amérique in 1986, is the transitory account of a French postmodern theorist traversing and attempting to make sense of the literal and philosophical American landscape.2 Like many of the international filmmakers explored in these pages, Baudrillard is “taken” by America, and the transportational valence of the word “taken” is appropriate. Baudrillard sees in the American road, which he links to the American cinema, an apt metaphor for contemporary existence in relation to America. The road, for Baudrillard, is emblematic of America’s curiously seductive and seemingly contradictory primitive modernism. Travel along it reveals a landscape of constantly evolving, barely sustainable “newness,” an endless series of rapidly moving and occasionally dumbfounding images that we experience only fleetingly, that remain—conceptually

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2 ROAD MOVIES

and literally—primitive. Deny it as he might, in terms that themselves indicate his own self-awareness, Baudrillard is seduced by what he refers to as astral America—an America of speed, surfaces, and (to borrow his term) “vanishing points.” Road Movies examines the terms of this seduction, engaging with the two foundational twentieth-century technologies at the center of Baudrillard’s work in America: cinematic and automotive. As its title suggests, this is a book about road movies, a genre burdened, it seems, by the seductiveness of its own mythological systems. Road movies appeal to us because they tap into as well as arouse our desire for modernity, our desire to be perceived as moving (and quickly at that) against or beyond tradition. Road Movies, however, is also a book about mobility more generally and the socially critical function that images of human motion have served since the cinema’s inception. Through a series of chapters focused on major figures of and moments in film history, Road Movies foregrounds a much broader pattern of self-reflection and self-criticism in the cinema and automobility’s central and often surprising position within this pattern. More than a study of any single generic category, its attending history, or its iconography, Road Movies makes a case for the cinema’s transnational, trans-historical, and trans-generic attraction to the subject of transportation. Contrary to what we might assume to be the attractiveness of the road movie, however, this vehicular curiosity arises from the cinema’s perennial though rarely discussed skepticism of modernity and its social costs. Beneath an attractive veneer of iconoclastic radicalism, especially as the American road movie genre peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, these motion-obsessed films are often, paradoxically it seems, dead set against the forward march of culture, clinging nostalgically to a past that really only ever existed cinematically. Mining the cinematic history of these mobile obsessions straight through to their current manifestations, we will find that the films themselves repeatedly focus on the consequences of a culture moving, often quite rapidly, away from the stabilizing structures of community and communication. Road movies, I argue, extend a longstanding cinematic tradition that posits a hopeless and lamentable mobility in an effort to eulogize or find stability. The book’s goal is to trace the history and evolution of this tradition.

INTRODUCTION

3

The Transportation of American Culture In contextualizing the Baudrillard quote that opens this introduction, I refer to the critic’s being “taken by” America and to the appropriateness of this language for its transportational suggestiveness, for its conjuring up images of a country literally driving the imaginations of its own inhabitants and its spectators overseas. One of Road Movies’s more complex tasks, in fact, is to examine the mobility of American culture itself, especially American cinema and the seductiveness of the myths contained within this highly mobile cultural form. As we shall see, this very seductiveness, the allure of certain American cultural myths, has helped shape critical approaches to the road movie thus far. In his 1991 A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, Timothy Corrigan discusses the hysterical nature and the near impossibility of genre. In a chapter that has become central to scholarly examinations of the road movie—its subtitle, “The Road Movie in Outer Space,” encapsulates its spatial concerns—he writes that “[contemporary] genre seems invariably to overdetermine, mimic, repeat, and shuffle its structures so excessively that what is mostly designated is a contemporary history that insists that it cannot be ritualized according to a single transhistorical pattern. The image of genre seems to taunt contemporary reception with its utopian possibilities only to turn those audiences back before its historical impossibilities.”3 Within this categorical chaos, Corrigan positions the road movie as a modern, postwar, and knowingly impure generic phenomenon, underscoring its overdetermined and built-in genre-blending tendencies. In so many words, Corrigan suggests that we read the road movie as a highly self-conscious, post-generic, hysterical genre, unique in part for its nearly exhaustive classical generic referentiality.4 Sowed in the soil of classical genre, the road movie, in this way, is first and foremost about the cinema, about the culture of the image. Road Movies seeks to roll back Corrigan’s explicit historical markers, exposing the cinema’s international and pre-generic interest in the subject of vehicularity. Doing so ultimately casts Corrigan’s assertions even more boldly. Not only is the road movie about genre, but cinematic genre itself seems to arise at least in part from the cinema’s relationship to vehicularity. If the road movie is assembled from the dispersed particles of Classical-era Hollywood genres, we must also, however, attend to the

4 ROAD MOVIES

structures that laid the so-called Classical period to rest. Implied though interestingly veiled in Corrigan’s work is the enormous postwar influence European cinema in particular exerted over American attempts to reorganize after the fall. As a newly forming, highly educated, and deeply skeptical postwar youth market clamored in the 1960s for new fare, a wave of existentially inflected, formally inventive European cinematic products filled the recently opened gap. The road movie is one of the first postwar, post-Hollywood, postgeneric American cinematic categories to bear the sometimes uneasy mark of this relationship. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), in this respect, are heirs to what we might call, in an echo of Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (à bout de souffle, 1960), a cine-ideological “Franco-American encounter.”5 Not simply a homespun cinematic movement erupting from the literary spirit of Jack Kerouac, the road movie’s structure arises— strangely, perhaps—out of a postwar European cinematic swell (French cinema in the 1960s was one of its most important waves) intent on questioning the ease and plentitude of the Hollywood machine, while celebrating and drawing inspiration from the periphery of that machine. The road movie’s famed political, aesthetic, philosophical and moral confusion (what Corrigan might call its hysteria) arises, in this way, from its similarly conflicted lineage; from its desire to both admire and critique American mythologies in a distinctly European dialect. Baudrillard seems acutely aware of this mode of address when he states that “it may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum—that of the immanence and material transcription of all values.” 6 Commenting further on the nature of this continental exchange, a state induced by a desire for history, authenticity, and a mythically rooted intellectualism—desires forming the core of the American road movie—Baudrillard writes, When I see Americans, particularly American intellectuals, casting a nostalgic eye towards Europe, its history, its metaphysics, its cuisine, and its past, I tell myself that this is just a case of unhappy transference. History and Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really cross the ocean, in spite of many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings. This is just revenge for the fact that Europeans have never really been able to domesticate modernity, which also refuses to cross the ocean, though in the other direction.7

INTRODUCTION

5

Modernity, in Baudrillard’s understanding, is a distinctly American affair; something coveted across the Atlantic but only incompletely absorbed. History, on the other hand—and Baudrillard’s understanding of history is as broad as any of his terms—is understood to be a distinctly European commodity. The road movie, perhaps more than any genre, exists between these poles; it is a genre that appears to move forward, though always longs for some mythic past. In her engaging book on the postcolonial shift in French consumer culture, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Kristin Ross offers support for Baudrillard’s sentiment, arguing that, while the desire to reach specifically American levels of modernity was not uniquely French, France’s colonial past made the soil particularly rich for rapid consumer growth. The nearly instantaneous domestic attainment of modernity, the rapid spread of consumer goods promising to make the French elite truly “modern,” would create within dominant French culture the necessary postcolonial difference that would separate “the nation” from the nation’s still-lacking postcolonial subjects. The key areas of French life affected by these products were domestic and vehicular, locations central to Road Movies as well. Ross writes that the French described their newly acquired modernity “in terms of abrupt transformations in home and transport: the coming of objects—large-scale consumer durables, cars, refrigerators—into their streets and homes, into their workplaces and their employs du temps.”8 This desire for specifically American standards of modernity, however, is cinematically fed. Ross goes on to indicate that the speed of Fordist production and consumption in France paired with these attempts at modernization along American lines were, in some ways, the result of France’s voracious appetite for newly available American cinematic products, which, in their own way, were selling a way of life; selling, that is, a host of other goods. A pivotal precursor to the American road movie, Godard’s Breathless stands at the intersection of this transcontinental flow of traffic, signaling Europe’s conflicted relationship to American cinematic modernity and providing a richly modern cinematic template for a generation of international introspection on the subjects of vehicularity and domesticity. With the exception of Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s excellent and diverse collection of essays, The Road Movie Book, and David Laderman’s impressively comprehensive overview of the genre, Driving Visions, little sustained critical attention has been paid to the road

6 ROAD MOVIES

movie, and still less to this much broader international and historical context. Perhaps descending from Timothy Corrigan’s chapter on the road movie in A Cinema Without Walls, most studies of the auto-cinematic pairing peel the generic layers only as far back as the Western and film noir, extending a reasonable but problematic “genre begets genre” logic. Additionally, the scholarly attention that has been paid, more often than not, rather unproblematically assumes the inherent Americanness of the road movie, a state of affairs Road Movies seeks to reevaluate. In the introduction to their collection, Cohan and Hark suggest, for example, that “[f]rom the old studio system to the new Hollywood in short, the American road movie has measured the continuity of the US film industry throughout its various economic incarnations. The road movie is, in this regard, like the musical or the Western, a Hollywood genre that catches peculiarly American dreams, tensions, and anxieties, even when imported by the motion picture industries of other nations.”9 Cohan and Hark’s provocative suggestion that the road movie is a Hollywood genre because it functions like other Hollywood genres— containing, as it does, American dreams, tensions, and anxieties— acknowledges the possibility of a wider sphere of influence, but it stops just short of addressing either the peculiar mobility of this and other presumably American obsessions via the cinema or the equally critical fact that the road movie is modeled on postwar European cinematic reflections upon American genre and, to some degree at least, its impossibility. Though David Laderman’s Driving Visions makes strides towards critically unearthing both the continuity and the importation Cohan and Hark refer to, his argument, too, hinges upon what in the end proves to be a frustratingly—for him and for the reader—elusive, largely mythic vision of the perfectly rebellious American road movie of the 1960s. This is, in other words, Laderman’s driving vision. The opening to his section on the European road movie encapsulates his position: In the spirit of the genre, then, our critical survey ends with an openended continuation of our exploration in Europe. Such exploration helps to “define” the genre by way of contrast with the formative American version. In venturing to Europe, we can more lucidly appreciate the cultural specificity of the genre’s American development and influence. Indeed, many contemporary European road movies seem a reaction to, or reformulation of, the American genre.10

INTRODUCTION

7

Laderman is aware of Europe’s importance, and his analyses here are, as elsewhere, first rate. They are also, however, clouded by a conviction that the road movie has, since its American pinnacle in the 1960s, been orbiting further and further away from its politically charged center of gravity (to borrow and alter Corrigan’s titular invention in referring to “The Road Movie in Outer Space”). For example, in a move that has become almost an obligatory gesture, Laderman offers a section at the end of the book entitled “Traveling Other Highways,” which features critical overviews of no less than six European road films. While elsewhere acknowledging the American cycle’s debt to Europe, this notion of a “formative version” and the book’s structural foregrounding of American films is misleading. The trouble is, as Laderman keeps realizing and cautiously tiptoeing away from, this politically charged center never existed—not, at least, in the form Laderman appears to be searching for. This is, in fact, the illusion the genre perpetually critiques. Laderman’s poetic suggestion in an earlier article that “Tradition maps the trajectory of Rebellion—sometimes even going along for the ride” is, in this way, an important miscalculation.11 The films Laderman and I examine are frequently about rebels. Perhaps even more critically, however, these films often wage war against a state of affairs—social, political, technological—that has resulted in this particular form of rebellion. Driving aimlessly and wandering are late-model cinematic responses to modernity, a dilemma European films of the 1960s pulled into focus. Far from rebelling against tradition, our road-bound protagonists rebel against the corrosion of the substantial and buoying myths that once sustained them. In this respect, the journeys explored in the latter chapters of Road Movies share much in common with the preservational acts of mobility explored in Chapter 1, where we consider the ideological motivation, for instance, of Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies. Like those early images, the wave of American road movies central to Laderman’s study, their European predecessors, and the international road movies riding in their wake rebel; they rebel, however, against a culture that, in the name of modernity, has buried its traditions, cinematic and otherwise. Again, America is a central player in this international relay. The history and the politics of this centrality, however, needs to be excavated and not simply assumed. Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson’s collection, Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie, while demonstrating an admirable grasp of the genre’s considerable international breadth, also demonstrates the tendency,

8 ROAD MOVIES

when approaching the auto-cinematic pairing, to catalogue—both films and generic tropes—and to adopt a nearly encyclopedic form.12 Sargeant and Watson’s collection is less idealizing of American iterations of the genre, suggesting the importance of a transnational and historically broad approach, though each “entry” in the book functions almost discretely and the history they suggest is never made concrete, never unified. As their titles and implied mission statements would indicate, though, all of these books are primarily interested in charting out the admittedly expansive generic territory of the road movie: one is a collection of essays about the genre, one is a guide to it, and one is a critical survey. The rationale for these forms is perfectly justified. The genre is enjoying a continued, maybe even a revitalized screen relevance as it considers a new wave of drivers and passengers (see, for example, Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny [2003], Alexander Payne’s Sideways [2004], Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers [2005], and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy [2006] for four recent American spins) and as critical interest in the genre has continued to flourish. Road Movies adds to this expanding field while suggesting a move away from traditional genre studies or surveys and toward an analytical process that seeks to account for the larger, genre-defying cultural influences that shape and define this particular representational obsession. By casting America not just as a “star” producer of road movies but as an integral part of a longstanding international cinematic conversation about the human price of modernity, I hope, in Road Movies, to create a sense of global and historical context. As we will see, this conversation often pivots upon a veiled faith in “The Familiar,” a concept infrequently associated with the genre, its predecessors, or its decedents. Stops Along the Road “The Familiar” manifests itself in a variety of ways in the films examined here, and Road Movies traces the roots of this association to the turning of the twentieth century. Chapter 1, “Early Cinema and the Mobilization of Narrative,” lays the foundation for the book by demonstrating the degree to which cinematic modes of narration and presentation were shaped by advancements in transportation technologies. The relationship, however, was uneasy from the beginning. Eadweard Muybridge’s “scientific” attempts to unravel the mysteries of human and animal locomotion, a fascination predated

INTRODUCTION

9

by Muybridge’s own highly mobile traveling photography, demonstrate an early imagistic fascination with travel and movement, but they also express a degree of skepticism with regard to machines. This skepticism emerges in Muybridge’s work precisely in the photographer’s desire to, with the assistance of his own machines of course, scrutinize and preserve the human body in its organic mobile form at a moment when machines were about to permanently alter the human relationship to space and time. The chapter traces this preservational impulse as it takes narrative shape in the similarly transportationally obsessed work of the Lumière Brothers; as it goes lunar in Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902); and as it examines transitional modes of transit in Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). All of these works warn of the physical and social costs of mechanized mobility. This tendency takes on nearly generic proportions from the early 1900s through 1915 in the Keystone comedies of Mack Sennett and the early Billy Bitzer/D. W. Griffith Biograph films, where plots often turn on the automobility of a young couple and the perceived threat they pose not to the physical body but to the established body familial. These largely domestic concerns will come to occupy the center of the modern road movie. Chapter 2, “Highways and Trails: Postwar American Cinema and the Journey Home in Detour and The Searchers,” explores the emergence of American film genres around the central motif of mobility, focusing on the Western and Film Noir to demonstrate the degree to which these American genres shaped international perspectives both on the American landscape and American mobility. The chapter looks closely at exemplary films from opposite ends of the economic strata: Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Ford’s film establishes the questionable motives of and strained sympathies toward the cinematic wanderer, a character the road movie genre will organize around. Ethan Edwards’s (John Wayne) mobility—violent, vengeful, and solitary—must, in the end, serve the unity and stability of the family. Mobility in Austrian born filmmaker Edgar Ulmer’s Detour is similarly conceptualized. Al Roberts (Tom Neal) keeps moving, the carrot of family and home dangling just beyond his reach. Perhaps as false as anything in the grim Ulmerian universe, home is one of the victims of a culture that keeps orbiting away from its influence in search of other, perhaps more seductive myths. These analyses reveal the road’s metaphorical

10 ROAD MOVIES

position in America’s darkening cinematic reflections upon its own postwar and cold war fears. Critically informing these fears are modernity’s effects upon human communication. The following three chapters will explore this perceived breakdown and its centrality to the road movie even more closely. Chapter 3, “Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and the Road to the Road Movie,” departs from the American scene of Chapter 2 and travels to France in order to establish Jean-Luc Godard’s central position in an international cinematic conversation at the center of which the road and automotive travel have presided. Godard, beginning with Breathless and extending well into 1960s, adopted the automobile as a central metaphor in his films, frequently placing it and his camera on the same tree-lined stretch of French country road. Organized as this portion of Godard’s career was around the investigation of American cinematic genres and American culture more generally, the automobile became central to Godard’s work and to his attempts at self-definition. The chapter closely explores Breathless through this lens, suggesting that the film is a frustrated road movie focused upon its protagonist’s inability to leave the streets of Paris except through imaginative, cinematic links to America’s perceived and highly generic hyper-mobility. Godard’s oft-discussed, infrequently contextualized jumpcuts are examined as a reaction to the false order of American mobility, an idea Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider picks up. Chapter 4, “Misreading America in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider,” develops the linguistic argument begun in the preceding chapters. Easy Rider’s much-discussed (often uncharitably) inarticulateness is, I suggest, an important part of the film’s formal and thematic strategy. Turning to the work of Roland Barthes, I posit the possibility of reading the road itself as a deeply and problematically seductive text, one capable of rendering its “reader” speechless. While critics have often remarked upon the film’s self-indulgently clipped dialogue and its vapid echoes of New Wave formal strategies, I argue that Hopper, though certainly not free of self-indulgence, is engaged in a process of self-reflexive self-criticism. Though focused on Easy Rider, the chapter traces this same trajectory through several American films of the 1960s and 70s (including Hopper’s almost career-killing 1971 endeavor, The Last Movie). The seductions so central to our analysis of Easy Rider and to our exploration of the road as a potentially and lamentably misreadable text, brings us to Chapter 5, “Kings of the Road: Wim Wenders and the

INTRODUCTION

11

Mobile Home Movie.” Focused on Wenders’s Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976), a film bearing the mark of Godard and Hopper (not to mention Ford and Ulmer), the chapter analyzes Wenders’s almost Muybridgian attempt to slow male automobility down in an effort to reveal its motivations. Instead of Godardian quick cuts, the film is defined by the long take and its ability to comment upon the fracturing of the structures his characters seem anxious to move away from, an idea most articulately presented as Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler), in the midst of the kamikaze drive that opens the film, tears into pieces a photograph of “home.” The film’s many remaining minutes will find Robert and Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) moving futilely and silently back toward that very structure, a structure modernity itself has rendered impossible. Chapter 6, “Roads and Movies as Another Century Turns: Oliver Stone and David Lynch,” concerns itself with postmodernity, less as a theoretical construct and more as a large-scale cultural phenomenon manifesting itself in an increased sense of chaos in a historical moment of technological and communicational change akin to the one Muybridge found himself in at the end of the nineteenth century. As in the century prior, reactions to this era of transformation often focus on issues of mobility, in this case both literal and communicational. Baudrillard’s America, an account of the French critic’s road trip across America, forms the critical core of this chapter while its cinematic center is formed by David Lynch and Oliver Stone. Through close examinations of Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999), the chapter illustrates the manner by which each filmmaker has explored the human consequences of the postmodern condition through the use of road imagery and a kinetic—or anti-kinetic, as the case may be—formalism. As in the turning of the last century, “home” and “the family” preside over both of these road narratives. The movement these films present is decidedly preservational; Stone and Lynch both imagine characters moving toward some longed-for and long-denied stability. Road Movies ends by reflecting back on the ground covered over the course of the book, and offering a focused analysis of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s transportational obsessions from his earliest, Neorealist influenced shorts through his highly acclaimed feature work. Kiarostami descends in marked ways from the other filmmakers explored in the book and, in an era that has classified his region of the world as part of the “axis of evil,” has found in the road and in transportational metaphors more generally a new language by

12 ROAD MOVIES

which to critique the politics of global stasis and mobility. Focused on Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass, 1997) and Ten (2002),“New Directions and Intersections: The Road Reworked and the Case of Abbas Kiarostami,” underscores the abiding relevance of the cinematic road as metaphor and suggests the manner by which the Euro-American dialectic upon which the road movie is built has expanded geographically. At the center of Kiarostami’s narratives of mobility are family and home, mythically stable structures rendered all the more complicated given Iran’s particular and, some would argue, highly unstable recent history. The epilogue includes a brief overview of the road’s continued screen presence, from reality television programs to the recent work of Jim Jarmusch and Vincent Gallo. The final pages of Road Movies reinforce the book’s central thesis by focusing on the increased frankness with which images of road travel have come to support not independence and mobility but community and stability. * * * In his 1983 analysis of international modernist cinema, The Altering Eye, Robert Kolker comments on several of the present study’s key terms as they occur in the cinema of Wim Wenders, gesturing, towards the end of that analysis, to the international allure of America’s mythic mobility. Kolker writes, “The road is more than a physical presence in American film; it is a sign—a communicative cultural presence connoting freedom of movement, adventure, discovery, danger, escape.”13 While some attention has been paid to the cinematic road in recent years, the cultural exchange it fosters and its function as an especially problematic American “sign” readable and transferable outside of its borders has remained virtually unexplored. This is due, in part, to the scope of the road movie’s history: to analyze the significance of the road in the cinema is to trace more than one hundred years of cinematic practice. It is also to expose the hollowness and the falsity of the road’s legendary and romantic connotations. Road Movies seeks to suggest something of the historical scope of the auto-cinematic pairing and its surprisingly consistent socio-cultural criticism. The book charts a selective route through film history, guiding readers from the turn of one century to the turning of another. Road Movies, in fact, reads like a story with two closely related, mutually informing plot lines, one cinematic and the other transportational. This pairing, as we shall see, has its origins in the cinema’s roots and has, since the late 1800s, driven down a curiously technophobic road.

1

Early Cinema and the Mobilization of Narrative

he cinema’s perennial critique of mechanized motion as a highly attractive, thoroughly modern threat to the accepted “order of things” begins, with the cinema itself, around the turn of the century. This chapter moves from what are typically considered non-narrative, pseudo-scientific and anthropological attempts to unravel the mysteries of mobility through early narrative comedies. This historical perspective foregrounds the cinema’s social and technological anxieties in a manner that should cause us to reconsider the terms, if not the very idea, of rebellion the road film appears to posit. Perhaps more critically, this far-reaching historical scope allows us to trace the central importance of motion itself to the formation of cinematic narrative generally and cinematic genre more specifically. My own ideas converge around the turn of the century “attractiveness” of the subject of transportation—an attraction, I argue, motivated by curiosity and fear.1 The motion picture was born at a curious moment in our much larger scientific history, a moment when new means of transportation (the automobile), a standardized way to mark time (the result of major locomotive modernizations in the early 1800s), and psychoanalysis (a kind of “time-traveling” therapy) were also born. It is no coincidence that early cinematic innovators explored the cultural ramifications of and, indeed, were ramified by each of these new advancements. The cultural perception of time and space and the individual’s relationship to both were changing dramatically, and the cinema both contributed to and recorded those changing perceptions.2 Ian Christie, in his excellent, highly accessible book on turn-ofthe-century technologies and the cinema, The Last Machine, discusses the locomotive’s impact on an emerging generation of spectators,

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whimsically but quite rightly suggesting that the move “[f]rom the carriage window to the screen was an easy transition” and that “sixty years of railways had prepared people to be film spectators.”3 Christie’s comments acknowledge the moving image’s unique ability to at least symbolically, and sometimes literally, move the viewer, and the connection is central to Christie’s project as a whole. Some of the cinema’s earliest subjects, Christie reminds us, were simulated “tours” or trips narrated by an expert on the region being explored. These programs would simulate the mechanics of travel and created, in the process, a spectatorial subject receptive to the narrative situation of “the journey”; a spectatorial subject, in other words, expecting to be transported. Christie suggests that the railroad’s influence over how time and space were understood and negotiated transferred to emergent screen practices and that, while Hales Tours might have been a short-lived trend, their effect on the products and attitudes of the cinematic century were more enduring. Christie’s analysis is a valuable starting point for my own work in this chapter on the cinema’s mobile preoccupations through 1915.4 Given the turn-of-the-century scope of Christie’s project, however, he fails to account for the sustainability of this preoccupation—for, as I seek to demonstrate in this book, the cinema is, though in a decidedly different fashion, still offering its spectators “views” of journeys. Nicholas Daly’s Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 pushes the chronological markers of Christie’s analysis, arguing, like Christie, that “modernity” has been defined by the machines of a given age. Focusing on the narrative and psychological impact of these machines, Daly’s work examines over a century of images of “human agency in the face of an increasingly mechanized (for which we might also read bureaucratized, rationalized, administered, commodified) world.”5 This affirmation of human agency, in fact, is the glue that binds my own cast of characters in this chapter and beyond. The cinematic innovators explored in this chapter all sought to control and know time and space in a period that predicted that both categories were about to spin wildly out of control and beyond rationality. As I have indicated, however, the railroad, though certainly an important influence on the cinema and its projected anxieties, was not its sole influence. It is most especially the invention of the internal combustion engine and the steadily growing availability of the automobile in the mid- to late-1890s that would come to preoccupy the cinematic imagination at both the thematic and formal levels.6 It is the autonomy of the automobile—its speed, its existence outside of

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the restrictive locomotive timetables—that the cinema would grow to emulate, evaluate, and critique. We must first, however, examine the roots of the cinema’s mobile obsessions. The Story of Motion Charles Musser, in his expansive work on early cinema, refers to notyet-cinematic projected narratives as early moments in “screen practice”: from the Magic Lantern (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), which consisted of a light source and lens in front of which was passed a glass slide containing discrete “scenes”; the Fantasmagorie (early nineteenth century), which was a more complex system of smaller lanterns that, because they were operated by roaming projectionists, created the illusion of movement and interaction between images; to Eadweard Muybridge’s more advanced zoopraxiscope (late nineteenth century), which achieved the effect of motion by turning circular glass plates upon which still images of the moving subject had been recorded in front of the light source.7 From the inception of these screen practices, early innovators attempted, through all sorts of ingenious rigging, to create the illusion of motion. The simple fact of motion is critical to what André Gaudreault might call monstration (showing) or the “first level” of narrative significance.8 While I do not wish to enter the debate revolving around the narrative intent of early cinema, I am fascinated by the spectator’s implication in the cinematic event. By the mere act of viewing, the spectator agrees to participate in an elaborate fiction, the elements of which are themselves derived from the visual situation and vocabulary of travel.9 This is not to make a naïve supposition about the spectator’s innocent belief in images that he/she sees, but rather an acknowledgment of the spectator’s complicity in the ritual of spectatorship. In short, the viewer agrees to be “transported.” Sergei Eisenstein, in Film Form, discusses the specific effect this implied “movement” has upon the emotions or, in the word he uses, “pathos”: “Pathos shows its affect—when the spectator is compelled to jump from his seat. When he is compelled to collapse where he stands. When he is compelled to applaud, to cry out. When his eyes are compelled to shine with delight, before gushing to tears of delight . . . In brief—when the spectator is forced ‘to go out of himself.’”10 Eisenstein’s use of the language of motion to describe the cinematic provocation of emotion indicates an understanding of the cinema’s

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ability to “move” its viewers. As he elaborates further upon this idea, his language becomes increasingly transportative until, finally, he describes the spectator’s relationship to the cinematic event as a process of “departing from his ordinary condition.”11 Eisenstein’s subject in the previous passage is neither “primitive” cinema nor the cinema in general. He describes the specific and emotionally transportative effects of Soviet Montage—his own 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin) is his model and his frame of reference. As modern as his ideas are, however, they may be usefully applied to early cinematic moments, which were similarly committed to “transporting” the viewer both emotionally and metaphorically. The degrees of spectatorial mobility are variable to be sure; Eisenstein hoped to move his viewers to revolution. The hinge, however, is the idea of movement. Eisenstein, whose ideas are rarely explored for their comments about the spectator, conceives of a psychically dynamic viewer, a spectator complicit in the act of coming out of himself. The “Cinema of Attractions,” as Tom Gunning theorizes it, is a fundamentally nonnarrative enterprise reliant upon sudden shocks and instantaneous spectatorial reactions; in fact, as Charles Musser points out, Gunning borrows the term “attractions” from Eisenstein.12 It is, however, Eisenstein’s acute understanding of spectatorial desire, the desire to conceive of the cinematic event in narrative terms even if those narrative terms are a stripped down and simplified version of the already simple “travel situation,” that needs attention. For Eisenstein the narrative concept of the journey, even if it is only out of oneself, is always implied. Re-reading Gaudreault’s “Film, Narrative, Narration,” where Gaudreault finds himself re-reading Christian Metz, Musser offers the following: “Gaudreault asserted in ‘Film, Narrative, Narration’ that all films have narrative, whether they be Déjeuner de bébé or L’Aroseur arrosé. ‘Thus when cinema is said to “take the narrative road” at a certain moment of its history,’ Gaudreault argued that ‘this is not the “innate” kind of narrativity just described, but the second level.’”13 Gaudreault’s choice of words is especially important to this examination of the road film and its cinematic predecessors. He discusses, via Christian Metz, the cinema “taking the narrative road,” a phrasing that describes film history itself in terms of travel. What Gaudreault, Musser, and Gunning seem aware of and yet unable to reconcile, however, is that motion itself is inherently narratival. Movement

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simultaneously shows and tells a story, or, perhaps more accurately, it tells through showing.14 Motion is, of course, the most primitive of stories, but it is also a fascinatingly seductive one, an idea Eisenstein is quite aware of. Montage—or, more generally, cutting—is effective because it is spatially and temporally dynamic. The cut, at the most basic level, facilitates motion, elongating, restructuring, and hyperbolizing it. What many scholars of early cinema seem to underplay, however, is the equally dynamic—we might substitute with the word “transportative” or even “narratival”—potential of mise-en-scène.15 The movement within a frame, the dynamism and composition of the shot, is as important to a film’s narrative potential and its emotional effect as the eventual organization of those shots. The so-called “second layer of narrativity,” to which Musser and Gaudreault refer, is motion itself; the cut is simply its most articulate and most complex expression. In Time and Free Will, turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson analyzes motion in terms that reveal the early part of the century’s narratival understanding of the concept, an idea that will prove especially valuable as we examine images of the period. In his discussion of mobility, space, and time Bergson asserts that: the successive positions of the moving body really do occupy space, but . . . the process by which it passes from one position to the other, a process which occupies duration and which has no reality except for a conscious spectator, eludes space. We have to do here not with an object but with a progress: motion, in so far as it is a passage from one point to another, is a mental synthesis, a psychic and therefore unextended process. Space contains only parts of space, and at whatever point of space we consider the moving body, we shall get only a position. If consciousness is aware of anything more than positions, the reason is that it keeps successive positions in mind and synthesizes them.16

While he never articulates the idea of narrative experience, and while his work never explores the then-new technology of the cinema, both ideas lurk in the background of Bergson’s words. Bergson’s idea that the experience of motion is facilitated by a mental synthesis that links the “parts” of motion into an experiential “whole” sound very much like the accepted explanation for the optical “trick” of the cinema. As in Bergson’s analogy, the parts of a film (i.e. each frame) are linked together in the mind’s eye to create a seamless “whole.” It is the complexity of this process, its “divisibility,” to use Bergson’s terminology,

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that constitutes the “narrativity” of the cinema.17 Moving pictures, no matter their simplicity, tell the story of motion. As Bergson is careful to point out, this idea of motion is conceived of in terms of “progress,” an idea that we will return to in a variety of ways throughout this study. Key to Bergson’s understanding of the body moving through space, however, is the idea of the conscious and synthesizing spectator, a key though critically elusive narratival element. Whatever the reasons for the simultaneity, spectatorial desire for motion, for increasingly and more complexly mobile images, coincided with what Metz might call the cinema’s taking “the narrative road.” Early attempts to meet, perhaps even to catalyze, this demand frequently focused on the narrative structure of travel. From the beginning, however, the story being told was far from romantic. Eadweard Muybridge, one of the cinema’s important forerunners, whose work largely pre-dates the invention of the automobile, was fascinated by and attracted to motion. In the age of the machine, however, Muybridge’s work reveals a desire to return to the organic, autonomous, and not automated body in motion. Studying Muybridge’s Motion: The Picaresque Meets the Picturesque While it is tempting to refer to Muybridge as a cinematic pioneer, his energies at the turn of the century were focused squarely on a project that appears opposite to the cinema itself. As Brian Winston succinctly indicates in a short “ode” to the Zoetrope written for Sight and Sound, Muybridge sought to stop motion so that it could be critically studied; he in fact saw no narrative or entertainment potential for his groundbreaking work.18 Despite his well publicized and highly commercial work as a still photographer and his often-remarked-upon flamboyance, Muybridge saw his motion studies principally as scientific curiosities; at least this is how he sold them. Muybridge’s basic organizing principals and his obsession to “know” and display the secrets of motion, however, are of critical importance to this examination because they function to create and, in a literal and figurative sense, mobilize an audience in need of motion. Critical examinations of Muybridge’s “fascination” with motion have concentrated almost solely on his work in Pennsylvania in the mid-1880s, primarily on the series photographs of animals and people for which Muybridge became most famous. Comparatively little

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attention has been paid to Muybridge’s earlier flirtations with what we today regard as the motion picture. These originary moments are of particular importance for their biographical peculiarities and their bizarre relationship to the contemporary road movie. Early in his imagistic career, Muybridge was principally concerned with his own physical, geographical motion and became one of the first photographers to literally take his show on the road. Muybridge’s non-series photographs, many of which were produced in the midst of a portraiture boom, are as concerned with and governed by the concept of motion as his work in Pennsylvania. These early photographs resemble, in form and content, the subjects that would dominate the cinema in years to come. He was an innovator of travel views, still photographs taken at popular landmarks or conversely at locations deemed inaccessible to the general public. Through this work in the realm of still photography he helped to forecast the future direction of the cinematic arts, which would, as Christie has demonstrated, include the task of transporting the spectator via the moving image. In the late 1850s, Muybridge, somewhat bored with portraiture and its studio-based rigors, changed his name to “Helios” (the ancient Greek sun-god typically represented driving a chariot across the heavens) and began his career as a traveling photographer. He packed his studio into, around, and on top of a custom-designed light carriage, calling the transformed contraption “Helios’ Flying Studio.” Gordon Hendricks, in what remains the most comprehensive biographical study of Muybridge, captures the mobility of the young photographer: “‘Helios’ continued to make his rounds and by early 1870 had acquired a specially built wagon for his equipment. This wagon was caught by his lens in a stereograph. He also photographed his apparatus. His business in photographing private residences also resulted in excellent work, and, on May 25 he photographed the laying of the cornerstone of the new Mint. ‘A photographer with his flying studio was on hand,’ the Bulletin reported, ‘and took several views of the scene.’”19 Hendricks implies a certain restlessness in spirit in Muybridge, a picaro’s desire for travel and adventure substantiated most peculiarly in Muybridge’s lack of a home address during 1879. As Hendrick’s succinctly puts it, “Other photographers solicited customers for their parlors, but only ‘Helios’ wanted to go afield.”20 While still photography was the only photography available to him, mobility was of critical importance to Muybridge’s understanding of

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the photographic world, allowing him to “view” scenes the public would pay to see. Muybridge’s itinerant photography appealed to a public for whom the novelty of static, indoor portraits was fading. His work and the work of other mobile photographers helped to develop a taste for seeing the world “out there” through the photographer’s portable lens. This relationship between traveler and spectator would have a profound effect on the soon-to-form cinematic audience’s relationship to screen subjects. In the summer and fall of 1867 Muybridge photographed Yosemite Valley. The resulting 260 published views (some stereographic and others mounted on cardboard) earned the photographer a local (soon to become national) reputation. Muybridge’s keen sense of self-promotion, along with a string of favorable reviews of the Yosemite images, propelled the photographer’s rise. Many of the reviewers were impressed by Helios’s ability to, in photographing the waterfalls in the valley, capture a sense of motion. The review of the series of photographs in The Daily Alta California, however, is most interesting in its prefiguring of Muybridge’s later career: “The view of the Yu-wi-hah or Nevada Fall is a fine piece of Instantaneous photographing. It seems as though the artist had arrested the descending sheet of water until its mottled and foamy surface paid tribute to his genius.”21 Muybridge, the mobile photographer, was already gaining a reputation as a “photographer of motion” as well. Muybridge merged “mobility” and its mysteries with what had hitherto been conceived of as a static art form and, as Helios, photographed an array of remote and especially picturesque locations. This rethinking of photography as not necessarily studio-bound occurred at precisely the moment that America’s feelings regarding mobility and stasis were being profoundly altered by the resurgent proliferation of the American railroad. Although the bulk of Muybridge’s work predates the introduction of the automobile in America, America’s mobile curiosity had already been piqued; indeed, Helios’ flying studio is testament to what might be understood as this country’s intrepid vehicularity. Muybridge’s own personal mobility was becoming increasingly important to a public demanding motion. Soon he would respond to that demand in a more microscopic way. His extraordinary popularity as mobile photographer and his talent as self-promoter made Muybridge the perfect candidate to settle a now-familiar longstanding debate regarding the stride of the running horse: do all four legs of the horse leave the ground as the horse

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reaches a full gait? Muybridge’s involvement in this debate and his eventual dedication to understanding the mobility of animals generally, soon put the photographer “on the road” again to present, narrate, and in some cases sell his findings to an equally motion-mad international public. In the 1870s, Muybridge’s subject for his study of motion was a horse (Occident) and carriage moving, at a distance of some forty feet, in front of his camera at a rate of thirty-six feet per second. As Muybridge’s notes indicate, the resulting photograph was “retouched as is customary at this time with all first-class photographic work, for the purpose of giving a better effect to the details.”22 As Muybridge’s words indicate, his purpose in 1877 was to mechanically reproduce the same critical photograph—the photograph that contained the “answer” to the bet’s question. In other words, his task was to capture (stop) and distribute one fleeting but frozen (and enhanced) moment of motion. These “scientific” curiosities were performed in answer to a presumed spectatorial question. Muybridge’s work, then, is based on a conversational model, a fact supported by his eventual commitment to the lecture circuit in support of his work. More than a series of attractions whose interest is self-contained, Muybridge’s work might be considered a series of responses to implied spectatorial questions: What does a horse look like when it runs? What about a man? There were, however, those in Muybridge’s “public” who doubted the veracity of his claims and who accused the photographer of trickery, thereby increasing the outward reach of Muybridge’s work and creating a need for more of it (to “prove” his claims). A reviewer from The Post, for example, faults the “stiffness” of the driver and calls the whole set-up “un-natural.” His untrained eye imagines a photo “alive” with movement and reverberating with an occasional “hieyar.”23 What the author and others like him did not realize, however, was that their criticism actually created for Muybridge a need to do precisely that: to create “photographs alive with motion.” His first attempts toward this goal are his now quite famous series photographs, which account more fully for the process of motion. Muybridge’s photographs, series and otherwise, demonstrate the nascent period of a growing American interest in mobility, with control and loss of control over time and space. Muybridge fed the public’s hunger, offering photographic examinations of more and more bodies in motion, and eventually arranging quantities of these still images to create the illusion of re-animation. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope—which projected light through a rapidly moving glass disc

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upon which were printed detailed drawings, modeled on the photographs he had taken—created a sensation in the early 1880s, leading to renewed and increasingly advanced efforts in serial imagery in Philadelphia that resulted, ultimately, in the 1887 publication of Animal Locomotion. Even in his earliest traveling career, the success of Muybridge’s photographs and the press surrounding them attest to the public’s pleasure in images that could move them, however metaphorically. By the late 1880s, this interest in mobility had developed into something less metaphorically “tourisitic” and, on the surface at least, more “scientific.” Rather than exotic, unfamiliar, or inaccessible landscapes, Muybridge produced images of bodies, animal and human, engaged in familiar activities. The increasingly complex technology of Muybridge’s apparatus, however, and an artificially rigorous mise-enscène (rather than a natural landscape or even the white background of his earlier series photographs, his later images depict figures “performing” in front of a numbered grid), render these activities strange, make the ordinary seem remarkable, perhaps even distant. In Muybridge’s “science,” however, can also be found the critical, primal stirrings of a larger set of concerns with regard to motion, anxieties that continue to linger in our cinematic present. This is more than one man’s obsession with questions regarding human kinesis; these images betray a national—in fact, an international— dilemma that Muybridge was responding to and helping to address. While a number of Muybridge’s Philadelphia motion studies concern animals, most fascinating are those series of photographs that take the human body as their subject. Muybridge’s work occurred at a time when man’s relationship to machines, especially to the technology of transportation, was changing the way individuals perceived themselves and their landscape. Much attention has been given to the gender problems inherent in these images—to the fact that the men often perform “masculine” activities and the women perform “feminine” or domestic activities, and to the fact that most of these activities are performed unclothed. Linda Williams is especially attentive to this idea and explores the same tendency in the work of French narrative film pioneer Georges Méliès.24 Beyond their controversially erotic and gendered content, however, these images also speak to the issue of modernity. The bodies depicted, male and female, are stripped of all technological prosthetics—including clothing. These are “primitive” bodies whose only activity is their momentarily glimpsed motion. Muybridge’s famous

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“Man Walking” or perhaps his “Man Cutting Wood” might be understood as assuaging the anxiety of “man in the midst of a technological revolution” by presenting images of humanity in an idealized, pre-technological state.25 But it is a bit too romantic to speculate that audiences were simply put at ease by the mere act of watching still images of naked people reanimated. As “natural” as Muybridge wanted his images to seem, there is nothing natural about a naked man cutting wood in front of a numbered grid. There is something else going on in this work, then, something besides assuagement and something beyond voyeurism but something related to both. These unnatural naturalist images are, once again, an answer to an implied spectatorial question: “What will become of the body?“ Muybridge’s work appears to offer a degree of protected optimism as it consistently reaffirms the efficiency of the human machine. This is a potentially humanizing effect, yet it is one based on the fact of visual denial and self-imposed compositional erasure. The images themselves are easy because they deny those elements that are disruptive to the body’s prominence in the order of things. Muybridge’s images, in other words, artificially compose a world where the human body, in all of its stripped-down, oxymoronically complex simplicity, is once again central. Muybridge’s primitive scenarios, in this way, are contradictory on a number of levels. First, technology was necessary to the experiments themselves even if the subjects appear organic. Mark Seltzer, in Bodies and Machines, discusses what he terms “Muybridge’s fascination with the technological replication of ‘the natural.’”26 We are faced with images of man or woman by him or herself—but caught by a machine. These photographs do depict the human body at an important transitional period, before those bodies became inextricably linked to mechanisms of transportation such as the train and automobile. The intrusion of Muybridge’s apparatus itself, however, becomes a transportative machine in its ability to contain the body and make it appear elsewhere, in its ability to capture that body in a state that is at once supposedly natural and utterly impossible. By linking Muybridge’s pre-series photography to his work in the late 1880s, a curious pattern of memorialization develops. His early work “caught” a landscape about to be permanently altered by a culture bent on making the inaccessible seem accessible, making the distant seem near. The rise of vehicular culture in the years following this work renders these landscape images all the more extraordinary. Similarly, Muybridge’s later work “caught” (perhaps “created” or “re-created”

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would be better terms) human bodies free from the machines that would soon come to define them, and caught these images with another critically important machine. Muybridge, then, speaks to the cultural fascination with motion on two distinct but related levels. He begins as a picaresque adventurer, satisfying the public’s desire to look at the unreachable and providing “views” of a world that seemed incomprehensibly large, and ends by creating strangely nostalgic views of man’s still central position in a curiously and rapidly shrinking world, views in which the subject is, quite literally, the mise-enscène. Though drawing a direct line from Muybridge’s work to, for example, road movies of the twenty-first century would be a bit of a critical stretch, his images do presage a set of concerns that will be central to the cinema generally and will come to shape the road movie specifically. Muybridge, however, was most assuredly not alone. As pictures began to truly move in the mid-1890s, the desire to memorialize the familiar and to problematize intrusions upon it becomes almost standardized. The Lumières: Moving Snapshots, Travel, and The Automobile Accident Heirs to a highly successful photographic plate manufacturing company, Louis and Auguste Lumière, like Muybridge, were weaned on still photography. In 1894 their father, Antoine, purchased an Edison Kinetoscope, and the brothers went to work tinkering with and improving the machine. These improvements resulted in the Cinématographe in 1895, a combined moving-picture camera and projector.27 Lightweight and elegant in its technological simplicity, the device also traveled easily; this transportability, in fact, would facilitate an important part of the Lumières’ relationship to the subject of motion. Designed as the Cinématographe was to capture and project motion, mobile and vehicular subjects seemed to beg for its gaze. The Lumières’ compositional selectivity, however, tells us much about their relationship to and skepticism of the world of machines, at least certain machines. Compositionally deliberate, the “typical” Cinématographe subject was the static recording of motion, generally human motion.28 A case in point is a beautifully composed film entitled Washerwomen on the River (Lumière Catalogue #626).29 Fascinating, in part because it captures the intricacies of “routine,” the film’s composition is vertically stacked, creating the illusion of several strips of film contained within one immobile frame. This vertical stacking is ideologically suggestive

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because the vertical arrangement of the planes of action indicates a hierarchy of labor and leisure. Shot from across the river and composed as a medium-long shot, the film captures women washing clothes in the bottom of the frame (horizontal plane of action #1). This, of course, is the “subject” of the film—its catalogue title indicates as much. Directly above the washerwomen, however, men gaze towards the camera, smiling and, it seems, acknowledging its existence (horizontal plane of action #2). Above the men, a fairly crowded street is observed (horizontal plane of action #3). The film is remarkable in that it captures three separate fields of motion in one fifty-second, stationary shot. More than the pre-cinematic equivalent of the establishing shot, this short, self-contained film moves beyond the geographical, establishing with incredible economy and without cuts, the socially complex space of labor that the women occupy. This shot in particular demonstrates the Lumières’ desire to capture as much mobility—and critically, ideologically significant mobility—as possible. Labor and leisure are, of course, of fundamental importance to the films in the Lumière catalogue, and this is a rare film that exhibits both realms within the same frame, vertically stacked and separated by gender. To argue that the planes of action in Washerwomen on the River represent discrete “scenes,” however, is to overstate the point. This film and several similar to it demonstrate the degree to which motion was important to the Lumières. It also suggests an acknowledgement of spectatorial sophistication. The lore surrounding the early cinematic event frequently presents the naïve audience member who, for instance, would have been terrified by the image of a train “approaching” them. The visual design of many of the Lumière subjects, however, suggests a faith in the audience. The films are often compositionally intricate and complex; the levels of action multiple and deep. As Charles Musser observes, location compositions like this one are the aesthetic antithesis of, for instance, the early Edison films, which were shot within the walls of the Black Maria, against black backdrops so that the “subject” of the film could be more simply “focused” upon.30 Not transportational in the conventional sense of the term, this film—like so many of the Lumières’ earliest subjects—relies upon the apparatus’s ability to glimpse the critical centrality of collective mobility to the social order of contemporary French culture, however divided (by class, by gender) that order might be. Following, consciously or unconsciously, Siegfried Kracauer’s suggestion that the Lumières “seemed anxious to avoid any personal interference with the given data” and his designation of their work as

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“detached records,” there has, until recently, been some reluctance to attach anything resembling authorial agency to these films. This, in spite of the fact that Kracauer himself also acknowledges (though is seldom remembered for doing so) the keen sense of thematic organization, the precise compositional decisions binding many of their earliest films when he writes that “their themes were public places, with throngs of people moving in diverse directions. The crowded streets captured by the stereographic photographs of the late ‘fifties thus reappeared on the primitive screen.”31 Camera position was critical in their effort to capture as much of this mass movement within the frame as possible. The Lumière diagonal is a case in point. In perhaps their most famous film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Catalogue #653), the upper right to lower left diagonal composition is strikingly realized. The movement of the train across the diagonal allows the train to remain in the frame for as long as possible. The result is a frame literally alive with motion. This short film that depicts the arrival and unloading of locomotive passengers is also a precursor to the travel films that would later comprise the bulk of the Lumières’ catalogue. Already the technology of transportation, here in the form of a locomotive, becomes a seductive cinematic subject. The logic contained within this image would seem to contradict the presentation of the pure, organic body, however much an illusion or construction, as it exists in Muybridge’s work. In the frame of the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is a mass of clothed men and women using technology and seemingly pleased to be doing so. Not only does the film appear unanxious about the technology of transportation, it seems to celebrate it. Key to this film and the several films in the Lumière catalogue composed along the same basic lines is the fact that the technology at hand maintains, in fact effectively creates, new notions of community. Motion, at least as it is imagined in these train films, is a process that occurs when people are together. The film’s clear attention to the crowd is evidence of this idea. In fact, it seems clear that the train is less the subject of the shot than the crowd itself or is, at least, equal to it in importance. This is consistent, of course, with the Lumières’ general interest in groups of people—playing, eating, working, leaving work, etc. The momentary chaos the camera glimpses, what Kracuaer calls the “confusion of arrival and departure,” is also a heavily mediated, timed, and officially coordinated moment of confusion.32 Though the film’s fifty seconds pass before a proper “resolution,” the implication of one is strong enough. The

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viewer is not invited to feel bewildered, confused, or distressed about the future of these particular traveling bodies. The technology of travel changed the way individuals saw the world around them; for the first time people could experience landscapes moving past them in rapid motion while they remained (relatively) stationary on board a moving object. The cinema, which was developing alongside this technology, recreated these ways of seeing. A remarkable Lumière film shot at the Universal Exhibition in 1900, a location that literalizes the notion of “attraction,” seems to defy logic because its subjects appear to move effortlessly. Universal Exhibition 1900: View of a Moving Sidewalk (Catalogue #1156) is an unedited fifty-second “tracking” shot created by carrying the camera onto a moving sidewalk, like a flattened out escalator, while two other moving sidewalks are in full operation. Positioned to exploit the right-to-left diagonal so that as many bodies as possible are contained within the frame at once, the camera moves or tracks forward. The result is a beautiful symphony of kineticism—back and forth with only the slightest suggestion of bodily effort on the part of the spirit-like passers by. The shot is technically important in that it suggests the evocative power of the camera in motion. It is sociologically interesting also in that it captures a group of uncontained bodies being effortlessly transported. Again, the mobility of this shot is celebrated—the passers-by glide along in front of the camera, smiling amusedly and comfortably. Technology both facilitates their collective movement and captures it. Obviously interested in the complexities of motion and its onscreen potential, the Lumières engaged in a variety of experiments. One such experiment, an edited fifty-second film “about” the destructive power of the automobile, fits within a larger early cinematic trend. This film, like Muybridge’s work, laments the connection between bodies and machines, though in a much more intentionally humorous way. The film is titled The Automobile Accident (Catalogue #2020), and while this is not their first edited film, it marks an interesting movement in the early cinema’s journey toward narrative complexity in a fashion that is intricately related to the automobile and its ability not so much to transport as to transform. It is a film that speaks to the automobile’s effects on the community, its class status, and its potential violence both to the individual and, more critically for the brothers, the collective body the bulk of their work so reveres.

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This early road—or, perhaps more appropriately, “street”—film can best be thought of as a trick film of sorts, as its chief interest would have been its presentation of a whimsical, if violent, illusion. A disheveled, already crippled, and apparently homeless man attempts to cross the street and is run over by a speeding automobile. His crumpled and thoroughly dismembered body, left in the middle of the street, is then re-assembled (legs are dipped into a large vat of glue and placed appropriately, etc.) by a concerned group of passers-by (see Figure 1.1). The illusion is created by several deftly placed and, one would suppose, barely perceptible cuts. Directly before “impact” the actor’s body is substituted with a similarly clothed mannequin. The substitution trick, as it is called, is often associated with Geroges Méliès in France and Cecil Hepworth in England, although it was used widely for “special effects” in the early twentieth century.33 Edison and Porter employ it at an especially violent moment atop the moving locomotive in The Great Train Robbery (1903), examined later in the chapter. The Lumières, however, were also interested in its spectacular and in this case socially critical potential. Since the man is crippled from the beginning of the film, the viewer assumes that such collision between man and machine is a regular occurrence. The streets, the film suggests in its own disturbingly comedic fashion, are no longer safe for a man alone without his attending machines, or more specifically, without an automobile. Lynne Kirby, in her article “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” and Ian Christie, in The Last Machine, both address the early cinematic fascination with the destructive capabilities of automobiles and locomotives and their effect upon the collective psyche. Christie in particular discusses the formation of a highly iconographic, early cinematic mini-genre that we might call “the automobile accident film.” Films such as the Lumières’ The Automobile Accident cast machine and operator in a villainous light as both, in the space of only minutes (sometimes seconds), spin wildly out of control, destroying everything in their path. As Christie suggests, the automobile and its resulting destruction were, in fact, favorite topics of the trick film. British director Cecil Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900) takes an automobile as its subject and, as the catalogue vividly describes, “It dashes full into the spectator, who sees ‘stars’ as the picture comes to an end.” Christie describes what we actually see in the following, more understated terms: “A black screen with animated exclamation marks and, presumably, the victim’s last words: ‘Oh dear, mother will be pleased.’”34

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Figure 1.1 The Automobile Accident. Automotive technology has rendered the body vulnerable, and the community must unite to reassemble the hapless pedestrian.

Less a “trick film” in fact, the effect here is achieved by camera placement in front of the oncoming vehicle and by a barrage of exclamatory, semi-coherent titles. Hepworth employed stop motion photography for a thematically similar film of the same year entitled Explosion of a Motor Car where, as per the film’s unambiguous title, a motorcar approaching the camera, which is placed on almost the identical diagonal as in the first film, explodes spontaneously, creating a shower of limbs much to the bewilderment of a concerned policeman. Both of these films are especially intriguing for their desire to depict automotive destruction alongside mobility as usual. In the first film, a passenger-filled horse and carriage actively and responsibly misses the camera and in the second, bystanders gaze at the rain of dismemberment in awe and shock. Méliès’s The ParisMonte Carlo Run in Two Hours (Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en deux heures, 1905) also uses stop motion to depict “a reckless automobile race across France, with someone or something being knocked over by a car in every scene.” 35 In spite of the broad humor and in spite of Christie’s well-honed understatement, however, there is something horrifying in these films; collectively they evince a logic of terror

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framed by a delight in the cinema’s presumably less destructive technological capabilities. The trend of the automobile trick film had a good run, about half a dozen years. While it is tempting simply to write off this sub-generic moment as an interesting phase in the development of the cinema, it is important to note the degree to which its precepts affect even today’s cinema. Occurring early in the cinema’s narrative history, these films demonstrate the narrative possibility of the cut to create the illusion of the passage of time and space. Furthermore, there is a remarkable self-consciousness to the “cutting” of these films that themselves are about the “cutting” apart of the human body and its various parts. Along with this more personal sort of dismemberment, the Lumières’ film suggests that the automobile is in the process of destroying and dismembering what was once “community.” The old man in the film walks alone. The driver of the car drives alone. It is not until the man is dismembered by the vehicle that the community unites to put him back together. Taken collectively, these films define an early moment in the formation of a recurring motif in the contemporary road film: the witnessing of roadside atrocities as a sign of the times, something contemporary directors such as David Lynch and Oliver Stone repeatedly return to.36 On a certain level, roads signify progress. The rhetoric surrounding both rail and paved roads capitalizes on this forward-moving, linear logic. Progress, however, in these early films and in many later road films is viewed as an invasive and often destructive venture. Jean-Luc Godard’s famous tracking shot in Weekend (Week End, 1967) seems most poignantly to illustrate this point: the long take, while replete with a sharp humor (not unlike its early predecessors), reveals what seems like miles of road-side chaos and destruction: bodies bleeding, people crying out in pain, cars aflame, horns honking, traffic barely moving, etc. This moment in the film, interrupted by full-screen titles, comments on the destructive stasis of a contemporary society that remains under the illusion that it’s moving right along. There is an interesting coda to this analysis of the Lumières and their relationship to the gestational road movie. While I have referred in the preceding analysis to the operators responsible for these films as “the Lumières,” it is critical to point out that Louis (the principal photographer) was responsible for less than fifty of the 2,113 items in the Lumières’ 1903 catalogue. The remainder was shot by hired operators using the Lumière camera.37 Tracing who shot which film would

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be as difficult as it would be intriguing. The mere fact of the Lumières’ “world-roving” operators photographing scenes and, perhaps without fully realizing it, shrinking the globe as a result, however, complicates the brothers’ relationship to the idea of mobility. These traveling cameramen created for the early 1900s spectator a sensation of instantaneous travel beyond the fastest motor-cars and far exceeding the speediest trains. In one evening, the viewer could be treated to scenes of Paris, Venice, London, Dublin, Belfast, Spain, New York, Chicago, Mexico, Russia, Jerusalem, Egypt, Indochina, Japan and Africa. In fact, as Charles Musser points out, “by 1897 the Lumières had shot on every continent but Antarctica.”38 The Cinématographe was itself a world traveler, simulating its experiences for those who witnessed its play of light and shadow. While the views it provided most certainly provoked curiosity about the world “out there,” it also potentially supplanted, or at least supplemented, the need to venture out on one’s own. Spectators at these programs were collectively being moved (in all senses), collectively experiencing. The Lumière brothers, of course, were neither the only producers of travel views, nor were they rare or especially provocative among trick filmmakers. Eager to employ the latest fad and committed to their conviction that the entire moving-picture phenomenon would eventually fade, the diversity within the brothers’ catalogue represents much larger trends and a desire to appeal to rapidly shifting public tastes. That they produced a “topical” comedy film like The Automobile Accident alongside films celebrating more collective and, at the time, traditional modes of transportation, however, is significant, reflecting a skepticism of modernity as it was represented by the automobile and its socially disruptive potential. This protection of the status quo, this articulation of a distinct distrust of modernity, points to the cinema’s early-formed fears, its seemingly inherent nostalgia, and its ability to surreptitiously thrust these fears and this nostalgia upon the viewer. As I seek to demonstrate, the road movie’s apparent celebration of forward motion is, much as it was in these earlier examples, often a self-consciously tragic cover for a desire to roll history back, to return to a pre-technological, mythically innocent moment. As the 1900s began, these concerns manifested themselves in increasingly unexpected ways. In the work of cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès, they became lunar as the cinematic magician humorously warned against the technological by looking toward its future; Thomas Edison and Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), on the other hand, critiqued progress by looking back.

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Allegorical Journeys Back and Forth: A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery Two seemingly divergent narrative films from the early 1900s concretize the key ideological aspects of the journey film’s relationship to progress and technological advancement. A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) and The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter and Thomas Edison, 1903) both imagine collective travel scenarios and pattern their complex narrative aesthetic on the potentialities of this situation. One looking to the future and the other to a slowly receding past, the films also interestingly presage the generic and the pre-generic road movie’s puzzling, often troubling, blend of nostalgia and modernity. While typically considered a screen magician and a master of the trick film, Méliès demonstrates in A Trip to the Moon a profound interest in and knowledge of the power of kinesis to the cinematic process.39 A longer film and one heavily reliant on editing, Méliès’s film, like the Lumières’ road/street film, is a trick film. The tricks, however, are most frequently employed to create the illusion of linear mobility, and here the mobility is interplanetary. The film begins with the travelers’ elaborate, earth-bound preparations for flight. The leader of “The Astronomer’s Club,” played by Méliès himself, has drawn on a blackboard his plan for the trip and, in the background, our lunar destination can be faintly discerned at telescope’s end. As John Frazer has noted, the interior of the factory resembles Méliès’s glass-roofed studio in Montreuil, connecting in a manner that should not be understated the implied similarities between filmmaker and, in this case, interplanetary travel coordinator.40 The scene dissolves into a scene in the factory where the ship is being constructed. Another dissolve brings the viewer to the roof of the factory; the city below appears to be awash in industrial pollution as the factory chimneys emit thick columns of smoke. While the astronauts’ adventures on the moon and their return to earth are of interest largely for their acrobatic accomplishments, it is the overall continuity of the film and its relationship to the more “accepted” travel genre that is critical to us here. Méliès’s film is important to the genre of the road film in that it, like its offspring, occurs at a moment of technological crisis and reaction. Méliès was obsessed with transportation; the narrative structure of the journey and its inherent surprises are perfectly suited to his magical approach. Later in his career, he even produced his own version of the car-as-destroyer

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film, The Paris-Monte Carlo Run in Two Hours (1905). A Trip to the Moon, however, extends the theme of earth-bound chaos to otherplanetary realms. The film is, to be sure, good humored enough, but it simultaneously tells a disturbing story about technological progress, colonialism, and destruction. It is a thoroughly modern film in both form and content, using editing to create an unlikely but cohesive narrative structure. However, it is also a film nervous about its own modernity. The critical roof-top shot previously alluded to, where the factory chimneys belch forth endless streams of smoke into the atmosphere, indicates that the purpose of the launch has something to do with the destruction of what is presumably our own planet. Travel to the moon is not therefore merely whimsical; it is, perhaps, necessary (see Figure 1.2). Linear movement is key to Méliès’s film; the plot advances with the imaginary vehicle. The implied “motion” of the rocket, however, involves more than the dissolve or the substitution trick. The launch (through double exposure) creates the illusion of a traveling shot; it is as though the camera was strapped to the front of the rocket ship. The rocket’s return to the earth’s atmosphere is equally fascinating and quite differently realized. John Frazer summarizes the sequence of shots as follows: “The next three shots have an editorial linkage seldom found in Méliès’s work. The spaceship falls toward the earth. It leaves the frame. In the next shot it reenters the frame and plunges into the sea, a real photographed sea. In the third shot the missile again enters the frame and lands on the bottom of the sea, this time a fish tank. The continuity of action and direction are maintained through all three shots.”41 What Frazer attends to here and what I find so fascinating is Méliès’s use of the cut to simulate linear, and in this case vertical and downward, motion, his use of technique to enhance the journey-like narrative structure. Paul Hammond has commented on the importance of travel to Méliès’s form: “Méliès’ travelogues are his most majestic productions, on a spectacular scale, sometimes consisting of thirty or more scenes, and lasting 15–20 minutes. The simple linear structure of the journey ‘from A to B’ lent itself to the simple linear construction of Star Films: there is a sort of ‘pantographic’ relationship between the metres of film expended and the kilometres of road or ocean or space to be covered.”42 Simple? Perhaps. But the imagery involved and the mechanisms employed to create the illusion of motion have sufficiently captivated audiences and filmmakers alike since 1902 to necessitate not only this

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Figure 1.2 A Trip to the Moon (1902). Prior to launch, astronomers examine the planet they will leave behind as their own interplanetary labors choke the earth’s atmosphere.

chapter, which explores the prehistory of the road film, but this book as a whole, which looks at the ways in which this early cinematic obsession, brought on by the cinema’s simultaneous birth with mechanized travel, still guides us. Hammond’s invocation of pantography suggests that there is a scaled correspondence between the physical, unwinding length of film and the road that is graphically represented. This relationship, this suggestion that film resembles the road, is one that road film makers return to repeatedly. Despite its fantastic theme, Méliès’s narrative film works with cinematic conventions already established in the travel film. A Trip to the Moon, however, takes the basic premise of the journey and hyperextends it spatially, temporally, and dramatically. For, unlike the travel film, the entire process of the journey is represented. The spectator is not offered merely a few views from the rocket ship window but is aligned with the space explorers from their pre-launch preparations until their return to the earth. This film has characters, and they guide the viewer through what was a fairly complex linear narrative structure. The omnipresence of the movie camera is disrupted and reinforced by this film. The camera travels to a supposed location impossible to the viewer both temporally and spatially. Yet each step in the journey is accounted for. The Lumière travel subjects, as a counterexample, would begin and end in the same location, usually within the same frame.

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A Trip to the Moon is also critically linked to the travel films of the day in its depiction of the moon’s inhabitants, the Selenites, who are dressed and behave in a perversely exaggerated spectacle of the “native”; they even throw spears at our unfortunate travelers. A film reliant upon both the wonder and the terror of mechanized travel— here of the lunar variety—A Trip to the Moon establishes the critical link between cinematic narrative and the journey and begins to articulate the cinema’s conflicted relationship to mobile technologies. The cinematic journey provided early narrative filmmakers with the profound challenge of creating viable techniques by which the illusion of the passage through time and space could be visually represented. These ideas, as well as the sometimes not-so-latent anxieties informing them, become even more complex in The Great Train Robbery. Ian Christie, in discussing the switch from trains to automobiles as cinematic subjects and formal templates, argues that: “Trains were established technology; they ran on rails and transported the masses, according to a timetable. The final years of the old century saw the emergence of a radical challenge to this predictable, conformist means of travel. After German engineers developed the internal combustion engine in the 1880s, the motor car soon became an attractive personal alternative to the enforced collectivity of the railway. Motor cars not only allowed brave individualists to ‘go off the rails’; they also fostered an enthusiasm for speed as a new and soon addictive sensation.”43 Christie’s assertions will certainly be of use in Chapter 2, which, among other things, will examine the curious fascination with the automobile in film noir and American gangster pictures, as well as the rugged and romantic individualism of the horse in the Western. But they are also relevant to an understanding of Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which arises as something of a counterpoint to the Lumières’ earlier celebration of locomotion. The film is decidedly about the locomotive. It is also, however, a deeply disturbing commentary on the idea of progress itself. While even Edison’s earlier Black Maria films are about motion in the most basic sense, The Great Train Robbery is unusual in its frankness regarding the connectedness between forward, linear motion and the idea of narrative identification. The hand-colored gunman shooting at the spectator, an emblematic shot that might have been inserted by the exhibitor at either the movie’s beginning or conclusion, labeled “realism” in the catalogue, is a telling reminder that, with this film, an old way of viewing was being systematically destroyed, to be replaced by a new mode.44

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As Charles Musser has pointed out, The Great Train Robbery seems to utilize, in potentially frightening ways, several of the elements of the former “passenger” genre and was, in fact, sometimes programmed with railway “views.”45 The viewer is compelled to align his or her sympathies with the passengers on board the train—becoming a surrogate passenger him-/herself. This process of identification is reminiscent of the premise of early travel films, which encouraged their “participants” to come along on their journeys to remote locations. The shots from the interior of the moving train, the simulated landscape whizzing by through the window in the background, help to reinforce this notion in a manner not unlike the phantom rides some years prior. The shots that physically follow the bandits outside and on top of the train, however, complicate this process of indentification, allowing the spectator views beyond those of the passengers for the sake of dramatic tension. Spectatorial alignment is, on one very important level, with the technology of movement itself, with the locomotive and its forward motion through space and narrative. This is significant, for it introduces an early fascination with following the fate of a moving object precisely because its occupants are forced along due to the collective nature of this mode of transportation. This is a passenger film gone wrong, with the passengers’ vulnerability brought on by technology.46 The unloading of the car and the subsequent murder of several passengers is especially shocking in its disturbing parallels to the collectivity and vulnerability of cinematic spectatorship. Indeed, the terror of The Great Train Robbery is precisely this connection between audience and passenger, suggesting the vulnerability and potential victimization of the viewing audience, which, in a manner quite similar to the characters depicted on screen, has been corralled together in the hopes of being transported, only to find themselves witness to a moment of unforeseen violence. The close-up of the bandit aiming and firing his gun straight at the audience reinforces this paranoid vision. The shot is brutal. It enforces and punishes viewer identification in the space of seconds and comments on the consequences of technology and progress in a manner that will run through the road movie well into its present form. Mickey and Mallory’s TV-induced nightmare visions in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) are the information age’s version of this emblematic shot. The Great Train Robbery aligns “progress” (the railroad) with terror and violence, a

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type of violence akin to that in the Lumières’ film but all the more “real” for its lack of humor, for its severity. Muybridge, the Lumières, Méliès, and Edison and Porter set in motion the impulse to analyze motion. Together they illustrate the importance of the concept of human mobility to the early cinematic imagination. The impulse toward movement, however, does not arise simply from a desire to move beyond the “real” stasis of, for instance, paintings, photography, or sculpture. The work of these cinematic luminaries suggests that the impulse itself is symptomatic of a much larger need to make sense out of the modern world’s rapidly changing experience of both time and space as a technologically inclined era was radically altering both. As the cinema grew increasingly comfortable in its narrative capacity, it would continue to explore the idea of the journey, imposing upon the idea of automotive travel in particular an at times surprising set of ideological concerns. Outlaws, In-laws, and the Road to Domesticity What began as my own journey to the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection to view films catalogued under “automobile” in Kemp Niver’s Early Motion Pictures became something else altogether when, in the midst of my preliminary research, a strange and fascinatingly consistent thematic strain began to reveal itself. What emerged was an odd titular preoccupation with the pairing of marriage (sanctioned or unsanctioned) and automobiles. As I made my way through the alphabetized list of some ninety-odd films, referencing the descriptions as I did, I soon realized that even many of the less obvious titles (titles not containing the words “wedding,” “engagement,” or “elopement”) were similarly concerned with the automobile’s role in domestic union. This was puzzling, to say the least. Was I witness to a large-scale and largely undocumented cinematic trend? Was this evidence of an early generic hybrid? Was I being misled by the idiosyncratic cataloguing of Kemp Niver? Though not easily explained, the topical confluence I detected is, in part at least, the result of the vagaries of copyright law itself. In terms of a general cultural understanding of imagistic and/or narrative “property,” the years covered by the catalogue—1894–1915—seem a bit like the Wild West. Cinematic images and ideas, when met with public interest and approval, radiated rapidly within and outside of

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their country of origin. Sometimes actual and sometimes subtle thievery (of self and others) was a governing early industrial principle. The short-lived but enormous popularity of the “auto-dismemberment” films explored earlier, or of films organized around the logic of “the tour” are evidence of this trend toward periods of thematic uniformity, and it’s a trend that still guides the waves and ripples of popular cinematic tastes. Automobiles and youth culture were hot topics at the turn of the century, palpable symbols of “the new,” and, as these films seem to demonstrate, the two were ideologically connected at a very early point in our cinematic history. While the analysis that follows does not pretend exhaustiveness, it is somewhat representative of Niver’s list, which is itself comprised in large part of films produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph and Keystone, companies that, along with Edison, were especially interested in staking their particular cinematic claim. For this reason, names associated with one or both of these companies—Billy Bitzer, D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett—appear to have set what we must suspect was a much larger cinematic trend.47 Where our previous sections have established the aesthetic roots of the cinema’s mobile obsessions, glancing along the way at the ideologies that fed these preoccupations, my hope, in turning briefly to these somewhat later films, is to get to the historical core of the apparent ideological contradictions of the post-1960s road movie, especially with regard to ideas of domesticity and stability; in doing so I hope to, in a sense, look forward by looking back. I have claimed in the preceding pages that pre- and early cinematic image culture was aligned in its metaphorical use of “transportation” in large part to critique “progress.” In both Muybridge and the early Lumière films, “traditional” notions of transportation are valorized: organic and bodily in the former, social and collective in the latter. The Lumières’ The Automobile Accident, along with Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon and Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery imagine the destructive potential of mechanically assisted motion: the Lumières humorously explored their rapidly evolving present, Méliès provocatively and whimsically prophesied the transportational future, and Edison and Porter looked to the mobile dangers of a slowly receding past. As the century progressed, however, these concerns were brought, quite literally, much closer to home. An acknowledged, though difficult-to-reconcile, feature of the contemporary road movie is its tendency to envelope within its often paranoid critique of modernity a vision of irresponsible, semi-domestic union

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that, in many ways, is more terrifying than the technology its characters inevitably abuse. The road movie’s seemingly illogical thematic interest in domesticity, I hope to demonstrate, has its roots in some of narrative cinema’s earliest moments. Growing in part out of and at times indistinguishable from the chase film, these films are unique for their mobile motivations. Where chase films, one of the earliest sustainable narrative forms, most typically focus on criminal behavior and attempts to contain it, the social and moral implications of the hybrid films examined here seem somewhat more complex.48 As I have briefly indicated, the narrative “push” of these films is most frequently a young couple’s attempts at domestic union, followed by familial pursuit. While interesting variations on the form abound (and some will be examined presently), it is the couple’s eventual reabsorption into the community that it initially sought to escape that is of particular interest. Like the vehicular films that precede them, and, as subsequent chapters will illustrate, like the vehicular films that grow from them, these films, while inviting and indulging our desire for speed, danger, and rebellion, are principally concerned, as they conclude, with upholding their opposites. A 1907 American Mutoscope and Biograph film shot by Billy Bitzer perfectly encapsulates the overall ideological timbre of this narrative ploy. The Elopement (which shares its title with two other AM&B films, one shot by Arthur Marvin in 1900 and another by Bitzer in 1903) is a remarkably mobile short film that, within its 266 feet, manages to embody a host of social themes central to the road movie’s generic and pre-generic manifestations. The film begins in the family library, where our young protagonists are denied permission to marry by the girl’s father. Determined, they make their escape to the preacher in the young man’s sporty roadster. From the start, their rebellion is figured in purely domestic terms. A long shot lingers on the exterior of the family home until, in a chaotic burst of activity, the girl’s parents erupt from the front door, and the automobile pursuit commences, the young elopers in a modern open vehicle and the parents in a much larger, differently aged, and differently classed chauffeur-driven touring car. Throughout the chase, telephone lines remain visible in the frame, reminding the viewer, in a manner that will become iconic, of the central role communication—and, in this case, miscommunication—will play. The viewer is also treated to a number of beautifully captured location scenes shot along the roadway supplemented, as

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the car spins out in a sharp turn, by a bit of excellent trick editing. Suspense peaks as the young couple, faced with car trouble, are forced to proceed on foot. When they reach the water at the edge of the woods, they take a motorboat that explodes, forcing them to swim. When they arrive at the preacher’s, they are taken in and married. The parents arrive, just at the end, and to our surprise and everyone’s delight, wish the young couple well. The film equates automobility with a very specific form of familial or domestic rebellion. The car is a means of escape, or so it seems, from the confines of home and paternal law, an idea that is, I think, brilliantly and provocatively realized in the shot, summarized earlier, of the parents “exploding” from the house that contains them and threatens to contain their daughter. That the car fails the young couple is only part of the irony here. More critically, the couple’s “rebellion,” which finally receives official, paternal sanction, is limited by its own replication of the domestic they imagine themselves escaping from. Variations on this pattern abound. Biograph’s similarly themed They Would Elope (1909), directed by D. W. Griffith and also shot by Bitzer, elaborates on the absurdity of rebellion and the role of miscommunication. The film begins, as does the former, in the heart of parental domesticity as our young protagonist (Mary Pickford), dramatically and in close-up, plucks petals from a flower. Her lover (Billy Quirk) arrives, nattily dressed and sporting a finely cocked straw boater hat, and they kiss under what appear to be the disapproving eyes of her parents. Sensing this parental rejection, the young couple agrees to elope, leaving a note indicating as much and escaping onto the street. The next shot shows her parents, to our shock, reading the letter and smiling delightedly. Once again, youthful mobility is initiated by a generational misunderstanding. While the automobile here and elsewhere only plays what might be considered a supporting role, both its speed and the violence of its eventual failure are boldly foregrounded. An early and highly successful example of Griffith’s ability to build and move between layers of parallel action, the next shot shows the young couple making their “escape” in a horse-driven buggy, which promptly falls apart. They run until a car comes by and picks up the desperate-looking pair. The car does not simply break down, however. It explodes violently, and our couple is once again foot-bound. Unlike the earlier trick films this explosion seems to descend from, the primary interest here is not the comical agony of bodily dismemberment and reattachment but, rather, the vehicle’s role in familial

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dislocation and its eventual and wholly inevitable reunion. The automobile, a key figure in the young couple’s fantasy of escape, is ultimately contained by a narrative logic that hopes to foreground its inability to disrupt the continuity of family. Throughout the chapters that follow, I hope to reveal the surprising longevity of this narrative logic. The young girl falls to her knees from exhaustion, and the couple appears to be doomed until they encounter a farmer (Mack Sennett) with a wheelbarrow, which the young man purchases and transforms into a conveyance for his immobile lover. The agrarian implications here are not to be overlooked. The wheelbarrow is, by film’s end, the only vehicle that does not fail the young couple. 49 When they reach the water, they pay for a canoe, which they manage to tip over in due time. Discouraged and filthy, they resign their efforts and return home, only to find that the young woman’s mother and father have arranged an elaborate wedding party with all of their friends and family. Though present elsewhere, perhaps most notably in Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, these films are interested in foregrounding the protection and stability offered by home and the home’s contrast with the characters’ shortsighted attempts to escape to worlds of mobility and freedom. Though less complex in its motivations, AM&B’s earlier An Acadian Elopement (1907), shot by O. M. Gove and O. L. Poore, is a series of vignettes that draws much the same conclusion. After their elopement, which is unexplained, a young couple embarks upon their mobile honeymoon. Though automobility begins and ends their journey, the film, like the others discussed here, is interested in various modes of transportation; one shot in particular depicts our young male protagonist in a situation much like that found in the Lumières’ Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat, save for the fact that a cable car, and not a train, enters the station, carrying with it the threat of violence. Our bridegroom, in fact, fights in every one of the film’s several post-elopement vignettes until, at film’s end, the couple returns home and are greeted warmly by their fellow villagers. The automobile both leads our couple into danger—the aforementioned series of brawls are brought on, we suspect, by the fact that our couple finds themselves in a strange land with strange and unknown codes of behavior—and conveys them back to the safety of the familiar, the communal. Though it is implied in the Lumières’ dismemberment film and other films of the sort, it is the automobile’s growing association with

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carelessness, avarice, greed, lust, irresponsibility, and villainy that finds particularly articulate expression in these films. Unlike their violently humorous predecessors, however, these films seek redemption in the guise of reform. D. W. Griffith’s 1909 A Change of Heart capitalizes precisely on this process, casting the car itself in a central role and ending, like several of these films, in an officially sanctioned marriage. The film concerns a wealthy young man from the city and his auto-seduction of, perhaps unsurprisingly, the farmer’s innocent daughter; once again, the agrarian here is meant to symbolize the traditional. Frustrated by the young woman’s unwillingness to accompany him to the city, our automotive villain promises marriage. His behavior, here and elsewhere, is likened to the automobile: it is rapid, unpredictable, dangerous, and a threat to traditional and communal values. Bidding her family farewell, she joins the young man and they are falsely married, appropriately enough at a crossroads, which functions here morally as well as literally. Learning of the wrong done his daughter, the farmer righteously swears revenge. The film’s conclusion moves as rapidly as its beginning. At a wild drinking party with his friends and accomplices, the wealthy young man’s mother unexpectedly shows up, giving him some “old fashioned advice” (as an intertitle informs us) that causes him to change course, to stop drinking, and to reconsider his reckless behavior. The film ends with our newly reformed city boy legally marrying the farmer’s daughter, once again at the symbolically charged crossroads. The reel ends as all parties embrace (see Figure 1.3). Griffith’s Sunshine Sue (1910) is also concerned with the automobile as “sophisticated” and seductive corruptor of innocence. This time a pair of summer boarders make a visit to the country. One of them, Harry, takes a liking to Sue, and they go driving. His automobile disabled, Harry promises to marry her in the city if she spends the night with him at a roadhouse. Sue writes her parents a letter that brilliantly articulates the automobile’s mounting disruption to traditional notions of morality: “Harry and I met with a romantic auto accident and could not get back, so to complete the romance we are going to town to be married. Will return at once. Sue.” When her citysuitor deserts her, she is too ashamed to return home and instead wanders the terrifyingly lascivious city. Her job at a piano store ends abruptly when its owner attempts to get overly familiar with her. Her father, aware that the young man has no intention of marrying her, keeps a candle burning in memory of his abused daughter. Upon her long-awaited return, Sue and her father are delighted to learn that

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their humble and, we presume, more class-appropriate hired hand had intended all along to ask for her hand. The reel ends with the pair seated cozily close to each other in her father’s parlor. Automotive and urban threats behind them, the family is relieved to return to their tranquil and traditional domestic scene. Another case of appropriate vs. inappropriate object choice occurs in Mack Sennett’s 1912 An Interrupted Elopement. A young suitor, Bob, is denied the girl he desires, Mabel. A title card summarizes her father’s sentiments: “My daughter’s husband must be a man, not a milksop.” What the unfortunate young man lacks in brawn, however, he attempts to make up for, albeit rather pathetically, in brains. Bob and his friends plot an elaborate elopement by automobile, but Mabel’s father intercepts the explanatory note to this effect and makes his way towards the minister himself, hoping to halt their plans. Learning of this unfortunate situation, Bob’s friends plan to kidnap the minister and perform the wedding in transit. Idiotically, however, they kidnap the father instead, who has beaten them to the location. Bagged and abused, father is conveyed via automobile to the decided-upon nuptial location and released, much to the dismay and confusion of all. Bob, peeved at his friends and reeling from the shocking revelation, socks their appointed, though decidedly inept,

Figure 1.3 A Change of Heart (1909). Part of a larger cycle of films that imagine the automobile’s role in escaping the home, this film and others like it end with the promise of new homes. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division.

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leader. Father, impressed by the show of strength, agrees to the wedding after all. The film ends in a highly communal, highly congenial group shot (see Figure 1.4). A Beast at Bay (1912),50 Another Griffith and Bitzer film starring Mary Pickford, is similarly concerned with the fate of the milksops and their ultimate and highly mobile revenge. Here, Griffith combines the classic criminal motivation of the chase film with the romantic/domestic motivations we have analyzed. The narrative begins with an escaped convict being closely pursued by a group of policemen. As this action develops, our heroine and her friend spy a good-looking, well-dressed young man who, after a round of golf, is loading his golf clubs and preparing to leave the country club. A ruffian approaches the young women and taunts them, kicking violently and brutishly at their car, acting rough, and hurling insults. The girls get into the car, disappointed that the object of their desire is unwilling to intervene. He is, it seems to them, a perfect coward, a milksop. The action cuts to the convict, still roaming about, looking menacing. On the side of the road, he forces our heroine to aid him in his escape, forcing her to drive him to safety. Our “cowardly” hero, seeing this, is moved to action. Knowing that the train tracks run parallel to the road, he attempts to secure an engine for the pursuit. As we might suspect, the film transforms into a brilliant and technically masterful, if highly unlikely, battle between train and auto. The utter impossibility of this pursuit and pursuits like it that figure in other films seems to underscore the critical centrality of its implied symbolic systems; here most clearly, transportational forms, like the characters that occupy them, are categorized as either good or evil, responsible or irresponsible, reasonable or rash. The camerawork in this section of the film is truly remarkable: lengthy and highly energized tracking shots from a camera-car at the front of the action elegantly frame the convict and our heroine in a large open automobile with the enormous speeding locomotive engine closing the distance to the left of the frame. Separating automobile from locomotive in the composition are section after section of telephone lines, a detail of mise-enscène that is, of course, historically accurate but also highly symbolic to the development of the cinema’s vehicular obsessions, which will grow, as the years progress, increasingly entangled in these wires and their communicational significance. Here, in 1912, we have a perfect capsule of our ambiguous relationship with modernity and its objects: a car, chased by a locomotive, separated by telephone lines, and contained within a film (see cover).

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Figure 1.4 An Interrupted Elopement (1912). The interruption, in this case, is the father’s eventual sanctioning of the proceedings. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division.

Our convict, desperate for a solution and attempting to “cover his tracks” as a title card informs us, takes our heroine hostage, holing up in an abandoned barn. Our hero arrives just in time, moving forward to rescue the young woman against a hailstorm of bullets. With some intervention on her part, they manage to defeat the convict. Order is restored, and our heroine’s thirst for speed and danger has, we suspect, been permanently abated, replaced with a palpable satisfaction with (once again) reason, order and tradition. * * * In a manner befitting the subject at hand, we have moved quite a lot in this chapter: from Muybridge’s traveling lens—his “flying studio”—to the nascent generic beginnings of a clearly defined cinematic narrative sensibility revolving around automotive technology. We have studied the centrality of motion to the cinema’s progression and have, additionally, examined the cinema’s own ambiguous relationship to the more general concept of progress, a concept, in these films, typically reduced to vehicular signs and typically regarded with an equal amount of interest, humor, and anxiety. As the cinema’s own path became increasingly genre-based and as Hollywood organized

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and, to some degree, standardized its narrative practices, it refused to abandon its interest in the nuts and bolts of mobility. That we call them motion pictures at all is telling. More intriguing, however, are the ideological uses this mobility has been put to and the remarkable consistency of these ideological designs. Chapter 2, in looking at Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, follows along this same path, suggesting the manner by which genre arises from the thematic idea of travel and anticipating, as it does so, the formation of the road movie genre itself.

2

Highways and Trails Postwar American Cinema and the Journey Home in Detour and The Searchers

hough I have been critical of what I refer to as strict generic approaches to the road movie, its connection to genre is undeniable.1 This fact has resulted in a fascinating degree of sometimes unquestioning scholarly repetition. A compelling Darwinistic logic has emerged that imagines the demise of unsustainable genres—the Western, for example—and the growth and development of mutated, hybrid (Timothy Corrigan might call them hysterical) genres capable of fulfilling a given culture’s complex and evolving mythological needs.2 The road movie, in this manner, is viewed as ideologically and aesthetically revising the Western and film noir. Here, however, I hope to establish its continuity with its generic predecessors. In Hollywood’s late-classical period, the cinema’s longstanding desire to pin broad, socially critical stories to the narrative skeleton of the journey began to fork in two geographically specific directions: through the American West and through the American city. On the surface, no two cinematic locations seem more diametrically opposed: one is the landscape of America’s mythic past and the other the equally mythic urban landscape of American modernity. One location is governed by an uneasy nostalgia and the other by an equally uneasy and often grotesquely pessimistic sense of the present. The highly iconic locations of both the Western and film noir, however, are the largely static backdrops to the cinema’s sustained desire to capture and critique motion through space. While the present chapter acknowledges the importance of the road movie’s generic lineage, the previous chapter, I hope, provokes

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consideration of the cinema’s more global, more durable attraction to the subject of motion. Growing out of a postwar environment that had shifted radically, both at the micro and macro-geographical levels, film noir and the Western posit a set of fascinatingly similar (to each other and to their pre-generic predecessors) ideological concerns that have come to shape the road movie as well. It is especially their influential focus upon community and communication, notions that on their surface seem opposed to the mythological individualism the road movie is supposed to embody, that concern us here. Modernity, which is metaphorically linked in these films to mobility, has altered the foundation of these structures. The road movie, like its turn-of-the-century and late-classical predecessors, continues to examine the root of this change. In establishing both their ideological link to the past and their profound impact upon future road movies, this chapter closely examines a pair of particularly emblematic films from opposite ends of Hollywood’s economic spectrum, films that make this interest in communication and community explicit: Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Ulmer’s artistically acclaimed, tensely compressed sub-”B” picture illustrates the fiscal and temporal efficiency of the cinematic road and allows for an exploration of the metaphorical connection linking the road to the narrational process generally and to the cinema more specifically. Grimly ambiguous in its overall moral temperature, Detour’s mobility, its initially hopeful but ultimately doomed journey west to California, is enacted in the name of domestic union, critically false though it might be. Fate—an Ulmerian euphemism for the chaos of modernity—intervenes, halting the journey and sullying the dream. This attention to a micro-budgeted crime film from Hollywood’s tiny PRC Studios is balanced somewhat by the studio-financed, location-shot grandeur of Ford’s film, which was a cinematic event so significant that it warranted a television program starring Jeffrey Hunter that traced the development of its production.3 Often referred to as a “filmmaker’s film,” The Searchers’s widely influential, frequently emulated, and highly mobile narrative structure, centered on the preautomotive “trail” instead of the road per se, is similarly concerned, almost painfully so, with the domestic space and the price the family has paid in the name of progress.4 David Laderman, addressing Barbara Klinger’s attempts to debunk the notion of “progressive” or “rebellious” Hollywood genres, summarizes her position, stating that “classical genres foster such

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‘rebellion’ as a temporary titillation, destined finally to be contained and corrected by the status quo.”5 He then goes on to suggest the road movie’s difference, arguing that This sense of restless wandering, foregrounded throughout, lingering at the end, distinguishes the road movie’s rebellion against conformity from that of classical Hollywood. Thus, I submit that the road movie is more authentically progressive than Klinger’s examples, yet still bears within it the ideological give-and-take derived from the classical genre system, between anarchy and order, rebellion and conformity. Beyond reflecting the influence of classical genres, this dialectic likewise expresses an American society historically torn between the two sides—inside and outside—of the frontier. In other words, what makes the genre so provocative is its distinctively modernist staging of a rather classical, perhaps timeless and universal struggle between two primal drives: the dynamic and the static.6

Laderman’s position here is fantastically difficult to take issue with because it is next to impossible to pin down. The road movie, in his understanding of it, is both more “authentically progressive” than and subject to the same old pitfalls as classical genre. Its progressiveness seems to hinge on the genre’s supposed but, I think, highly dubious “independence” from Hollywood and its vague appropriation of a modernist formal sensibility, what Laderman calls its “staging.” Throughout his analysis, then, Laderman is left wondering why otherwise “progressive” films attend to such “mainstream” or “classical” concerns as “family” or “community,” items that are underplayed in his typically quite insightful analyses. The pattern in some ways crystallizes Klinger’s position, revolving as it does around a systematic listing and valuation of “progressive” features (what she might refer to as “inventions”) followed by a muted but marked tendency to apologize for the conservative ideology operating “insidiously beneath the genre’s surface of wild adventure.”7 How do we account for this “progressive regression”? The answer may well lie in the international appeal of both film noir and the Western, an appeal that necessitates our specific generic scrutiny in this chapter and dictates its directions. The postwar, postembargo flood of American films onto French screens catalyzed a growing cineliterate and cinephilic French culture, a culture that would come to identify and name film noir and would appreciate the peculiar Americaness both of these films and the Westerns that shared screen-time with them. From the start, however, it was a remarkably

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ambivalent love affair. Jean-Luc Godard, our subject in Chapter 3, was especially keen to this and to the mobile influence of American culture more generally, commenting as early as 1962 within the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, that “things American have a mythical element which creates their own existence” and complaining, some years later but in much the same spirit, that “what was really going on is that we were living under the mythology of the American cinema.”8 Seduced though he was, Godard’s words begin to crack away at the attractive façade of American products, most especially American cinematic products, in a manner that will come to absorb him and increasingly color his image-making, all the way through to the moment of this writing. The process, however, was begun with Breathless (1960), a film synonymous with the emergence of the French New Wave that most articulately expresses the impossibility of genre in postwar France. Its confused generic nostalgia, its fits of aimless mobility, and its tormented pauses, as we shall see, also formally launch the genre this book investigates, a genre that, curiously, is also concerned with generic impossibility. The generic ambivalence that Laderman so rightly recognizes and, to some degree, laments, then, is imported. Strangely, however, it is imported from sources themselves reliant upon and torn over imported generic signifiers. The logic I propose, then, departs somewhat from convention. Less a late-model outcropping of previously recognized and themselves always problematic cinematic categories, I wish to foreground the road movie’s—and the Western’s, and film noir’s, and the French New Wave’s—place within a much larger pattern of critical imagistic reflection upon the politics of motion. This larger, trans-generic category of films (we might call them Motion Studies) utilizes the mobile human body to critique notions of progress. Like their turn-of-thecentury predecessors, the mobile stories these films tell often serve to valorize—or at least lament the disintegration of—traditional and stable notions of community and communication. Detour and The Searchers demonstrate the underpinnings of this valorization with particular grace and in a manner that will begin to make sense out of Godard’s use of a similar generic vocabulary. “I’ll Be There if I Have to Crawl”: Chasing Home in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour Paul Schrader has argued in his highly influential article “Notes on Film Noir” that noir is not a genre but a cinematic style and a period

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of fascinatingly varied thematic preoccupations.9 In this way, noir is quite different from the more thematically identifiable Western, an indisputable genre to which studios and filmmakers consciously contributed. In Schrader’s analysis, style alone functions to determine noir. As R. Barton Palmer points out, however, Schrader’s article, which was heavily influenced by Raymond Durgnat, was especially important in the newly forming cine-academic climate of the early 1970s, as it helped to justify interest in and the study of Hollywood cinema.10 Schrader valorizes form over theme for a reason, but also at a cost. As Palmer points out, the style of film noir is a direct function of theme. Style, in fact, was attended to little by the early French critics who first began theorizing American noir. These French critics were more interested, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the films’ common thematic links of criminality and their particularly critical depiction of the American city.11 Still, Schrader’s observations directly or indirectly caused critics to attend to the stylistic means by which these stories were being told and to their peculiar narrational techniques, details that are critical to noir and influence, along with key thematic elements, the direction of the road movie. While American noir is not “discussed” until the late 1940s and early 1950s, more or less similar films—both thematically and stylistically—were being produced in this country because they were relevant. They were relevant because they answered or at least raised pertinent questions and because, like the Western, they addressed war-time and postwar anxieties about space, place, and nation— questions that the road movie would come to adopt as its own. Perhaps not surprisingly, these questions are often raised, in films we now call noir, on the road itself—raised, that is, in the spaces between the places that have come to define urban modernity. The road movie’s history, in fact, shares much in common with noir; both are defined largely after the fact and both, as we shall see, are deeply indebted to the conflicted culture of French cinephilia. Nicholas Christopher, in his 1997 study of the city in film noir, Somewhere in the Night, points out the importance of the automobile and, to a certain extent, the railroad and the subway to film noir. The core of Christopher’s argument is infallible. I would add to his vehiclebased litany, however, the structures supporting these machines, most especially noir’s roads, its omnipresent networks of intertwining interstate highways and byways. Christopher argues that “the automobile’s effect on the postwar city is inestimable. It has transformed the city more profoundly—and negatively—in a more compressed period of

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time, than any previous factor.” 12 Christopher goes on to illustrate the importance of what he refers to as the “labyrinths” of film noir: the genre’s thematic interest in the many forms of transportation that make their way into the noir narrative and seem to shape its urban landscape. He fails to connect this important and complex network to its correlative in the narrative forms these films often take—the critical connection between these images that appear so frequently in noir narratives and the ways in which those narratives are themselves “told.” Unlike Schrader, Christopher is more interested in content than form and, at least in this formulation, fails to connect them; fails, in fact, to address the manner by which noir’s narrational techniques correspond to its mobile structure. Christopher continues by arguing that “the passengers are traveling between two sets of existential or emotional situations—or two sets of trouble—often symbolized by the cities at either end of the journey. Detour (1945), Gun Crazy (1950), The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1948), and The Hitch-Hiker (1953) are all important—and very different—examples of such films, in which the automobile’s interior can carry the same charged or claustrophobic atmosphere as the noir city itself. The automobile becomes an insulated version of the city in miniature, in transit.”13 Christopher is alert to the centrality of the vehicle as a noir location. His idea that the automobile is a “version of the city . . . in transit,” however, largely misses the mark. While it is true that the automobile offers little “actual” relief from the confines of the city and that its cramped, claustrophobic quarters are often shot to heighten the effect, the car is a decidedly different space in its mobility, in its promise of “removal” from the supposed offending location, and noir narratives frequently pivot, in their vehicular obsessions, on this promise. In this way, the noir automobile functions rather like its pre-generic ancestors explored earlier in the century by Griffith, Bitzer, and Sennett. It promises freedom from structures that ultimately prove inescapable. The act of travel, in these films, functions both at the physical and psychological levels; characters typically move back in time as they journey through space. The automobile, then, works as a sort of mobile psychoanalytic couch, and this referencing of “the talking cure” is anything but felicitous. The flashback/voiceover narrative style so central to film noir, so much a part of its oft-repeated psychological journeys, is also closely tied, metaphorically and literally, to the road, and no film better demonstrates the implications of this connection than Edgar Ulmer’s

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Detour, a film whose narrative structure relies not on the automobile necessarily but on the road—and notably, a diner car on the side of the road—for its continuity. The diner car is both a literal and figurative reminder of motion stalled in Ulmer’s film, and this pause in physical motion sets the narrative in motion. As previously noted, Ulmer’s film is a classic of Hollywood “B” grade cinema. James Naremore, in fact, recognizes that the film is one of only a very few noir films perceived as “B” that actually was a “B” film in the economic sense.14 It is a tightly woven narrative that unfolds in slightly over one hour and, in that short time, manages to set into place a number of ideas that will later become important to the road genre proper. The film traces the misadventures of its protagonist, Al Roberts (Tom Neal) and the trouble, mostly of the female variety, that he encounters on the road. Told in a highly stylized flashback fashion, the story begins in a grimy New York night spot called the Break O’ Dawn, where Roberts15 and his girlfriend Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake) scratch out a meager living for themselves, he on the piano and she singing for the spot’s low-ball clientele. Sue, disgusted with her dead-end life, decides to make a go of Hollywood, splitting up with Roberts temporarily as she tries her luck in another big city in a grim reworking of the A Star is Born (1937) formula. The bulk of the film concentrates on Roberts’s desperate attempt to meet up again with Sue in Los Angeles. During his eventful and unfortunate trip across the country, Roberts witnesses and is, by implication, culpable for two deaths: one a man, Haskell, who dies after Roberts picks him up on the road and whose identity Roberts later must adopt in order to save himself; and the other, a woman, Vera (Ann Savage), whom Roberts also picks up and who, because she had previously ridden with Haskell and knows the “truth,” controls Roberts’s movement for the remainder of the film by repeatedly threatening to turn him in. Roberts “accidentally” kills her (strangling her with a phone cord he tugs at from another room) as she attempts to place a call to the police in the hotel room where they hide out. Roberts’s connection to both deaths, the narrative keeps reminding us, is tied to his dogged and ill-fated domestic determination. After an extended, day-lit and road-bound credit sequence, the film’s narrative begins on a dark and damp road, a car swerving toward the viewer and our protagonist who, expressionless and eerily silent, accepts a ride. A wipe brings the viewer and this character inside a roadside diner, where a fellow driver asks if he needs a lift, explaining that he is craving company and mumbling that he’s “one

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of those guys that’s gotta talk or he falls asleep.” The driver gets change for the jukebox and spins a tune that sets our mysterious passenger off into the extended flashback that comprises the majority of the film; this is how we come to know Al Roberts. This brief conversation in the diner between our none-too-friendly protagonist and his would-be ride is of interest because it illustrates quite poignantly the importance of communication to this proto-road movie. The conversation, as truncated as Roberts’s side of it is, is a conversation about the need to maintain channels of communication—an idea that, as we learn later, is not entirely palatable to our protagonist. Roberts’s character, in fact, is revealed for this contradiction even at this early moment in the film: he is communicationally reserved, even hostile at times, and yet evinces an overarching need to tell his story. Like so many noir films, Detour is held together by voiceover narration. The voiceover, however, is not just a convenience to advance the narrative in as economical fashion as possible. It is also a desperately anxious voice that expresses a dire need to tell its story. There is a confessional quality to Roberts’s narration, and his words take on a sort of semiarticulate, mythic quality that will be adopted in a variety of ways by future road film protagonists.16 Bonnie and Clyde, in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, are immortalized by Bonnie Parker’s doggerel poem, which “tells the story of Bonnie and Clyde.” Mickey and Mallory, in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, always leave one person alive to “tell the story.” Kit (Martin Sheen) in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) leaves mementos of himself, including a hastily made phonographic record, that tell his story. Thelma and Louise (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) are obsessed with photographing themselves in Ridley Scott’s 1991 road movie of the same name. Even Dorothy (Judy Garland) in The Wizard of Oz (1939) needs to tell her story, though the promise to do so is the note upon which the film finally ends. In spite of the road traveler’s often outwardly antisocial intentions, these often preverbal attempts at communication point to a need—desperate, sad, unfulfilled, and often realized too late—for community. To signal Roberts’s flashback, that staple of noir narration, the space of the diner suddenly goes black leaving only Roberts’s eyes illuminated, suggesting that, in remembering, he is truly “seeing again” the events on the road that brought him to his current situation. Roberts’s impassioned and seemingly desperate narrational desire connects the process of storytelling to the process of the journey, which begins with his girlfriend Sue’s frustration at living in New York city and working at the old Break O’ Dawn, where on any given

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night she was pawed at by the club’s male visitors. Sue exerts her own (within the context of the film) fearsomely willful mobility in her escape from this world, a mobility that impels Roberts into a sort of existential crisis because the only thing that made living in the city bearable for Roberts was Sue.17 Like The Searchers some years later, Ulmer’s film posits that men move because of women. Here, however, the mobile women, both Sue and later in the film Vera, are mobile by their own free will; they are not victims of some savage nomadic tribe, and they are not women who need protection. Vera, in fact, is the film’s “savage” victimizer, and her power over Roberts is not unlike Scar’s power over Debbie in The Searchers. In fact, Detour imagines a world spinning toward chaos precisely because women have suddenly gained access to mobility.18 The femme fatale character so central to noir is, at least partly, the product of wartime anxieties about the modern woman and her new access to domains usually occupied by men, including the freedom to move about the country at will and without the stabilizing force of a man behind the wheel. Detour literalizes this idea of the newly mobilized woman and speculates disastrous results. Even Sue, the somewhat sympathetic female character who “moves” in part to escape the humiliation of her New York nightclub existence, is figured as an indirect cause for Roberts’s fateful descent. Sue’s liberated mobility, however, is only partly to blame. The Break O’ Dawn and its immediate environs also contribute to Roberts’s mounting though barely articulated domestic desires. Once Sue is gone, the club itself is shot from only three angles, suggesting formally the unbearable limitations of the location itself: an establishing shot conveys its red tablecloth status; a close-up on Roberts’s face his disinterest; and a close-up on his hands his robotic workethic. The result is a palpable sense of anxiety and claustrophobia, precisely the sort burdening both Roberts and Sue. The camera’s three positions pulsate nervously as Roberts plays an energized, hepped-up, and jazzy version of a classical tune, though only one slightly intoxicated patron seems to notice, offering Roberts ten dollars for his trouble. Roberts, the scene illustrates, is getting nowhere, a colloquialism the film will revisit ad infinitum. The exterior of the club offers little in the way of relief; it, too, is engulfing, entrapping, and claustrophobic. The streets are littered and damp, and the whole of the outside world seems to be encased in a deep, thick layer of fog that makes even the characters’ faces barely discernable. There is, of course, an economic explanation for the fog: it

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literally covers up a cheap and probably recycled set. Metaphorically, however, it descends from A Trip to the Moon, where the city was envisioned as a crowded space literally overcome with a steady and dense stream of factory smoke. In both films, the city must be escaped from, even if only to enter the equally hostile environment of another “space,” which in Detour takes the semi-lunar form of the American desert.19 It is, in fact, in the gloomy, heavy atmosphere of the club’s exterior that Sue announces her decision to try her luck in Hollywood. Roberts, unable to sever his roots so quickly, still desperate to get married, to “make with the ring and the license,” decides to stay back, and his dejected expression at the end of their walk home articulates his disappointment. Sue dreams—and, in fact, Roberts shares her dreams—of becoming a star and is not afraid of losing Roberts in the attainment of that dream. Roberts, however, is unwilling to make the sacrifice and, perhaps over his better instincts, places a phone call to inform Sue of his plans to follow her out West, making promises (threats?) of marriage to which Sue, in her own compromised situation—she’s become a waitress, not a star—begins to warm. The phone call draws the connection between travel and communication very clearly, reminding us of the convergence between telephone lines and speeding vehicles discussed in Chapter 1 and, more specifically, prefiguring the fatality caused by communication in Detour’s later telephone-strangling scene. It also suggests the futility of what is here figured to be the male dream of domestic stability. In this rather elegant montage of communication are images of busy operators across the country and wires, demonstrating the distance (and technology) between them and the difficulty with which they communicate at all. Roberts says, “Train, plane, bus, magic carpet . . . I’ll be there if I have to crawl . . . have to travel by pogo stick.” Instead, he thumbs rides across the country and the distance between New York and California is implied by yet another montage, this time a travel montage of images of Roberts walking, maps with a line moving across them, and images of Roberts with his thumb out, followed by the map again, and so on (see Figure 2.1). All of this motion, conveyed so expressively and exhaustingly, is, for Roberts, undertaken in the name of stability. Communication and mobility are critically linked in this film that imagines the impossibility of completing either in any meaningful way. Commenting in a manner especially appropriate to this discussion of language and its relationship to the journey, Roland

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Barthes in S/Z offers the following comments in a section aptly titled “Completeness”: to depart / to travel / to arrive to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify—one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection. Fear of forgetting engenders the appearance of a logic of actions; terms and links between them are posited (invented) in such a way that they unite, duplicate each other, create an illusion of continuity . . . What would be the narrative of a journey in which it was said that one stays somewhere without having arrived, that one travels without having departed—in which it was never said that, having departed, one arrives or fails to arrive? Such a narrative would be scandal, the extenuation, by hemorrhage, of readerliness.20

Barthes’ analysis is key because it unearths the paranoia of the incomplete utterance—of a narrative without a form or a journey without an end—and this paranoia is precisely what motivates Roberts’s voiceover. It is, more than anything else, an attempt to apply logic, to make whole a life, an identity, and a story that has been fractured. Moreover, Roberts’s narration (like his journey) is a desperate attempt at unification.

Figure 2.1 Detour (1945). Al Roberts thumbs rides and awaits his fate in the name of stability.

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Communication and narration are central to Detour and are aligned with the space of the road in interesting and often very frank ways. After being picked up by Haskell in Arizona, Roberts says, “Emily Post ought’a write a book of rules for guys thumbin’ rides cause as it is now you never know what’s right and what’s wrong . . . We rode along for a little while with neither one of us saying anything . . . I never know what to say to strange people drivin’ cars . . . Then, too, you can never know if a guy wants to talk. Lotta rides been cut short because of a big mouth. So I kept my mouth shut until he started opening up.” Roberts, here and in the earlier moment at the diner car, indicates an important and self-inflicted verbal impotence upon which the road film will come to rely. In Detour, as the previous quotation indicates, this self-imposed silence is brought on by distrust and paranoia. But this is a peculiar brand of distrust and paranoia created, in part, by the isolated and isolating activity of modern automobile travel and the relative powerlessness of “passengers.” As Haskell drones on and on about how woman is the most dangerous animal in the world, Roberts simply nods his head, says “Yeah” and occasionally exclaims with little emotion “That’s the stuff,” replying vaguely so as to maintain the mobility Haskell controls. Roberts’s monologue regarding hitchhiking etiquette is also wonderfully ironic in its expression of gendered knowledge. Emily Post is imagined as the expert on a decidedly male activity, and this male activity itself is described as being necessarily though frustratingly silent. Although he is the male center of the film, Roberts is defined almost exclusively by his longed for reunion with Sue, his desire to make the journey and the utterance complete. This idea is driven home in a highly expressionistic moment in the film where, as Roberts drives and checks himself in the mirror—seemingly to reaffirm his fleeting, fractured existence—the mirror fades into a screen, expands to fill the frame of the shot, and slowly transforms into a severely canted shot of Sue singing “I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me” in a nightclub accompanied only by horn-playing shadows. The details of this moment coalesce to suggest that Roberts’s movement, indeed his very identity, is motivated by Sue’s and not his own “making it.” The road, however, refuses to accommodate the wishes of either of our characters. Haskell’s unexpected death shortly after Roberts’s daydream does not help matters. Along with Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and, later, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Detour suggests that the American highway

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is not always a viable escape route either from the city (in Ulmer’s film) or from the doldrums and confines of domestic or working life (in Lupino’s and Hitchcock’s films). These later films depict a world where travel along America’s open roads is no longer safe, with gun toting lunatics or knife-wielding mother-obsessed boy-children seemingly lurking around every curve, behind every roadside motel sign. In Detour, of course, the source of the threat is somewhat less tangible, seeming to have more to do with modern mobility’s effects on identity and community. Violence occurs, but appears unmotivated, the stuff of fate, something that happens when human beings try to move outside of their tightly fitting urban boxes. Roads and the sort of isolationist travel encouraged by the automobile were, in fact, perceived both as sites of liberating recreation and as potentially dangerous in the American popular imagination. Automobile manufacturers and the businesses that profited from road travel worked to combat this latter image problem by foregrounding the automobile’s ability to transport not just individuals, but the nuclear family itself. Commercial renderings of road travel in the 1950s, especially in the form of motel brochures and advertisements, consistently promoted the activity as safe, comfortable, familiar, familial, and in this context, as necessarily white.21 The road was being sold, in other words, against its reputation, against the notion that it separated. Detour, as early as 1945, grimly and evocatively suggests otherwise. In Detour, Vera is the unlikely poster child for the threat of automobility, its adverse effect on the domestic. Disenfranchised and diseased, Vera’s own desperation finds her wandering, thumbing a ride in front of a gas station where chance—a cousin to fate in Ulmer’s cinematic universe—has placed Roberts himself (see Figure 2.2). He offers her the lift, and several miles of road whiz by as they converse tensely, awkwardly, Roberts’s voiceover cueing the viewer in to his observations as they do so; he is intrigued, nervous, then calmer as her tense eyes close in slumber. Vera’s desperation runs deep, however, and it is not long before she puts the pieces together, prematurely ending Roberts’s contentment in the process. She had ridden with Haskell in the car Roberts claims is his own, and Vera plans to use this upper hand to her advantage. Vera, in a highly ironic mockery of Roberts’s domestic plans, forces Roberts to masquerade as her husband; only if they pose as a married couple can Vera hope to get them a room without arousing suspicion, without undermining her plan to sell Haskell’s car and collect the

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Figure 2.2 Detour (1956). After accidental murder number one, Roberts (assuming the identity of his victim) pauses for fuel. Vera (screen-right), sensing his vulnerability, prepares to strike.

cash. The scenes of the “couple” in the small rooms where Vera effectively holds Roberts hostage are some of the starkest, most uncomfortable, and cramped in the noir catalogue. Though standing still, Vera drives the situation in the direction that best suits her, and the discomfort is palpable. Vera and Roberts frequently occupy an absurdly tight frame. The viewer anticipates, perhaps even longs, for an eruption. Ulmer enhances this claustrophobic sense by favoring tight two-shots in these sequences so that Roberts’s existence is now inseparable from Vera’s, an idea Vera articulates when she says to Roberts, “You and I are like Siamese twins.” The uncomfortable proximity of this false domestic space makes Roberts all the more aware of his increasing separation from Sue who, ironically, is very close in a purely geographical sense. The charade continues when Roberts and Vera attempt to hock Haskell’s car at a local dealership. Vera verbally dominates the situation despite Roberts’s feeble request that she sit back and let him do “all of the talking.” Vera proves, here and elsewhere, that not only does she have access to mobility (she had hitched a ride with Haskell all the way from Louisiana) but that her control of verbal situations correlates directly to her control over mobility as she here dictates the terms of the automobile’s sale, deciding at the last minute not to sell the vehicle

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because, in the glove box, she has found papers suggesting that Haskell was to inherit fifteen million dollars from his dying father. And so she plans to force Roberts to maintain his false identity, posing as Haskell and intercepting the inheritance. After a night of drunken argument, made doubly uncomfortable for the spectator because of Benjamin Kline’s extremely close cinematography, Vera threatens to turn Roberts in, dialing the number for the police and, once again, verbally taunting him. When she asks him to open a window—all along she has kept windows and doors shut tight against the outside world—she takes the opportunity to run into the bedroom with the phone to place what turns out to be a fatal call. Roberts tugs violently at the phone cord from the other side of the closed bedroom door, an illogical act in a film brimming with them. The cord, which had wrapped itself around Vera’s neck as she passed out on the bed, tightens and makes the unplaced call fatal indeed, but not for Roberts. In the space of only a few emotionally packed minutes, the scene connects the road to the failure of the domestic (Vera and Roberts, but also Roberts and Sue); it also suggests the potentially violent end result of this failed existence, positing that communication, especially electronic communication (here, in the form of a phone cord), is not only incapable of shrinking the physical world (as the earlier montage of phone lines and operators would have us believe) but that it is potentially threatening and fatal when it comes to stand in place of real human contact, the loss of which the film laments throughout. Later road films will pick up this theme of failed communication and run with it well into the current age. Detour returns repeatedly to the topic of communication between human beings and suggests, at every turn, breakdown, distrust, and eventually chaos. Roberts’s voiceover narration arises, in this sense, as a desperate attempt to reopen critical channels of human discourse. His only chance at reaffirmation (false though it might be) is narrational: he must tell his story and seeks to tell it through direct, confessional address. This need for self-documentation appears in The Searchers as well, though in epistolary form. Ford is careful to imagine a frontier held together, however tenuously, by the mail, held together by letters addressed to the family, to the threatened and vulnerable site of the domestic. As we shall see, the community, injured though it is, fares much better in Ford’s film. Ulmer’s tale is grimmer as it suggests that fate, here closely tied to newly forming definitions of modernity, has closed ranks on community and communication and thus has rendered stability impossible.

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“Let’s Go Home, Debbie”: Wandering Home in John Ford’s The Searchers The Western is often regarded as the most “authentically American” of genres, fitting as it does within a much broader network of American myth.22 It is also a remarkably varied cinematic category, as contradictory—between and within films—as the country it imagines. In a much-quoted passage that has become a favorite among scholars of the film Western, André Bazin, in “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence,” even equates the history and evolution of the genre with the history and evolution of film, stating that “The Western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.”23 The Manifest Destiny that informs the Western has something to do with this Americanness. Distasteful as it is, the brutally basic narrative structure Manifest Destiny implies—its structural, as opposed to its political, social, or philosophical appeal—has to do with its reliance on motion through space. This is, to be sure, a very particular brand of motion arising, as it does, from the myth of pre-ordained expansionism and territorial colonization.24 Many Westerns, of which The Searchers is just one exception, figure Native Americans as impediments to this necessarily white and European forward motion through space, disrupting this “natural” progression and causing the moving group to stop or move in another direction.25 Movement, these films suggest, is a racially and nationally determined activity. In The Searchers, however, mobility— and especially a violent, anti-social mobility—is explored as being a peculiarly Native American activity and the antithesis of civilized stability. The settlers “moved,” to be sure, but in the name of stability and in an effort to plant roots, to domesticate the frontier. Stopping, Ford’s film suggests, is both the key to and the problem of civilization. It is the Western’s peculiar fascination with space and time, its nearly obsessive need to justify the masculinized conquering of each, that makes it especially American.26 All Westerns demonstrate and perhaps perpetuate this obsession. It is, however, the cinema of John Ford that most interestingly plays it out. Many of his non-Western films are equally charged with this idea of perpetual mobility, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)—a film about people who desperately want stability, who long for the domestic but are forced to take to the road—being only the most obvious. While Ford’s later films will more outwardly critique the mythic heroism of the mobile male

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body, The Searchers begins to ask the questions that guide his later investigations. Lee Mitchell, in his work on Western film and literature, has discussed at length the masculine space of the Western narrative and the fact that the male body lies at its center.27 Mitchell discusses the repeated theme in Westerns of the destruction and convalescence of the heroic male body. He focuses, however, on the bodies themselves and not what those bodies do on the screen that seems to “masculinize” them, critically overlooking the fact that, at the most basic level the hero’s body is defined by its motion, its movement across space. This idea, made imagistically concrete as early as Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments, suggests that motion or travel itself is “masculinizing” because it necessarily involves a movement away from the domestic sphere.28 Linda Williams, in discussing the gender problems of Muybridge’s work, has argued that “Men’s naked bodies appear natural in action: they act and do; women’s must be explained and situated: they act and appear in minidramas that perpetually circle about the question of their femininity. In other words, in Muybridge’s case fetishization seems to call for narrative, not to retard it.”29 Williams’s ideas about the “natural” appearance of men’s bodies in action are more than a little hyperbolic. As we have noted, there is nothing natural about images of a naked man cutting wood against a numbered grid; these images, too, are highly gendered “minidramas.” Nonetheless, her ideas are pertinent, for she identifies the long imagistic history that associates masculinity with motion and femininity with the domestic. Of course, these associations are still very much with us. Additionally, her ideas regarding the narrative completeness of the male body in action, its independence from the process of narration, are important to our understanding of the male body at the center of the American Western. The male body of the Western is defined by its activity, particularly its activity in a direction away from, but always in relation to, the sphere of feminine domesticity. Stagecoach (1939) is an early example of John Ford’s interest in frontier mobility and its gendered associations. Stagecoach, in spite of its straightforwardness, is a complex film that begins to ask questions that are asked more complexly in The Searchers. These questions, like the films themselves, are about space and belonging, which return repeatedly to issues of community and communication. The Searchers tells the story of the five-year journey of its two male protagonists, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter).30 The “search” begins after the home of Martha (Dorothy

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Jordan) and Aaron (Walter Coy) is raided and destroyed by Indians and their daughters are stolen. The men begin in search of the young girls with what appears to be a like-minded group, all of whom seem to be interested solely in rescuing the girls and reuniting what remains of the family. As the narrative progresses, however, Ethan and Martin disband from the original group and their divergent motives begin to materialize. Martin hopes to return his “sisters” to their family and Ethan, as time passes, regards the case of the surviving sister as hopeless. In his racist paranoia, Ethan’s logic prefigures Vietnam-era policy: Ethan seeks to destroy her in order to save her. The term “Western” suggests, more than some unknowable and largely mythic topography, movement in a Westerly direction. The Searchers foregrounds this idea of motion and critically contrasts male “life on the trail” with female domestic existence or life on the homestead. This narrative pairing of “home” and “the trail,” of course, is square one for most road movies as well. Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything takes this notion further and suggests that the Western itself is a reaction to the domestic novel. Lee Mitchell’s dismissive summary of Tompkins’s thesis comments on and swiftly dispenses with this idea. He writes, “West of Everything (1992) makes the generic claim that ‘the Western answers the domestic novel.’ . . . Tompkins moves through a broad swath of Westerns to prompt provocative observations she can neither prove nor disprove.”31 Mitchell’s comments are partly valid, for Tompkins’s intriguing, topic-sentence approach to cultural history does occasionally simplify. At the same time, however, the backbone of her theories requires attention. At the root of her work is the gendered conflict presented repeatedly in the cinematic Western between the realms of motion (male) and stability (female). While this conflict may not necessarily be in response to Victorian mandates of domestic stability, it is certainly a defining characteristic of the film Western and the road films that take up and sometimes question this pattern. This theme of motion is alluded to early in Ford’s film during the credit sequence with the song “The Searchers” by Stan Jones with its questioning lyrics: “What makes a man to wander?” The question posed by the title song is, of course, answered in the film but problematically. For the true wanderer of the film, Ethan Edwards, is a largely unsympathetic character through much of the film; his actions and motions are designed to be questioned. This song plays as the opening credits roll over a red brick background and the opening ends on the Warner Bros. logo. The brick wall is an interesting choice

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for an opening image when considered in relationship to the song, which is about a man who denies walls, who refuses to be, as classical Western music would have it, “fenced in.” It is also interesting in terms of genre. The wall is strangely “urban” in its appearance and suggests the crime film more than the Western, especially given the Warner Bros. logo that ends the credit sequence, which signifies a studio historically associated with the crime genre. The wall seems more than anything to suggest “change” in a mythological space unused to boundaries. The film begins in iconic fashion with the wanderer, Ethan Edwards, returning home from the wilderness. The composition of this opening shot establishes the theme of the film itself. From the interior of the home Martha (Dorothy Jordan)—or, more precisely, her silhouette—opens a door revealing the immense Technicolor desert outside and Ethan Edwards on horseback in the deep field. The contrast between “in here” and “out there” is critical to the Western genre and to this film in particular, and the dark, silhouetted space of the interior of the home next to the bright and colorful world outside helps establish this contrast. Martha’s featureless silhouette highlights the contrast—her image is interior, off-center, shadowed, and still while Ethan’s is central, bright, and, most importantly, approaching. This visual difference is not unlike the color as fantasy and black and white as reality scheme in The Wizard of Oz, a non-Western protoroad movie. As in that film, “out there” is attractive and fantastic, larger than life while “in here”—for the spectator looks with Martha from within—is, as we soon learn, strangely cramped and not altogether desirable. The interior shots are warm but nearly washed of color. Low angles give Ethan a towering appearance and, more importantly, create a subtle but effective sense of claustrophobia achieved through the inclusion of the ceiling. This discomfort with the interior spaces of the film, typical of noir as well, serves to align the viewer, at least at this point in the film, with the character who seems most “outside,” the character whose movements within these interior confines make the least sense: in this case, Ethan Edwards. His mobility and the world he occupies are, then, initially seductive, both to the viewer and the children that in a moment will greet him. This initial alignment is problematized, however, by Ethan’s racism, which is exhibited early in the film. In fact, the viewer identifies almost immediately with the character who appears to be the source of Ethan’s racial hatred—his part-Indian

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(“half-breed”) “nephew,” Martin Pawley. While the two men are constantly at odds with each other, it is their relationship and their similar ways of achieving different goals—one in avoidance of and the other in maintenance of the domestic sphere—that propel this narrative onto the seemingly endless trail. The “search” of the film’s title, its mobile “quest” begins after the previously mentioned raid on Martha and Aaron’s home.32 This movement, of course, is central to the film’s structure. The film’s comments on community and the means by which the journey is “preserved” or communicated, however, are the key elements that situate the film as an unusually influential, prototypical road movie; a film that will be revisited and interpreted by road film makers in the decades to follow. The “search” of the film is extensive both temporally (the men are on the trail for a handful of years) and geographically (their search leads them from Texas as far as New Mexico). Ford masterfully creates the illusion of the passage of time and space on the screen by using a variety of techniques that, combined, achieve a very fluid whole. Montages of changing seasons and landscapes are key indicators as to the journey’s duration. This constant motion, however, is periodically interrupted, punctuated by scenes of apparent calm next to the campfire. The campfire in The Searchers and in the many road films that follow it serves not only as a break in the kineticism of travel but also to establish the connection to home that is so important to all road movies. Here the campfire functions as a surrogate, temporary, and entirely male domestic space, a mobile home away from home, and a space in which the characters involved come to terms with their relationships with each other and their actual homes. These rest points in the trail narrative of The Searchers are also quite critical in that they become major turning points for the characters involved in the journey. Like many road movies that follow it, Ford’s film sets into place the notion of the inarticulate or “quiet” journey; the men have very little to say to one another while in actual transit. The campfire—or its otherwise restful equivalent in cantinas, outposts, gravesites, etc.— is the “stationary” point at which characters disclose information, reveal their anxieties, and develop their relationships over the course of the film. Stability, this pattern suggests, encourages human interaction where mobility comes to take its place. Interestingly, the campfire scenes in The Searchers, a film otherwise deeply engaged in the mise-en-scène of its outdoors locations, are studio set pieces. They convey an air of artificiality and seem, in

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spite of their “outdoor” props—sand, shrubs, clouds, etc.—to convey a closed-in, claustrophobic sense paralleled only by the film’s interior locations. The result is the distinct impression that there is something unnatural and uncomfortable in pausing. The scenes themselves foreground this idea and place in bold relief the connection between the masculine pause in motion and the female domestic sphere. The heightened emotions of these scenes, their honesty, their verbosity, and most critically their ironic duplications of the domestic scene point out the absurdity of man not in motion. In an especially crucial campfire scene, Ethan tends, in a jokingly maternal fashion, to Martin’s comfort and warmth by offering him blankets and adding wood to the already roaring fire, much to Martin’s chagrin. These attentions, however, prove to be false and, in retrospect, are uncovered for their duplicity. Ethan “tucks Marty in” to maintain the kinetic energy of the film and to defend himself and Marty from the threat only he knows lurks in the shrubs above them: the outpost trader, Jerem Futterman, who intends to rob the journeying men. As Martin points out in anger, Ethan intends all along to use him as a decoy. More interestingly, however, is the equation the scene posits between stillness and vulnerability, an idea the film explores repeatedly and from various perspectives. Another aspect of the road film set into place by The Searchers is the wanderer’s need to wander in spite of attempts to keep him grounded, particularly at “home” within a stable domestic environment. Both Ethan and Martin are “tempted,” or at least attempts are made to tempt them, into not following the trail of the lost girls. Early in the film, after the burial service for the slain Martha and Aaron, a neighbor attempts to convince Ethan to stay and in her words “care for the boys” that remain living. Ethan, of course, can do no such thing. Similar attempts are made to persuade Martin to stay. After the death of Brad, the men return to break the news to the Jorgensen family. After the telling, Ethan intends to continue the search. Martin intends to join him as he feels a kinship with his only surviving “sister” Debbie (by this time in the story it has been revealed that Lucy, the other sister, is dead). But everyone has different plans for Martin: Mr. Jorgensen offers to keep Martin on as long as he’d like and Laurie would be content with this arrangement for romantic reasons. Ethan especially wants Martin to stay on with Jorgensen; he recognizes no kinship between Martin and Debbie largely for racist reasons and is accustomed to traveling the trail alone. Martin’s fate, however, is too entwined with

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Ethan’s to give up that easily. He is, in spite of Ethan’s torment, the wanderer’s pupil, one whose contentment in the space of the domestic will only come later in the film after certain items are in place. Unlike his mobile tutor, however, Martin maintains a connection to the domestic throughout the journey, and in the end this connection will triumph. Ford’s film relies on the Pony Express postal network as a means to narrate the road and to keep its wanderers connected to the site of the domestic. The Jorgensen family relies on the mail to learn of Brad’s death, as well as other bad news the men encounter on the trail. The searchers themselves learn of a piece of calico dress from a letter, their first real clue as to Debbie’s whereabouts. While the searchers are on the trail, Charlie comes courting with a letter to the Jorgensen family. Laurie, of course, is interested in the letter and not her courtier, and there is a discernible amount of tension and pride associated with the act of reading and writing, ideas that also form a significant trope in Ford’s films that deal with early immigrant communities. The reading of the letter is in Laurie’s voice and soon the images of the living room fade so that Laurie’s narration is over images of the trail itself and of the trade being narrated. The narration eventually changes to Martin’s voice and soon is dropped entirely, making the whole process seem uncommonly natural and fluid (the seasons change when Martin’s voice takes over). This narrational process is not merely a simple and economical way to tell significant portions of the story; it also comments on the characters involved and contributes to the mythic status of the journey. Martin’s letter to the Jorgensen family—however delinquent, however solitary—demonstrates his connectedness to the domestic realm of the family and home. His time on the trail is spent in search of something tangible that, when found, will place him back in the space of the domestic. Ethan, on the other hand, is in search of something wholly intangible—a somewhat psychotic salvation of the white race. One suspects that, with or without Debbie’s capture, Ethan would be on the trail for one reason or another. This postal narration of the journey—a narrational form that itself must travel—projects the journey mythically, actualizing it in a manner that will be replicated in countless road films that follow The Searchers. The letter is the documented “proof ” of the journey’s ephemeral and geographically fleeting existence. This mythic status is projected further in The Searchers by the constant references throughout the film to the Indian’s life on the trail, a wandering mythology that is differently documented and, in part, exists primarily in the settlers’ tellings and re-tellings.

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The mythic notion of the nomadic Native American is common enough to the Western genre. The connections established in The Searchers between this wandering and (within the film) destructive group and the assumed protagonist of the film, however, are rare. Ethan, who is full of what he considers to be Indian wisdom and knowledge, and who is depicted by Ford as Comanche Chief Scar’s double, is not shy about sharing his knowledge. Interestingly, much of what Ethan “knows” about Native Americans has to do with wandering or travel, ideas that Ethan has himself grown to adopt. This connection between Ethan’s nomadic ways and Scar’s underscores the savagery that motivates Ethan’s motion. Both have become an impediment to white civilized progress. The film barely contains a sense of nostalgia and regret with regard to the destructive erasure of Ethan’s civilized character, but civilization holds its problematic place in the end. Gaylyn Studlar expands upon and assigns a gender to this idea in her provocative essay on the topic, “‘What Would Martha Want?’: Captivity, Purity, and Feminine Values in The Searchers.” Studlar makes a case for the triumph of feminine (read: civilized) values in the film, arguing that “far from demonstrating Tompkins’s claim that ‘the discourse of love and peace that women articulate is never listened to,’ The Searchers . . . illustrates the triumph of “feminine” values that are ultimately “listened to” by Ethan Edwards as well as by the film’s audience.”33 In a manner that will have a profound effect upon the road movies that follow more than a decade later, the film’s critique of progress begins with the protagonist himself, who has been so wounded by change that he has, himself, become incapable of change. He is nostalgically romanticized, to be sure, but dead wrong. He must heroically step aside or, as Ford’s film would have it, outside. This, of course, is the film’s complex crux. Ethan’s knowledge and his mobility are attractive, but, like that which he imagines himself fighting against, they must be defeated. Early in the film the group encounters the unburied body of a dead Indian. In a fit of frustration and anger, Jorgensen stones the corpse. Ethan suggests that he finish the job and proceeds to shoot the Indian’s eyes out. When asked why he behaves in such a violent fashion, Ethan, assisted by Old Mose Harper, says that an Indian with no eyes is doomed to wander forever “between the winds.”34 This bit of impassioned dialogue seems deeply significant given Ethan’s own wandering tendencies and his utter lack of vision. Later, Ethan says “Human rides a horse ‘till it dies, and then goes by foot. Comanche comes along, gets that horse up, rides ‘im another twenty miles then eats ‘im.” And still later, he says

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“Injun’ll chase a thing ‘til he thinks he’s chased it enough . . . same way when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter’ll keep on comin’ on. So we’ll find ‘em in the end. I promise ya . . . just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth” (see Figure 2.3). All of these “words of wisdom” share one critical and common element and that is that each of them centers on the idea of the wandering or nomadic native American, on the idea that America’s first inhabitants have, for one reason or another, movement in their blood. These words also describe Ethan himself, and herein lies the conundrum of Ethan’s racial hatred and paranoia. At its base is a complex feeling of envy. On the one hand, Ethan envies his brother who married and settled with Martha; scenes composed specifically to show the visual attention Ethan and Martha lavish upon one another and not words suggest their complex relationship. He longs for, and is therefore hostile toward, this life that has been closed off to him. On the other hand, Ethan envies the Indian, especially Chief Scar, who, in the mythology of the film, is both entirely mobile and is able, however violently, to “have” Martha. This idea—this love/hate relationship with and misunderstanding of this county’s original inhabitants—is one that recurs well into the contemporary road movie. Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers explores the idea most poignantly by depicting the major turning point in Mallory’s character in a teepee and, not coincidentally, in front of a fire.35 Ethan, though, uses his knowledge of Indian lore against the Indians—and against himself. As has been established, The Searchers is a male-driven narrative and one that takes the very notion of masculine mobility as its subject. In fact, only the male characters in the film are truly mobile; Debbie and Lucy are moved by the hypermobility of Chief Scar and his warriors, not by any action of their own. Debbie is domesticated, too, though in an Indian fashion. When Martin and Ethan first encounter her at Scar’s camp, she tells the men that Scar’s people are now her people, punctuating her comments about her own boundedness with words and a gesture indicating her male counterparts’ mobility: in her “native tongue” she tells them to go, and motions, in a wave-like gesture, in the direction in which they are to depart. To be sure, Laurie is defined by her own more traditional (read: white) home-boundedness. At one point in the narrative, as Martin is about to return to the trail in search of Debbie, Laurie tells him that she will not wait. Yet, in this narrative, all of the female characters wait in one way or another.

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Figure 2.3 The Searchers (1956). Ethan lectures Martin on native mobility while on the trail.

As the opening scene of the film suggests, however, even the film’s mobile characters are bound by the landscape that surrounds them. Monument Valley’s visual effect is nearly expressionistic, and this subtle connection to the visual style of film noir is no accident. In many ways created by Ford and repeated, by him and others many times since, the valley itself is a set, a point that Jean Baudrillard, in America, is at great pains to demonstrate. Ford, in fact, was so committed to the location’s cinematic qualities that he initiated the building of roads into the valley to ease the in and out flow of his crew.36 Where the noir city is monstrously threatening, however, Ford’s landscape is beautifully so. It is, in the word’s original and now hopelessly lost sense, awesome. The landscape, in all of its vastness, also offers interesting insights into the character of Ethan. From the beginning of the film, Ethan encounters bodies seeking refuge from the elements or from hostile enemies: people hiding in barns, caves, between rocks, etc. It is not until Ethan sees Debbie seek shelter from his own hostility that he begins to see the error in his ways. He has become a part of this hostile and overbearing environment. Lee Mitchell has discussed this landscape and, focusing on Stagecoach, has pointed to its “vertiginous” qualities, arguing that the landscape is heroically “Americanizing” for its sheer immensity.37 The

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hero in Stagecoach emerges larger than life in the midst of this immense landscape through the film’s famed dolly in to a close-up of John Wayne as The Ringo Kid. Like its graphic and literary predecessors, though, the landscape in the Western film is also strangely minimalizing to its inhabitants; in a sense, it is the center of the narrative and the film’s star. The Western landscape also appears curiously “urban”; the mesas and the buttes themselves resemble, in their impossible immensity and their illogical and curious formations, the contemporary cityscape. The optical effect of Ford’s Monument Valley and the noir city are quite similar. Vertical space, in both genres, dwarfs the individual(s) in its midst and creates an illusion of enclosure. But where noir imagines characters who take to the road to escape these enclosures, the Western, and The Searchers in particular, imagines communities engaged in the building of walls separating inside from outside. The wall in the film’s opening, strange as it appears, is in this way what the film is ultimately about. Mitchell discusses this idea in relation to the closing of the frontier, writing, “Urban and industrial transformations had begun to feed a nostalgia for supposedly simpler ways of life, contributing to the celebration of an unindustrial West—a celebration that was also, of course, a barely disguised effort at restoring cultural hegemony.”38 The road, or more specifically in this case, the trail is, of course, a transitional space, a space between extremes of modernity and primitiveness. It is a prominent part of the Western precisely because it foregrounds this idea of transition at major turning points in American history. It is not entirely romantic in its “between-ness,” however. In other words, the “old way” must, at various points, give way to some vague notion of progress. The trail in the Western exists as a space between progression and regression, between the old and the new. Travel on it, as indicated at the beginning of this examination, is a physical, kinetic form of denial that “change” is taking place. Ethan’s arm-clutching return to this space of denial at the end of The Searchers, then, is a retreat in precisely the way other characters throughout the film have been observed to retreat from the threat of physical harm. Ethan seeks shelter in the desert landscape and, in his own blindness, has doomed himself to a lifetime of walking between the winds, away from both community and communication. This is the critical connection between Al Roberts and Ethan Edwards, the connection that gives birth to the supposedly rebellious road movie and its often confused relationship to home. Both Roberts and Ethan are imagined to be victims of modernity, the desperate

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leftovers of cultural progression. In The Searchers, this progress is in the direction of the domestic which, as Gaylyn Studlar illustrates, must triumph, however problematically, by film’s end. Home, however, leaves Ethan and his unchanging—and, with few exceptions, unsympathetic—ways at the threshold. In Detour, desperate as Al seems to be to attain it, domesticity as such has vaporized, has become another cruel joke of fate, has itself fallen victim to the march of modernity and its frighteningly powerful and ill-intentioned female spawn. As with their turn-of-the-century predecessors, however, both films, even if by negative corollary, valorize the home and vilify impediments to its stability. In The Searchers, these impediments are savagely racialized, and Ethan, until the end, has become one of “them.” In Detour, a film even more perversely guided by postwar anxieties with regard to masculinity, these impediments are feminized. As I argue throughout this chapter, Detour and The Searchers evince the central thematic, ideological, and structural tensions that emerge in the formal road movie genre of the 1960s and 1970s. However, it is the uneasy digestion and rearticulation of these same ideas in Godard’s Breathless that most clearly anticipates the road movie genre’s directions. A film about the films that precede it, a film that, as Laderman would have it, helps define the “modernist staging” that, in his estimation, sets the road movie apart from traditional genres, Godard’s film is equally set upon lamenting, not celebrating, its hero’s rambling condition, his existence outside of society, its structures, and its institutions.

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3

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and the Road to the Road Movie

Mobile American Culture o begin with a requisite, though perhaps readily apparent, point: films represent motion on the screen and are themselves mobile, traveling between screens and nations. Fueled by a complex and selfinterested studio system desperate to sell its product overseas, a combination of clamoring postwar French collectors and programmers and the lifting of France’s wartime embargo on American films caused an enormous influx of American cinema into France in the years following World War II. French intellectuals watched eagerly, sometimes enthusiastically attending to films largely overlooked or completely dismissed in the United States. Although France is singular in terms of the scope of this influx and in the journalistic interest it generated, the basic pattern repeated itself in country after country and, to this day, American films appear to occupy a great percentage of our international screens, extending into the early twenty-first century the continued impression of a distinctly, though occasionally and interestingly interrupted, one-way flow of cinematic traffic. As the French New Wave was forming, the American film industry and the American automotive industry were at their peaks, both economically and in terms of their respective grips on the international imagination; and, of course, this pairing of the cinematic and the automotive industries is far from random. The cinema and the automobile are the twentieth century’s crowning achievements in mobility, one enhancing and the other capturing it. By the late 1950s,

T

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however, the global mobility of American cinema, its imagistic and economic stronghold abroad, was causing international intellectuals and would-be filmmakers to ask questions about the influence of the American product. The answers to some of these questions soon took cinematic form. Another critical though frequently overlooked point: filmmakers watch each other and, in patterning their own cinematic practice, adopt ideas they admire from one another. They make direct or subtle references to or criticisms of their predecessors and contemporaries and, perhaps less obviously, form larger cinematic conversations as they do so. The road movie is the product of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring international cinematic conversations, and the next three chapters explore this intricate policy of exchange, examining three closely related films that speak to the road movie’s broader concerns. The three filmmakers—Jean-Luc Godard, Dennis Hopper, and Wim Wenders—have all participated in this practice of cinematic reference and borrowing, drawing from cinematic history generally as well as from each other in their repeated cinematic explorations of the journey. Involved as each of these filmmakers was in a young, more or less cohesive film movement intent upon exploring, challenging, and renegotiating the very foundation of the cinematic, each filmmaker’s deliberate choice of the road is especially revealing. Godard, Hopper, and Wenders situate their narratives on the road, that most linear of structures—for, in spite of its inherent curves, it suggests forward movement—to raise questions about the various and typically assumed components of an equally linear cinematic grammar. That the roots of this grammar are imbedded in classical-era American genre pictures allows each filmmaker to interrogate the impact, significance, and mobility of American images in particular—expressing, sometimes simultaneously, both a love affair with and concern over the globalization of American mythologies. Godard, Hopper, and Wenders are also linked by an intense, sometimes overwhelming interest in the key elements I hope to illuminate. The road, in the work of these three filmmakers, emerges as a mechanism by which to critique a global culture that has rendered stability impossible—a threateningly and perversely modern world that has severed, perhaps irreparably, its relationship to both community and communication and has cast its inhabitants out, on the road. The directors and critics of the French New Wave and their attempts to understand and theorize American cinematic genres form

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the first link in this international chain of cinematic exchange. JeanLuc Godard, when asked to define the cinema, once famously remarked that the cinema was a gun and a girl, an obvious reference to his interest in the 1940s American “B” gangster/noir tradition.1 To this equation, at least in the French understanding of it, might also be added the automobile and the road, both of which appear with regularity in French films of the 1960s and are a fundamental part of Godard’s cinematic practice at least through the end of that decade. Godard’s fascination with the automobile and the road is rooted in his fascination with (and skepticism of) all things “modern” and all things “American,” categories that become increasingly intertwined in Godard’s work. In this way, Godard’s images prefigure the words of Jean Baudrillard, whose America similarly critiques the modern American culture machine and its international effects. Interestingly, both French thinkers locate their criticisms on the road. The automobile is a modern object with inarguable American associations, and Godard draws out this Americanness by frequently using American cars in his films. These associations, in fact, are so ingrained that the road movie itself is often, problematically I think, considered an inherently American form. The automobile, however, is both thematically and metaphorically important to Godard’s cinema. It is the physical embodiment of transportability and it signifies, in Godard’s work, the global movement of American popular culture.2 This chapter explores Godard’s Breathless as a road movie and as a source for the formal and thematic rupture and experimentation its road-bound American cousins are celebrated and decried for. As with its generic predecessors, however, Godard’s film imagines a world, or at least a character, driven mad by and painfully obsessed with modern motion, a character whose humanity hangs in the balance between mobility and stasis. Breathless follows the exploits of Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time car thief unable to exist within or without the generic confines that determine his behavior. Governed as he is by an ill-fitting faith in the prototypical American gangster, Michel’s mobility, his desire to hit the road, is cinematically derived, stumblingly absurd, and also tragically doomed. This need for mobility is counter-balanced by a similarly overdetermined, similarly generic, and (for Michel and perhaps the viewer as well) excruciating stasis. Michel’s American love interest, Patricia (Jean Seberg), who sells the New York Herald Tribune along the Champs-Elysées, is not Michel’s moll and seems to exist, though also somewhat tentatively, on

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another generic plane altogether, one that seems to follow more closely (or wants to follow more closely) the mandates of American domestic melodrama. Genres clash in this film about genre, and, as they do so, the film pulsates nervously with its own discomfort. The narrative proximity between the road and the cinema are key to Godard’s work, which, in this early period, was frequently focused on understanding the relationship between text, narrative, image, and motion. These elements swirl together in Breathless and leave in their wake characters that can neither move nor stand still. Godard’s personal obsessions, on screen and off, with the subject of mobility, however, must be read not as celebrations of rapidity and escape but as the desperate, though one suspects self-knowing, attempts of a man struggling to keep up, struggling to stay or become human, and struggling, finally, to understand the cinema’s deciding role in all of this. Breathless, on its surface at least, might appear to be the least obviously “road-obsessed” of Godard’s films. Weekend (1967) and Pierrot le fou (1968), with their concentration on space, distance, and postwar dislocation, and Alphaville (1965), with its post–atomic age implications of the same, may well appear to be better, more literal, or more “pure” examples. These films, after all, devote significant screen time to actual, physical travel. 3 Breathless, however, presents the primal stirrings of what will become a governing thematic in Godard’s films of the 1960s, providing the basic formula for a host of road movies to follow. Breatlhess, in this way, assembles the formal and generic logic of the modernist cinematic road movie, paving the road in many ways for future makers of road films. Godard, however, claims to have intended for Breathless to fit within a distinct chain of American films. He was, in other words, looking back and abroad to generic traditions that had fascinated him. The resulting film, of course, was quite different from the films that predated it. Godard’s own views regarding this generic confusion, this “inability”—for this is how Godard himself frames it—to work successfully within the American idiom, are illuminating. In a much-cited conversational fragment, Godard suggests, “Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like A bout de souffle very much, but now I see where it belongs—along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface.”4 Godard’s words are remarkable in that they recognize the film’s seldom-remarked-upon fairy-tale-like qualities, its play upon and within a world of illusions and allusions. The film’s protagonist, Michel, falls victim to the same illusions Godard claims to have been chasing.

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Godard’s casual citation of Alice’s adventures hints at the elusiveness of the obsessions that haunt both the filmmaker and his film’s protagonist; both seem desperately to want something they can not have. Godard’s film enacts the danger of pursuing a mythical and fairy-tale-like Americanness, and Godard admits to, or plays at, being duped himself. Godard’s words also call to mind “the looking glass” through which Alice travels and, in the process, “discovers” herself, an idea relevant in many ways to Breathless, which, as critics like to point out, contains many self-consciously constructed gazes into mirrors and a host of other reflective planes.5 Breathless itself might be understood as a reflection of American culture as France in the 1950s imagined it and in which American audiences, perhaps for the first time, recognized themselves. The self Godard asks America to recognize is its illusionary, cinematic self—what Jean Baudrillard might refer to as simulacra-America.6 This self-recognition, in fact, results in an American wave of road movies equally critical of “America” and its genuinely seductive, cinematically derived myths of “freedom.” Regardless of its “success” as a genre picture, Breathless is clearly a film about genre. Dudley Andrew, for example, discusses the film’s noir roots when he suggests that “Belmondo’s dream of going south to Italy with his girl and his swag recalls the ‘escape over the border’ dreams of so many forties’ antiheroes, like the fated couple of Gun Crazy.”7 More than simply “recalling” these generically determined dreams, however, the film suggests the seductive traps set by genre. Michel can only behave within the troublingly romanticized parameters of American genre. Godard dedicates his film to Monogram Pictures, the Poverty Row production company that produced Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950). The dedication, however, is no casual, name-dropping gesture. Lewis’s film is an early and important American proto-road movie, one that presents a version of the roadbound Bonnie and Clyde myth that Arthur Penn—himself under the influence of Godard and the New Wave—took up in 1967 with his breakthrough Bonnie and Clyde, a film that was first offered to Godard and then to Truffaut before Penn took on the project. Godard, as early as 1959, explores the effect of this cinematic “diplomacy,” placing at the center of his narrative a character taken in by the mobility of these cinematic myths and who, as a result, is rendered frustratingly and hopelessly static. The noir films that Godard admired were frequently smart beyond their means and were themselves often engaged in cinematic critiques of American culture, which impressed Godard and the

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other young critics of the New Wave. Built along the line between mobility and stasis, a line indelibly connected to America’s national mythology, these films were also directly interested in exploring America’s fascination with and occasional fear of the road. Andrew goes on to summarize the plot of Breathless in a manner especially befitting this exploration: “The net of plot might best be symbolized . . . as a maniacal system of roads. The highway where the crime takes place harbors no hiding places.”8 Andrew has identified perhaps the most important characteristic of Breathless and of Godard’s cinematic world more generally: the “maniacal system of roads” that constitutes the plot, such as it is, of Breathless. This is the grid upon which many of his later films are built; and it becomes a metaphor for the modern traffic in images that was, in 1959, both the object of Godard’s passion and the emergent source of his contempt. “Communication Is Going from One Place to Another” Language at the Cinematic Crossroads In a 1980 interview with Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone, Godard offers the following highly relevant, though characteristically elliptical, comment on the relationship between language and movement, the central elements of Breathless: I think that communication is going from one place to another— moving from, say, New York to Telluride. To me, being a human being is being between two places. It’s the movement that’s important, not remaining in one place. As a moviemaker, I feel as if I’m living more than I’m moving. That’s why I think there’s no difference between my life and my movies. I exist more when I’m making movies than when I’m not. That’s why someone might say to me, “You have no personal life; I can’t have a relationship with you. When we’re making love, you’re suddenly saying, ‘What a beautiful shot I’m thinking of!’ It’s like a painter only speaking of colors.” But I think what I’m doing is the only thing I can speak of—creation.9

Godard’s words imply an inability, perhaps an unwillingness to separate life from the movies, and this problem lies at the center of Breathless as well. Movement—both cinematic and literal—is imagined to be a fundamentally humanizing activity, a preferred form of communication, though he admits that his own practice of it results

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in alienation from other people. Godard’s comments reflect aptly upon Michel, a character who is alienated, troublingly disconnected throughout the film, and for whom an often ridiculous, cinematically determined mobility is compensatory, functioning ineptly in place of, and tempting him away from, communication and community. Breathless opens on images of linguistic and communicatory significance. A close-up reveals Michel “reading” Paris Flirt, a semi-lurid pulp publication whose cover features a scantily clad woman suggestively holding a doll.10 He holds the paper up over his face, obscuring his identity as he surreptitiously surveys the situation, waiting for his vehicular prey. In voice-over, Michel refers to himself as “a dumb bastard” and, removing a cigarette from his mouth to do so, rubs his lips self-consciously and exaggeratedly with the side of his thumb, mimicking Humphrey Bogart and introducing the viewer to a gesture that continues through the remainder of the film.11 The gesture, however, is not only cinematically reflexive. Combined with other elements in the film, Michel’s thumb-to-lip gesture, along with the voice-over that precedes it, also suggests the primacy, but ultimate failure, of oral communication in this film where characters continually speak not to or with but just beyond one another, their relationships remaining verbally stunted, fundamentally dumb. “Dumbness,” though perhaps not in the sense Michel means, is an important idea in this film about attempts at and breakdowns in communication, about verbal and cinematic misfires. A series of communicative though non-verbal nods between Michel and his dark-haired female counterpart occur just before he hotwires an older American couple’s rather conspicuous American car—a 1950 Oldsmobile—beginning the albeit rather fleeting geographic motion of the film. The exchange of glances and gestures between Michel and his accomplice are indicative of this film’s engagement in alternative, non-verbal means of communication. They also comment critically on Michel’s character. Michel, we learn quickly, desires a relationship defined in terms of movement, not words. Robert Kolker has pointed out that the opening of the film denies the viewer the customary establishing shot and suggests that the viewer’s “attention is instantly diverted, even though it is not yet diverted from anything.”12 The film opens on a close-up of an unidentified and obscured character whose identity and whose relationship to the space around him will be further fractured by a series of rapid and disorienting cuts. Spatial relationships and locations are not immediately clear and do not promise to become clear until

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Michel enters the automobile, denying his female counterpart access to the world of motion as he does so. The film’s opening, however, is as shocking and disorienting for its verbal starkness as it is for its unorthodox visual organization. The missing establishing shot is accompanied by near-perfect silence. Unmoored by the usual narrative anchors, then, the viewer grasps at the familiarly seductive promise of mobility, that most basic, nearly universal narrative structure. Mobility, in other words, will come to stand in for narrative clarity, will placate in its absence, and will suggest the smooth contours of narrative (while covering up actual lack), which here and elsewhere in the film, is synonymous with communication. The apparent mobile clarity of the automobile on the road, however, is also fragile and impermanent. In this film, mobility is merely one of several highly attractive, highly cinematic illusions and the automobile’s generic past, its ability to “speak” on behalf of its characters, is both invoked and questioned from the very beginning. The perspective shifts, after a slow dissolve, to a series of tightly framed and similarly disorienting interior shots from various locations within the recently acquired American car. The sequence begins with a point-of-view shot of a rural tree-lined highway, followed by a shot from the back seat (echoing the elegant and frequently discussed extended take from Gun Crazy’s famed bank-robbery scene), and one from the passenger seat. These suggestive positions place the viewer squarely into the narrative and the motion, but not comfortably, not fixedly; like Michel, the viewer—via Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s highly mobile camera—is dislocated, unstable. Michel sings and talks to himself as a series of jump cuts alters the very basic representation of distance traveled and time spent. To the already shaken viewer, these “gaps,” these discontinuous representations of space and time, challenge the basic notion of “classical” cinematic linearity. In films like The Searchers or Detour, for example, where narrative chronology is reorganized via flashbacks, the reading of letters, etc., motion (through the narrative, through space) still appears “fluid” because the cuts are soft, gradual, and suggest “continuation.” Both of these earlier films, as we have seen, use montage to suggest the length of the journey represented. While montage in these films functions economically, since less film and time are required, the effect is the illusion of duration. Time and space, in other words, are compressed to frugally and seamlessly narrate a journey of continental scope. Godard, on the other hand, cuts in a manner that foregrounds the seams and renders the artifice of the “whole” all the more apparent.

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Godard’s editorial technique, his jump cuts from the dash, most obviously illustrate that the classical Hollywood style is mere convention.13 But the mechanism also works more complicatedly. Michel Marie, focusing on the radical editing of this portion of the film, calling it, after the literal road it’s filmed along, the “Nationale 7” sequence, notes that “Godard could not have found a more devastating way of reviving the dynamics of Eisensteinian montage and the deconstruction of the revolutionary machine-guns in October.”14 Calling up Eisenstein, Marie hints at a more interesting reading of Godard’s early formalism than is typically suggested. Implicit in Marie’s analysis is the idea that Godard’s editorial techniques are ideologically motivated. Godard’s ideology, however, is cinematically framed. Though it is no less political in its inspiration or its intent, Godard here imagines a revolution of images and not of fists. His film revolts, but its revolution is aimed squarely at a cinematic tradition that has seduced Michel onto the road in the first place.15 Godard, more Brechtian than Eisensteinian at the time of Breathless, seeks to expose the artifice of the image and its organization in order to lay bare and reconstruct cinematic and (later) political practice. Like Eisenstein’s, however, his editorial technique is emotionally impacting, psychologically expressive. The cut in Godard’s work is, in short, moving, though problematically so, and, in Breathless, it functions to expose the political as it functions on the personal level. From these opening frames through the film’s highly symbolic conclusion, Godard’s editing raises critical questions about the relationship between mobility and communication and represents graphically Michel’s devastatingly limited access to either category.16 More than a tribute to or revival of Eisensteinian montage, Godard’s editing achieves a metaphorical and deeply troubling kind of ancillary kineticism that road film makers since him have adopted more or less successfully. The film, its protagonist and, by proxy, its viewer move recklessly and impatiently in search of some impossibly whole, impossibly linear, impossibly cinematic logic; a logic that, in the end, cannot be found.17 These multiple impossibilities are rendered all the more elusive by the film’s similarly disorienting and equally slippery verbal track. Shot in the postwar Italian style— silently on the streets with sound dubbed in later—utterances in Breathless seem to search for their “proper” image and vice-versa. Michel Marie, discussing the relationship between sound and image in the film, has noted, “This deliberate opting for visual discontinuity goes hand and hand with the general autonomy of the

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soundtrack, which has its own time, regardless of its links with the image. Thus, at the beginning of the film, while Michel is talking to himself at the wheel of his American car, the image track cuts between fragmented images of his journey with the very obvious spatial ellipses, while the language, however nonsensical, operates in a relatively continuous way.”18 Marie continues to discuss Michel’s use of a highly idiomatic— and, one should add, notoriously difficult to translate—slang and the English-speaking Patricia’s inability, throughout the film, to understand his often rambling narrative logic. Marie concludes by saying that “A bout de souffle is a tragedy of language and the impossibility of communication.” 19 Marie’s comments hint at the parallel Godard draws in Breathless between verbal and cinematic language and the glaring inadequacies of both. Indeed, the unspoken element in Marie’s conceptualization of “a tragedy of language” is the equally tragic, equally confused cinematic language Godard employs. Dudley Andrew, quoting Godard, has offered the following perspective: “‘Clumsiness,’ Godard said, ‘attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.’ No film would try harder than Breathless to fix simplicity straight in the eye. No film so joyously and cavalierly disregards finesse and technical competence in the pursuit of direct expression.”20 More than a simple disavowal of “finesse and technical competence,” however, Godard’s film foregrounds the conventions by which we mark competence and, in the process, becomes less about “direct expression” than about the search—and, for all of its pleasure I do not think it’s an especially joyous search—for an adequate means of expression. Godard searches, as does Michel, who, at this point in the film finds community only with himself and the camera that records him. The “National 7” sequence is marked, significantly I think, by its reliance on monologue. In fact, Michel’s most articulate—or, at least his most vocal—moments occur alone in the stolen American car as he speaks either to himself or directly to his interestingly captive audience (like Detour and The Searchers, this is, in its own way, a captivity narrative). In what might most appropriately be called his automonologue, Michel mumbles to himself, “First I’ll pick up the dough. Then I’ll ask Patricia ‘Yes?’ or ‘No?’ And then, ‘Buenas noches, mi amore!’” Michel’s words imply a fantastically linear, uninterrupted, forward moving logic; a structure of first, then, and then again. This logic resembles, in skeletal form, the plot-line of a classical-era

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American gangster film. In this way, Michel verbally connects his story to its cinematic heritage. Here and elsewhere, Michel fancies himself a cinematic tough guy who must keep moving, who refuses to slow down; a conventional, generic imperative that threatens to become reality when Michel shoots the policeman who follows him off the side of the road (see Figure 3.1). This linearity, however, cannot, be maintained and is everywhere undermined. Michel’s monologue summons up and obliterates the noir tradition of voiceover narration. The direct address of Detour has been turned on its head here as Michel turns directly to the camera, asks questions of and then proceeds to dismiss the spectator, further alienating himself and the viewer in the process. Michel’s direct address differs critically from the traditional noir use of the voiceover in its temporal and spatial proximity. Detour, for instance, like so many 1940s noir films, employs the voiceover to suggest the hindsight of its protagonist, his memories. The relationship between Al Roberts and the spectator is based, at least in part, on the spectator’s probable disbelief of what has happened or what is about to happen and Al’s desperate need to convince. Breathless, on the other hand, is somewhat more complicated. The audience joins and is spoken to by Michel in the present. In spite of this nearness, however, Michel remains distant, incomplete, and removed, and this proximate distance, as we might term it, becomes a defining characteristic of the road movies that follow Godard’s film, films that similarly ask the viewer to ride along with characters that remain puzzlingly closed, characters the spectator willingly follows because of their always seductive mobility. As much a product, or, perhaps more appropriately, a byproduct, of “The Cinema” as Godard’s jump cuts, Michel is little more than a displaced generic element. His spasmodic wanderings—verbal and physical—are in this way parallel to the film’s own formal and generic confusion. Godard, like Michel, struggles to find a fit, and his structure throughout, like Michel’s behavior, reveals the fissures. Critically, however, these fissures occur when characters are in transit or in conversation. Speaking, again somewhat hyperbolically, about his editorial decisions in Breathless, Godard remarks, “Unless you are very good, most first movies are too long and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours. In fact, the first cut of Breathless was two and a half hours and the producer said, ‘You have to cut out one hour.’ We decided to do it mathematically. We cut three seconds here, three here, three here . . . ”21

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Figure 3.1 Breathless, driving under the influence of American images.

As unlikely as such an explanation is, it is remarkable that what Godard claims to be his “random acts of editing,” occur most typically at certain moments within the film: they disrupt moments of dialogue (usually involving the telling of a story or a joke) and moments of travel (an act itself usually accompanied by conversation). In interviews Godard has commented that he cut on dialogue because he grew impatient with his characters’ yammering on and was impatient to get to the meat, however scant, of the matter. The statement clearly indicates that, far from cutting randomly, Godard chose which narrative sequences to cut, if not exactly which frames. In selecting to cut within motion or conversation, Godard effectively renders communication—as it is generally understood and as he articulates it in his interview with Jonathan Cott—impossible. If it is the movement itself, the “betweenness” that is communicative and “important,” then something is sacrificed in compressing it. That it is so aggressively compressed indicates the degree to which Godard hopes to make the sacrifice itself visible. Just before Michel confronts and shoots the cop who has followed him off the road, he exclaims, frustrated at the slow female driver ahead of him, “Cars are meant to go, not to stop!” One might extrapolate Michel’s comments to apply more broadly to conversations, which

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in the context of the film, also have a curious habit of stuttering, of stopping short of their mark. Godard’s decision to cut most aggressively when characters are between spaces, conversational or geographical, disallows the growth of their humanity. But this cutting, this compression of time, this apparent impatience with the spaces in between is, finally, expressive of our characters who are, themselves, consumed with destination: Michel with Rome and Patricia with Paris, where she intends to stay all along. Their motion, in other words, is a desperate attempt to find a way or a place to stop. Godard suggests that Michel’s failure, his tragic outcome, is predicated upon an unquestioning reliance on a certain stock of American images that are, for him, wholly unsuitable. Try as he might, Michel cannot connect with either of his American obsessions—Patricia or Bogart. Hollywood fantasy, Godard suggests, is eminently transportable but, perhaps, not translatable. In other words, the fantasy itself collapses when language intervenes. “Cars Are Meant to Go, Not to Stop!” Godard frequently returns to the metaphor of travel in comments about his work, compelling Jonathan Rosenbaum to open his 1980 interview with the director by saying, “Jean-Luc Godard seems to be into transportation metaphors a lot nowadays. It’s been rumored that when Paul Schrader sidled up to him recently at a film festival and said,‘I think you should know that I took something of yours from The Married Woman and put it in American Gigolo,’ the master coolly replied,‘What’s important isn’t what you take—it [sic] where you take it to.’”22 Godard’s words affirm his dual and always-connected fascinations with travel and its relationship to cinematic citation and borrowing. The process of cinematic citation has, for Godard, collapsed with travel and has become, through pun (the preeminent Godardian pastime), something that you take from one place to another—something transported. Suggested here is that other system of maniacal roads, a system through which cinematic images and ideas travel, stop, and are integrated into the work of others. In Breathless, a film rife with cinematic and pop-cultural citations, mobility of the generic, American sort, sits most uncomfortably. As we have explored, Godard’s form bears evidence of this uncomfortable importation. By 1980, of course, Godard had seen the traffic in images moving in the other direction. Approximately three decades after Breathless,

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the idea of an American director borrowing from European sources not only made sense, it had become a rite of directorial passage. Citing, sometimes idly and sometimes quite meaningfully, one’s international influences was the shiny, hip coin of the New Hollywood realm. Breathless, however, is an early example of a type of cinematic practice (one that would soon become widespread) that questions the notion of the cinematic narrative as a closed, complete, and wholly self-contained universe. One of Godard’s central questions in the film revolves around the apparent ease and plentitude of motion and its attendant mythologies in classical-era American genre films, which themselves seemed to move with ease. This particular question and the language used to articulate it would, in due time, be absorbed into a wave of American road films similarly intent upon questioning these generic myths.23 The hyperkinetic world of the beginning of Breathless comes, quite literally, to a screeching halt when Michel, behind the wheel of his recently stolen vehicle, pulls over to the side of the road. After Michel shoots the cop, a scene replete with some of the film’s most exciting and jarring editing effects, there is a quick cut to an extreme long shot of Michel running across a field in a slight diagonal from right to left. The camera pans to follow him as he runs off into the distance, getting smaller and smaller as the jazz score, a variation on Michel’s theme, swells dramatically in the background. This “disappearance” of an actively mobile Michel is critical in that it marks a turning point in the film. Actual “road-based” and rural movement has been interrupted and will be replaced by a deeply signifying metaphorical and formal movement within the city. Breathless, in fact, never leaves Paris and spends much of its time indoors in the rooms of its various characters. Michel, however, would have his narrative be a road movie. He longs for the impossible mobility of American cinematic images, though his desire is finally thwarted by Patricia’s compulsion to stop moving. The dilemma imagined in Godard’s film is, in fact, the exact opposite of Detour’s where Al’s doomed mobility is motivated by female prime movers. Here, in a fashion more or less modeled on the “traditional” Hollywood type, the female character expresses her comfort in her rootedness; she is unwilling to move and continually exhibits her connectedness to the domestic sphere. Her journey to France, we are led to assume, was an act of bravery, but even this act remains under the watchful eye of her father, who demands that she finish her studies. The film will continue to ponder the possibility of movement. It will also continually disallow it, creating in the viewer a desire for

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mobile action parallel to Michel’s. The desire, however, is tragic and ultimately unfulfilled. At a critical moment on the streets of Paris, Michel attempts to convince Patricia to go with him to Rome, claiming that he is in danger in Paris. When the two part, the scene is punctuated by a close up of a portion of a French movie poster for Robert Aldrich’s 1959 Ten Seconds to Hell that reads “Vivre dangereusement jusqu’au bout” or “To live dangerously until the end!” The names Jack Palance and Jeff Chandler are visible in the lower right hand corner of the frame. The poster’s language sums up Michel’s fantastic self-perception, his cinematically derived ambitions. Michel’s walk and Godard’s moment of cinematic self-reflection are interrupted briefly by a young girl holding, as if to drive the point further, an issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the journal where Godard made his name writing critical articles about American cinema.24 The girl, curiously but indignantly, asks if he has anything against youth, and Michel replies simply that he prefers old people. Next there is an especially significant, though brief, moment in the film. The camera cuts to a long shot of a car dangerously screeching around a corner, and a series of quick cuts create the illusion that it hits a man in the process. Though formally quite different from the Lumières’ The Automobile Accident (explored in Chapter 1), this moment in the film does resemble the automotive disaster films so popular at the turn of the century and, like those films, employs a number of cinematic tricks to achieve its effect. Lying dead in the street, the unfortunate pedestrian is surrounded by onlookers, including Michel, whose only reaction is to make the sign of the cross and walk on, reading his newspaper, hoping to maintain his own pedestrian motion. The scene ends with a close-up of the newspaper headline: “Police have identified the interstate killer.” In a very literal sense, Michel is arrested—is made immobile—by these words. The printing of his image makes him vulnerable on the streets, where he might be recognized. Michel must, once again, seek shelter. Movement, the moment reminds us, can be dangerous, even deadly business. After the accident in the street, Michel goes to visit his underworld contact, Tolmatchoff (Richard Balducci), at the suggestive locale of the travel bureau where he receives his mail in order to maintain his anonymity. The scene is replete with technical innovations, but its formal virtuosity is not simply an exercise; again, it is deeply significant to the theme of the film and the anxiety, on the part of Michel (and, by extension, Godard), to maintain motion and to return to the

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road. As with many of Godard’s more impressive visual moments in the film, the scene begins with a long frontal back-tracking shot of Michel. The camera, through this entire extended shot, remains in slow, smooth motion, circling Michel and, at times, predicting new directions. We learn, during the conversation between Tolmatchoff and Michel, that Michel has arrived to collect his money. The camera stays with the men as they exchange small talk. Dudley Andrew’s continuity script, however, interprets the movement in a curious, but highly relevant way: “During the conversation the camera tracks from Michel’s left to his right, reversing the movement it had made earlier at the receptionist’s desk. Neither hesitating nor slowing, it seems to lead Michel back in the direction he had come.” 25 Andrew has identified and described a very important element in Godard’s formal work in the film: the role played by the camera. Raoul Coutard’s wheelchair tracking shots have been explored for their virtuosity, but their thematic significance, the purpose for their placement, has been ignored. Andrew implies that the camera invites Michel to move. I’d like to suggest that it dares him.26 The collaborative camerawork of Godard and Coutard constantly riffs on the history of the cinema. It is a selfconscious, highly aware and very mobile element in the film, and Michel has an intimate relationship with this element; in his automonologue, as he claims his adoration for the country and countryside he speeds through, he treats the camera like a character, looking directly at it (and, by extension, the audience as well) as he exclaims “go fuck yourself ” if you don’t like the sea, the mountains, or the big city. This is a dangerously prophetic statement as Michel, who is himself geographically dissatisfied, finds himself “fucked” by film’s end. But Michel, here and elsewhere, should be read as a desperate performer seduced by this trickster camera that seeks to replicate and critique—or to critique by replication—generic American cinematic moments and movements. The camera provokes and perpetuates Michel’s need for motion; it incites him. The scene ends with the detectives, who pass Michel unknowingly as they enter the building, questioning Tolmatchoff about Michel’s whereabouts. The travel bureau scene alerts the viewer to two important details. First, we learn of Michel’s cinematically self-aware alias: he names himself Laszlo Kovacs, who was a real cinephile living in Paris at the time and who would later go on to become a cinematographer, perhaps most famous for his work on Easy Rider. The viewer also learns that before becoming a car thief Michel worked as a steward for

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Air France. This is yet another reminder of the character and the film’s obsession with motion and, perhaps, a hint at the idea of international exchange with which this analysis is also concerned. This sequence is punctuated with a shot of Michel standing, once again, in front of a movie poster, this time for The Harder They Fall, featuring Humphrey Bogart in his final film role. Michel stares intently at the poster, which we see in close-up, and he again imitates his impossible alter ego, taking his glasses off, puffing his cigarette self-consciously and rubbing his lip left and right. Michel’s violent moment in a men’s restroom moments later in the film, where he knocks a man cold and steals his wallet, is a misreading of Bogart, to be sure, but does indicate the degree to which Michel is guided by his own idiosyncratic understanding of cinematic images. The senseless violence also helps to maintain the pointless kineticism that Michel has doomed himself to. Michel is moving, but he is going nowhere, in part because his motion, like the violence in the bathroom, is utterly random, lacking in both direction and purpose. The film continually alerts us to its own aimlessness. “Where to?” are the words that open the next scene in the film, a brief scene that is critical mostly for its dialogical obsessions. Michel, throughout the film, expresses very little about himself verbally. We have already explored his revealing auto-monologue and its function within the noir tradition. Here, as they walk along the street together, Michel tells Patricia about the France Soir news item that has caught his attention, an item that seems to reveal Michel’s own criminally mobile fantasies: “Seems a bus driver stole five million francs to seduce a girl . . . He made out like he was a tycoon. They went down to the coast together. In three days, they dropped the five million. But there, the guy didn’t back down. He said to the girl, ‘It was stolen money. I’m a poor slob, but I love you.’ But the best part is that the girl didn’t drop him. She said ‘I love you too.’ They went back to Paris together and were picked up burglarizing villas at Passy. She was keeping watch. It was nice of her.” Michel’s articulate romanticization of this French Bonnie and Clyde pair is predicated upon the young woman’s desire to move along with her male counterpart. Michel tries to reenact this scenario with Patricia but fails because of Patricia’s promise to her father to attend classes at the Sorbonne. He is also fascinated, of course, by the fact that the journalistic word has immortalized the pair. Along with his image and an array of movie posters, Michel continually consults the papers to learn of his own status and seems genuinely

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intrigued by the disconcerting rapid mobility of the press. Through the entire scene, the camera maintains a back-tracking motion similar to that in the travel bureau scene, keeping Michel and Patricia in medium close-up and stopping when they stop. The shots themselves are bold, highly mobile, and move through the streets of Paris with precisely the sort of graceful bravado Michel fancies. Again, the taunting camera wins out, leaving Michel and Patricia quite literally behind. When Michel offers to give Patricia a ride to her date with the journalist, Van Doude, however, the visual world of the film again shifts and begins to “speak” metaphorically. The scene takes place in yet another automobile and once again points to the central, though tragic, implications of mobility within this film. Within this highly mobile scene, Godard most clearly illustrates the inevitability of communication breakdowns in situations where the spoken word cannot find its appropriate receiver. These detours in conversational momentum and direction lead to related complications in physical motion. As Michel and Patricia talk—the conversation begins on the topic of mobility, with Patricia inquiring about Michel’s Ford, which is, according to him, in the garage—the position of the camera shifts constantly, restlessly. A series of abrupt, though at times barely perceptible, cuts make the visual situation impossible to nail down. The result is a scene in which words on the soundtrack are being clearly spoken in an orderly fashion, although the topic of conversation shifts rather rapidly, but the visual evidence of this conversation is never allowed the viewer. The typical shot/reverse shot conversational cutting pattern is dispensed with here, replaced by what appears to be a good deal of B-roll footage of the couple driving. Sound and image, the basic units of cinematic narrative, appear to be out of synch, and the unsuitability of the cinematic container these characters inhabit is rendered all the more apparent. This conversational chaos is transposed onto the characters in the film creating a de-humanizing disjointedness that is made clear by Michel’s itemization of Patricia’s admirable body parts—an itemization that, through the jumpcuts that separate the parts, serves to fracture her humanity. Michel’s wholly cinematic worldview is itself similarly fractured. Their ride together does not work, and the forward motion of the journey must be stopped. Visually, the impossibility of this motion is hinted at through the jump cuts, which serve not only to disorient the viewer spatially, but more critically to demonstrate the futility of Michel’s attempts at cinematic linearity. As Michel and Patricia’s conversation proceeds in a fairly linear fashion in spite of attending

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misunderstandings, the visual space of the journey appears to be going nowhere. Michel and Patricia are incompatible, and their incompatibility is heightened when they are in motion together. Patricia’s words, which effectively break the chain of futile motion, are, “Here it is! Stop!” Michel offers to park the car, and Patricia responds by telling him it’s useless. His final exclamation as she exits is one that will play a central role later in the narrative, when Michel’s motion has literally and permanently been halted—he says: “Fine, beat it! I don’t want to see you again! Beat it. Beat it, you bitch!” This very telling moment in an automobile initiates the immobility that comprises much of the remainder of the film. The failure between the two characters to keep any semblance of conversational momentum results in excruciating stasis and finally death. Much of the rest of the film takes place indoors, in Patricia’s hotel room, where Godard’s emphasis on language and its failures is heightened by the prolonged stasis of the extended scene. The room itself is claustrophobic, or at least this illusion is created by Michel’s hyperactive presence within the room. Michel exteriorizes his need to move by constantly fidgeting and pacing; the film contains Michel in a space totally removed from his noir fantasy of the open road. Here he is forced to be still and to communicate verbally; he has been removed from the space of the noir monologue and thrust into human conversation, one that runs threateningly close to the domestic. Again, Godard is taken by and interested in exploring the various levels of conversational banality, which is nicely encapsulated in a brief moment that focuses on the very foundation of language. Michel teases Patricia about her boyish looks and tells her not to make a certain facial expression. Patricia misunderstands and asks “What do you mean, ‘make a face’?” Michel responds by contorting his face as he has throughout the film and in precisely the manner that ends the film. He opens his mouth wide, forming “ah,” shows his teeth for “eeh,” and circles his lips for “ooh.” Michel has given Patricia and the viewer a lesson in forming vowel sounds, the very basis for spoken language. Meaningful language is impossible in this “Franco-American encounter,” as Michel terms it. A full third of the film takes place in this location and not once does the couple seem to truly communicate. Patricia attempts to discuss art, music, and a variety of subjects, including the possibility that she might be pregnant. Michel, on the other hand, is intent on living up to his “all or nothing” philosophy and systematically ignores Patricia’s attempts at conversation as he

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makes “business” phone calls, talks about cars, attempts to get Patricia to remove her clothing, and tries yet again to convince her to come with him to Italy. This is an extremely dialogue-heavy moment in the film and repeatedly Patricia speaks the same lines: “Qu’est-ce que c’est . . . ?” Patricia is aware of their dialogical differences and repeatedly stops the flow of conversation to re-orient herself, to get a translation. In a 1960 interview with Yvonne Baby, Godard offers the following commentary on the linguistic gap between Patricia and Michel in the film: “The American, Patricia, is on a psychological level, whereas the guy, Michel, is on a poetic level. They use words—the same words— but they don’t have the same meaning.”27 While I remain baffled by Godard’s use of the word “poetic,” for Michel seems anything but, at least in the traditional sense of the word, Godard does point to the fact that these are characters existing on two wholly separate linguistic planes, a state of affairs rendered all the more apparent when the two are still. Michel’s linguistic existence mirrors his spatial existence; both are governed by a need to keep moving, and quickly. The more “psychological” Patricia, however, is spatially and linguistically static, interested in analyzing and existing within the moment rather than moving rapidly to the next one. Another attempt to “keep things moving” is made immediately after the hotel room scene, and again the attempt is foiled—this time in a more tellingly metaphorical way. In the center of Paris, Michel steals a Ford, which he will use to drive Patricia to her interview with the author Parvulesco (played by Jean-Pierre Melville). As he waits on the street for her to change her clothes at the New York Herald Tribune offices, Michel buys the latest edition of France-Soir. Off screen, another man calls for the newsman, and a medium shot from across the street reveals that he is none other than Godard himself. An extreme close-up of the paper pans slowly up, revealing a photo of Michel with the heading “Route 7 Road Killer Still at Large.” The man, recognizing Michel’s photograph from the paper, informs the police just as Michel and Patricia speed away from the scene. Film, Godard’s cameo suggests, is both responsible for Michel’s fantasy and for its ultimate failure. After Patricia’s interview with Parvulesco and after Michel beats up the junkyard dealer, Mansard, over a stolen car deal (stealing money from him instead, claiming it’s for cab fare), Michel’s immediate situation becomes more perilous. The press and the police are on to him, and his options are becoming fewer and fewer. A brief

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scene in a Paris taxicab indicates the degree to which this narrative tension, for Michel, translates into a need to move, and quickly. The scene fades into a medium shot from the back seat of the taxi and the first words spoken are Michel’s (from off camera): “Go on, step on it! Don’t worry about pedestrians. Hurry, that’s all I ask you. Go on, step on it! In the name of God, you’re dragging!” Michel’s words are interesting in relation to the earlier scene in which a pedestrian is hit in the street—the walkers of the world are once again of no consequence. Michel is the embodiment of the egomania the Lumières imagined the automobile would inspire. His egomania, however, is inspired by cinematic images of egomaniacal gangsters. The irony of our putative gangster’s position, then, is all the more poignant—he is not driving, nor has he some willing Bonnie to take the wheel on his behalf; he sits in the back of a taxi cab, helpless and shouting. The chaos and speed is rhythmically heightened by a number of jump cuts in the scene. A transcription from the continuity script demonstrates the chaotic kineticism of the scene and also indicates Michel’s role as failed “director” of the narrative action of the film— he quite literally is calling the shots here: “Michel (to the driver after a JUMP CUT, off): Get going, my man, pass that 403. (JUMP CUT) Don’t touch your gear shift. What do you mean dragging yourself behind a 4-CV? (JUMP CUT) Hang on, look, you’re being passed by a Manurhin. (JUMP CUT) Put on your turn signal, we’re turning left.”28 Michel is the quintessential backseat driver whose attempts to “control” motion, in no small way, resemble Godard’s attempts to control narrative. Both, it seems, are governed by an urgency that finds expression through speed. Dudley Andrew indicates as much when he comments on Godard’s basic theory: “From the very outset Godard was certain that the defining characteristics of modern life had to be speed, boldness, and ingenuity. He was infatuated with André Malraux’s early novels for precisely these qualities.”29 From the backseat, Michel seems to have verbally mastered at least “speed” and “boldness”; critically, however, he lacks control. When the cab arrives at the New York Herald Tribune office, Patricia is questioned about Michel and immediately claims ignorance. Her tune changes significantly, however, when it becomes clear to her that the Paris police have the power and authority to make it impossible for her to stay on in Paris. It seems fair to assert that Patricia’s eventual decision to turn Michel over to the police is governed at least in part by her desire to, unlike Michel, stay put, to stay grounded in Paris and not continue to move senselessly about.

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As Michel and Patricia continue on together in search of an adequate hiding place, it seems the streets themselves have revolted against Michel and have themselves taken on the power of language. After they switch cars—for a Cadillac Eldorado, no less—and drive out of the parking structure, Michel sees a large, scrolling, electronic tele-news marquee that reads: “Paris: Arrest of Michel Poiccard is certain.” 30 Michel’s name in lights replicates a convention of gangster films, but again ironically. Here the gangster seems less interested in his ability to outrun the cops than the simple fact of his name, which, in a fashion far more dynamic than would be possible on the printed page, actually moves across the night sky. Michel has not just made headlines, but skylines. Even if Michel is unable to move in the way he desires, his name moves; however, it moves against him. As Patricia walks down the busy Paris sidewalk from screen left to screen right, just before she reaches the café phone she uses to inform on Michel, a quick cut changes her screen direction from right to left, signifying an abrupt change in the direction of the narrative. Dudley Andrew has commented on this moment: “When Patricia finally resolves to turn in Michel, her trip to the café telephone consists of three shots . . . , each reversing her screen direction and the speed of her gait. Unlike the rapid flow of motion that the New Wave taught Madison Avenue how to use in the stylish TV ads of the 1960s, Breathless stutters and spurts in scenes like this, jolting the viewer nervously and unpredictably.”31 The extreme mobility of Patricia in these scenes is in direct contrast to her prior static characterization. Here she has mobilized, but with the intent of betrayal. The images are also critical in their commentary on the space of the hideout Michel has chosen for himself and Patricia. The studio belongs to a still photographer, we assume, of female models—the very characterization of female stasis and the notion of woman as mere image. Here, in the space of only a few shots, Patricia’s desire to escape this characterization is formally imagined. As Michel and Patricia are hiding out in the studio shortly after Patricia informs on him to the police, the linguistic disconnectedness of Michel and Patricia’s relationship is realized most eloquently and signifies the literal end of the road for Michel. The scene itself is rich with metaphorical possibilities. Patricia tells Michel that she no longer feels like leaving with him. Michel says, “I knew it” and continues, off camera, saying, “When we talked, I talked about myself, and you about yourself.” In Breathless, this inability to communicate results in an excruciating stasis. This is a film about articulation, and

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the double meaning of articulation is quite relevant here. To articulate is to express, usually verbally. It also means “to connect” one part or one space to another. This second meaning of the word articulation is especially relevant, for Breathless is ultimately about disconnectedness as a consequence of inarticulateness. Patricia tries to explain why she has turned Michel in and he hears nothing as he tries pathetically, perhaps even tragically to explain his views on love. Patricia then attempts to convince Michel to leave, to force him out of her life and out of the way of eminent danger. He decides, however, not to leave and gives up, saying “No, I’m staying! I’m all messed up. Anyway, I feel like going to prison.” In pointing to prison, the ultimate static location—second only, perhaps, to the final stasis of death—Michel quite literally puts the brakes on in this frustrated road movie. He defies his own mythic notions of gangster methodology and looks ahead to a static, monological life. Berutti (another of Michel’s underworld friends referred to early in the film and introduced late, played by Henri-Jacques Huet) arrives with Michel’s money and offers him a ride, but Michel treats him in much the same fashion as he does Patricia, telling him to beat it and denying Berutti’s offer of an automatic gun with which to defend himself. Berutti, as he drives off, throws the gun to Michel, who picks it up as the police begin to approach him. Police Inspector Vital, the cop closest to him, fires once and hits Michel, sending him into one final and very telling attempt at motion and articulation. Michel, grasping his back where he has been shot, continues to run, stumbling into parked cars and falling to his hands and knees at several points. His balletic run is hyperbolic, playing on the prolonged conventions of death in gangster cinema, such as Rico’s (Edward G. Robinson) final machine gun dance, utterance, and demise in Little Caesar (1931). Michel appears to be almost cartoonishly acting out his final run down the street. As Michel makes his ultimate “journey,” the camera trails behind him by fifty feet as if to suggest that this masochistic relationship between man and camera is about to be terminated, that the camera can no longer lead Michel, taunting him along a path of movement. Michel lies on his back in the middle of the street, dying, and the now terrified-looking Patricia stands above him. Michel, as he does earlier in the film, makes vowel faces at Patricia, who collects herself and stares blankly at Michel. Michel’s final words are “That’s really disgusting,” but Vital mistranslates them to the confused Patricia as, “You are really a bitch.”

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Communication has once again failed Michel and Patricia, and this time the results are deadly, as well as borrowed from another film. Dudley Andrew comments: “Her ingenuous question standing over Belmondo’s corpse, “Qu’est-ce que c’est ‘degueulasse?’” is modeled precisely on Ida Lupino’s blank stare at Bogart’s riddled body in the final scene of High Sierra: ‘What does it mean to crash out?’ Both women are fascinated by the death drive of their men.”32 Andrew’s choice of words here is also fascinating. He refers to Michel’s “death drive,” and I have been arguing all along that Michel’s “drive” is fueled by a desire to live, to find life. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, however. For, ultimately, Michel’s desire to live, predicated as it is on American representations of life, can only end in death, and a highly cinematic death at that. Michel is gunned down in the middle of the street but manages, however impossibly, to drag his body to the middle of an intersection and the intersection itself is deeply symbolic. Here the road enters again as a metaphor for Michel’s—and, by extension, Godard’s—search for a viable narrative direction. The film ends, quite literally, at the crossroads. The Road Traveled . . . The Road Ahead Michel’s death journey at the end of the film ties together many ideas running throughout this book. The film’s final image itself is literally transported into Samuel Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961), which contains a similarly protracted death sequence in which the film’s protagonist runs several agonizing blocks before dying in the exact spot his father had died before him. Godard’s death sequence, contained within a film about cinematic influence and the pervasiveness of American images, is taken (to use Paul Schrader’s term, which Godard playfully puns upon) by one of the directors Godard most admired.33 Godard, by 1961, had already begun to realize a sort of reversed cinematic transportation: his own images had been mobilized, quoted, and reiterated to a remarkable degree. The scene also symbolically suggests Michel’s and Godard’s cinematic predicament. They are caught in the intersection between a need for and distrust of American images and their glossy myths of wholeness. In the film, Michel is betrayed by the embodiment of the American image—Patricia, on the one hand, and Bogart on the other. To extend the film’s noir fascinations, America itself is figured as a sort of impossibly attractive, ferociously dangerous femme fatale. And Michel is powerless in her presence. But what has all of this to do with the road movie?

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Godard’s relationship to the road is a complicated one. Dennis Turner has pointed to the ways in which Breathless is about a Lacanian crisis of identity and, in his 1983 article “Mirror Stage of the Nouvelle Vague,” he explores the film’s “oscillation between a belief in the inherent superiority of ‘things American’—Michel Poiccard steals T-Birds and Cadillacs, courts an American girl, dresses like a Warner Brothers gangster—and the recognition of the fact that a French hero cannot attain the mythical status of the American; the cars get him in trouble with the police, the girl betrays him, he is haunted by a nostalgia for ‘le néant’ from which the Hollywood gangster was manifestly free.”34 Turner’s idea is an intriguing one that revolves largely around Michel’s desire to see himself reflected in the American images he aspires to. Turner, however, underplays Godard’s equally fascinating role in this Lacanian game of identification. In Lacan’s theories, the child learns of its selfhood in front of the mirror, and this selfhood is predicated upon his recognition that he is an entity separate from his surroundings. Godard points to the increasing impossibility of this process of identification in a postwar European country literally swimming in American images. It is impossible for Michel to imagine himself as “separate” from these images, just as it is impossible for Godard to create a cinematic narrative that does not, in some way, reflect its American predecessors. My desire to classify Godard’s film as a road movie is, in part, a desire to trace the road movie’s self-conscious roots back to an important source of generic self-consciousness. Godard’s film is concerned with the road at the literal level—Michel begins on the road and tries through the remainder of the film to return to it, until he is finally gunned down in the street. The film also uses the metaphor of the road to comment on the influx and influence of American culture in general, but particularly American cinematic images on the European community. The imaginary road connecting America to France, however, is essentially a one-way road until this time in history because American images were seen as going in, but French images did not enjoy a proportionally equivalent freedom coming out. Godard’s film is revolutionary in this respect, for it quite literally opened up a passage into America. A film commenting on the influence of American images became, perhaps ironically, a widely influential film in America. Nowhere was this influence as deeply felt as it was on the American road movie, whose generic birth was to occur later in the decade and, in its self-consciousness, stylistic innovations, and thematic

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preoccupations, clearly looked to Godard for inspiration. Godard also provided for American filmmakers a mechanism by which to explore themselves critically, and the road—that captivating, frequently romanticized, and seemingly American space—was an important site for this critical introspection. By the late 1960s, American films were beginning to question their own mythos and its widespread influence. Godard, most especially with Breathless, was in large part responsible for opening up the possibility for this selfreflexive cinematic response.

4

Misreading America in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider

“This used to be one helluva good country.” George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969)

“Some day, this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be.” Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)

asy Rider is a film that bids farewell to a number of ideas. The idea of community, a persistent though always receding theme in the film, is one of them. Hopper’s own, admittedly hackneyed, words on the subject give shape to this assertion. Here, in the space of three semi-intelligible sentences about cinematic authorship, Hopper articulates a generation’s surging faith in the individual: “Film is an artform, an expensive art-form, it’s the Sistine Chapel of the Twentieth Century, it’s the best way to reach people. The artist, not the industry, must take responsibility for the entire work. Michelangelo did less than a quarter of the Sistine Chapel; yet directed all work, stone by stone, mural by mural, on and on and on.”1 Confused and romantic as Hopper’s words are, they very neatly encapsulate the stateside proliferation of the auteur theory and, ultimately, its marketability. Easy Rider, in some ways, initiated the popular growth of the concept, signaling its studio viability, and the result was a series—more a group of ripples than a wave itself—of American road movies produced by soon-to-be or would-be auteurs, each

E

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touching, in its own unique way, on the subject of this country’s post1960s fragmentation: among them The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971), Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971), Vanishing Point (Richard Sarafian, 1971), Boxcar Bertha (Martin Scorsese, 1972), Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973), Electra Glide in Blue (James William Guerico, 1973), The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974), and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974).2 While critical approaches to the road movie have thus far attempted to further slot these films into subcategories— outlaw couple road movies, buddy road movies, road melodramas, disenchanted cop road movies, etc.—I hope to draw attention to their connectedness, both to each other and to a larger tradition of films that use motion to critique the hypermobility of the contemporary moment, to lament the passing of stability, of community, and of communication. These are strange fascinations indeed for a genre associated with, and that would in fact ignite, a movement in independence. Easy Rider helped solidify the rules of this cinematic tradition, establishing as it did so a genre that, in spite of its visitation of themes that have been with the cinema since its inception, would forever be associated with a generation’s youth culture. To this day, the road movie in its myriad forms travels the same roads and attempts to reckon with the same core problems Hopper confronted in 1969. It is, however, Easy Rider’s mode of address that made it, within the late 1960s popular American context, seem so new, so revolutionary, so rebellious, so countercultural. All of this “newness,” however, has origins that can be traced to France, to the films of Jean Luc-Godard, and most especially to Breathless.3 Like Godard’s film, which resituates the cinema’s perennial desire to explore the tragedy of mobility, its mistaken directions, Hopper’s film similarly explores the seductive powers of modern motion and critiques its often empty inspiration. Although the examination that follows is a critical one, I hope to offer a more generous reading of the film than currently exists. Many of the film’s “failures,” I contend, need to be explored for their critical and symbolic importance as well as their popular reception. This is, of course, a film about failure. In this sense, its form fits its theme. The confusion of the film’s visual world, its seemingly self-indulgent and meaningless formalism, even its empty attempts at a meaningful and significant verbal language are symptomatic—more self-critical

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than they are self-indulgent. They are important, though difficult to negotiate, parts of the film, which, in the final analysis, give way to meaning. Easy Rider is, ultimately, a film that admits its own confusion, its naïveté, and perhaps even its failure. The deliberateness of these admissions is questionable. The effect, however, is remarkable and has too often been overlooked. Godard introduces to the road narrative a wide variety of concerns that are still fundamental to the road movie, even for those films that move more successfully than, for instance, Breathless. Godard’s interest in the narrativity of the road—transportation’s deeply significant relationship to language and to story—occupies a central position in the post-Breathless road movie. Godard’s concurrent exploration of the road’s seductive nature, its promise (often false) of fulfillment, escape, and completion, has also been absorbed into the basic road movie structure. These mutually informing ideas are central to Easy Rider, a film most film historians consider to be the first of the road movie genre. These same concepts find theoretical expression in the work of Roland Barthes, particularly in The Pleasure of the Text, where Barthes’ investigations of textual eros often quite explicitly employ the language of transportation. Though perhaps less concerned with its relationship to narrative, Jean Baudrillard, since the late 1960s, has been similarly drawn to critically exploring automobility’s fascinatingly erotic call and its relationship to contemporary existence. In this chapter I hope to unravel the mysteries of these seductions, beginning with the Barthesian notion of drift, an idea that, at its center, is concerned with the erotic relationship between reader and text.4 The relationship between driver and road, as we will see, is provocatively similar, and Barthes’ own text everywhere bears the mark of its maker’s own readerly and writerly journeys. Roland Barthes and the Pleasure of the Road In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes describes the curious, erotic tie that binds reader to text by alphabetically enumerating the details of that relationship. While Barthes’ text is itself wonderfully seductive—for with little work Barthes’ elegantly phrased ideas can be almost universally “applied”—the road film, and especially the road film in light of Dennis Hopper’s contributions to it, seems to demand Barthesian scrutiny. Discussing the seductive nature of the

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text, Barthes offers the following (seductive) words: “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”5 Barthes describes the text as a desiring subject—a critical component to an assumed pairing between text and reader. The Barthesian text is not an innocent object but a seductive and placating one. This idea would seem to run counter to Barthes’ notion of the liberated and active reader because it imagines the textual seducer as the dominatrix of this pairing—the imagined active desire of the text, it appears, makes the reader passive. Barthes, however, describes a peculiar sort of active passivity wherein the reader’s liberation (or activity) is enacted precisely out of a giving in to (which involves, also, a giving up on) the text. It is the rebellious act of giving in or up that constitutes readerly liberation. Road movies also demand—Barthes might say seduce—their viewers, a logic that is central to Hopper’s film and to the road movie more generally. They create in the viewer the seductive illusion of motion by locking the viewer’s gaze into the three elements that make up the road film—subject, vehicle, and landscape. These cinematic elements and the process by which they are presented, however, are entirely familiar. They are the components of road travel itself, which, as we have explored, is a curiously textual activity. Road films, because of their narrative attention to motion, implicate a viewer similar in disposition to Barthes’ reader. Seduced by motion, the road movie viewer actively agrees to be passive—to be a passenger— and is liberated in his/her identification with the presumably liberated on-screen road traveler. The viewer figures into the equation as “passenger” and is left “riding along” wherever the subject(s) of the road film takes him/her. This structure, as we have seen, is as old as the cinema itself. Road movies, in reducing this structure to its bare essentials, also foreground the consequences of this active passivity, and Easy Rider perfectly illustrates this idea. Tenuous to begin with, by film’s end the viewer’s own sense of pleasure in the journey, analogous to the pleasure that presumably leads the protagonists on the road in the first place, is not just disrupted, it is destroyed. Our seduction, however ineptly, is critiqued. The road’s innate ability to seduce has to do, in part at least, with its ability to create in the viewer a sense of “drifting.” Barthes employs the metaphor of unthinking travel through space to describe the elation of losing one’s narrative bearings, of “drifting”

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off and allowing one’s own unconscious to enter into the narrative process. In the classic Barthesian figuration, readers complete texts in this manner through a fairly complex, though instinctive and passive, interaction with them.6 Road movies foreground this idea of drift, often introducing characters that have succumbed to its spatial or geographical pleasures. More important than their presentation of characters adrift, road films encourage spectatorial drift by employing a variety of formal techniques to visually approximate the film’s desire for movement, its particular modes of travel. In Breathless, for example, Godard uses the jump cut to represent Michel’s frustrated, stuttering attempts to regain kinetic energy in a world that would have him stand still. Michel, it can be said, is guilty of “drifting” when the narrative would dictate otherwise. Nowhere is this more perfectly realized than in the extended indoor sequence in the film where even the viewer is anxious for the action, or at least Michel’s attempts at action, to resume. These “drift-inducing” techniques capitalize on the (sometimes disorienting) pleasure of the journey itself. Barthes describes the process of drift in the following, highly provocative way: “The pleasure of the text is not necessarily of a triumphant, heroic, muscular type. No need to throw out one’s chest. My pleasure can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever, by dint of seeming driven about by language’s illusions, seductions, and intimidation, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss that binds me to the text (to the world).”7 Barthes’ explanation of the process of drift is particularly illuminating in relation to the road, for it clearly relies on the metaphor of transportation. Barthes speaks of being “driven about by language’s illusions” and suggests that in drifting, the reader—or, for our purposes, viewer—assumes the role of passenger; he or she is motionless but constantly moving through narrative time and space. While Barthes speaks of written language, the visual language of cinema is doubly seductive because it is itself always, already kinetic. Known as a language of light and shadow, the cinema is equally a language of motion and stasis. and it capitalizes on the tensions that exist between. In their explicit focus on these basic elements, road movies literalize and exaggerate within the viewer a sense of being chauffeured about by narrative, often in the face of its quite literal absence. Travelers along the cinematic road become easy surrogates because they participate in a motion that is the basis for cinematic narrative and of cinematic pleasure. We are all, in this very basic

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sense, “passengers.” As will be demonstrated, Easy Rider thinks critically about this process of identification, about the ease with which viewers are transported. For Barthes, drift moves rebelliously against the rigid textual grain. Pleasure, as Barthes understands it, is linked to the reader’s ability to subvert writerly attempts to control and corral the readerly process, to determine the shape and scope of readerly pleasure. Easy Rider and its Godardian source, then, present us with something of a puzzle. If spectatorial pleasure is similarly linked to the viewer’s ability to circumvent an overly determined, orderly, and confining logic, what do we do in the face of disorderly films, films whose formal “structures” self-consciously mirror the thematic chaos they hope to represent? In their formal presentation of diegetic drift, these films determine their own breaches and impose limits on spectatorial drift. The resulting structure, then, is perversely orderly and, I think, inescapable. This logic is picked up in Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers, a film that critiques the manner by which our contemporary universe controls through its illusions of “freely” accessed channels of information. Hopper, too, is critical in his use of a formal structure that unmasks his characters’, his generation’s, and perhaps his own inattentiveness. Barthes continues his description of drift and states, “Drifting occurs whenever social language, the sociolect, fails me (as we say: my courage fails me). Thus another name for drifting would be: the intractable—or perhaps even: Stupidity.”8 This idea is critical in two very important ways. First, the characters adrift in the contemporary road film are characters for whom “social language, the sociolect” has failed. As I argue throughout this book, the road movie’s protagonists are curiously inarticulate individuals whose motion seems, in many ways, to stand in place of communication. Secondly, Barthes’ statement about the failure of language sheds light on the opening through which the spectator enters (or is forced to enter) the process of alignment. In road movies, language also frequently fails the viewer. Like the drifting characters, then, the viewer finds him/herself in a forced state of compensatory drift. This idea of spectatorial alignment with the inarticulate is handled with unusual dexterity in Easy Rider, and the film’s preoccupation with language and its connection to the road is re-examined in subsequent road movies. We are along for the ride, but our willingness, in the end, is punished. Easy Rider is about the state of drift, both formally and thematically. It begins with only the vaguest notion of narrative motivation

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(a silent drug deal) and continues for nearly its whole length wandering about and refusing to stop for any extended period. While the men have a destination, Mardi Gras, it is rendered largely arbitrary; that the men focus on the event more than the place that hosts it is key. The film provides Billy (Dennis Hopper), Wyatt (Peter Fonda), and the viewer with several narrative options, several opportunities to stop drifting. The rancher’s house and the hippie commune are both viable possibilities, and Wyatt even vocalizes his approval of both of these social alternatives, one of the antiquated, patriarchally organized domestic variety and the other a more countercultural, though still cultural, variation. Yet Wyatt and Billy take pleasure in the disconnect of the road, in their silent and blind drift across the country. In this way, their road—which is, of course, ours as well—resembles the Barthesian text. Billy, Wyatt, and, by proxy, the viewer are guilty of skimming through the text of the American landscape, of “not respecting the whole” of its history, its present, its future. This may well be pleasurable were it not for the stark fact that the landscape itself, that textual structure they and we ignore, contains the presumed “goal” we are questing toward: the film’s longed for “America.” Billy, Wyatt, and the viewer are seduced by the highly charged kinetic language of the road, and these stops, the details themselves seem just that: interruptions in what becomes the forceful, predictable, and unsustainable narrative energy of the film. The distinct, often-overcharged pleasure of the road and the need to continue along it has, of course, to do with the journey and not the destination. This idea takes hold in part because the characters in road films are always, in some critical way, incomplete. The road itself, however, is an incomplete text without the traveler. It offers the illusion of completeness because in traveling along it, the incomplete character completes the road that, as previously indicated, “needs or wants” him or her. Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), another important road film predecessor, takes this characteristic quite literally by featuring characters in search of completeness along the yellow brick road, characters in search of missing parts. This idea is introduced, even though it is self-consciously stunted, in Godard’s Breathless; it is expanded upon and, in the end, questioned in Easy Rider; it is re-worked in important ways in the films of Wim Wenders; and recent years have seen equally committed explorations of the subject in films by Oliver Stone, Abbas Kiarostami, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, and a host of other more or less self-conscious road film makers. Often with a sense of irony, our

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road-bound travelers are forced to accept the fact that the missing elements are precisely those the road seems to lead away from: community and communication. Easy Rider, in this sense, is significantly different from its predecessors and its followers, and the difference is largely dispositional. The Searchers and Detour, for example, explore the journey as a desperate and obstacle-laden necessity, something that must be endured in an effort to find or restore some degree of unreachable domestic stability. Ethan Edwards and Al Roberts are doomed to wander forever, and their perpetual mobility, set as it is against the disintegrating promise of home, is de-romanticized, tragic. Breathless, of course, responds differently. Michel’s mobile desires, which affect even the film’s hyperkinetic form, are, like so much in the film, the product of mistranslation, a misreading of the generic codes his character mimics. Michel, unlike his generic predecessors, wants to keep moving. Though he is not personally aware of its sources, however, Michel’s desire for automobility is a product of the cinema and, relatedly, his wish to make narrative sense of his own self-willed alienation. Godard, in this way, comes close to exploring the road’s textual seductiveness in Barthesian terms but disallows completion of the mobile act by cutting Michel’s “drift” short figuratively in the film’s formal propensity towards the jump cut and literally in Michel’s hyperkinetic death at the intersection. Michel’s death, in fact, is the mantle Easy Rider picks up. Hopper’s film imagines a pair of characters in drift, consumed and enthralled by the road’s seductive structures, living the mobility Michel longs for even in death. Their seduction is itself seductive, though their disconnect (social, cultural, geographical) is, in the end, problematic. In its focus on Billy and Wyatt’s largely antisocial rebellion, Easy Rider—like its turn-of-the-century predecessors and, for that matter, like Detour and The Searchers—makes a case for the social, a case for community. There is no question that bigotry—here, as in so many films of the era, rendered as a particularly Southern affliction—is one of the film’s enemies. It is also clear that the death of Billy and Wyatt carries on its surface all of the earmarks of martyrdom. The pair are shot down brutally, unfairly. Save for a few semi-articulate rants about “freedom,” however, Billy and Wyatt’s worldview is also flawed, and their desire to pull away, to remain deaf, dumb, and blind, is held up for scrutiny. Critically, one of the elements Wyatt and Billy pull away from is the landscape itself.

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The Landscape of Myth We learn early in the film that Wyatt and Billy are from Los Angeles, California. LA—or “El-Eh,” as the rancher calls it—is a mythic location. It suggests promise, fortune, and fame. It is a modern, cinematic El Dorado. It is also the destination for films like Edgar Ulmer’s Detour. Our protagonists in Easy Rider, however, have exhausted the mythic city and are in search of something “different.” LA is also, of course, the land of movies—an artificial dream machine where back lots are transformed into “landscapes.” Ideally, Billy and Wyatt seek to escape the artifice of LA, its movie-made reality. A fragment of dialogue blurted out in their jail-cell after they are arrested for parading without a permit reveals that Billy and Wyatt (as Billy the Kid and Captain America) have been employed in the service of artifice as stunt motorcyclists. The move outside of and away from LA, in this sense, seems a self-conscious move away from the nonreality of stunt work and away from merely “representing” life, danger, and excitement. Unfortunately, however, their treatment of reality and of the real American landscape seems equally representational. Monument Valley, we quickly learn, is little more than a backdrop for Billy and Wyatt.9 Monument Valley figures early in the film to alert the viewer to a contradiction that the film is intent on calling to the surface. For despite its arising from the handiwork of nature, Monument Valley has all of the earmarks of artificiality. It is too big, too colorful, too precarious, and perhaps even too beautiful. It is nature’s supreme artifice. This natural artificiality is compounded further by the fact that by 1969 it was recognizable first and foremost as a cinematic location, a very large back-lot. The Searchers is, of course, the most famous aesthetic predecessor, and Ford’s legacy in Monument Valley is crucial. For it was John Ford, in 1956, who brought roads (primitive though they were) to the valley floor, making it from that point on Hollywood-accessible and, significantly, I think, making it an especially important location for a number of road movies from Easy Rider forward. The valley’s role in Hopper’s film is complicated further by our travelers’ ignorance of it. For, in spite of its delicate and majestic beauty, Monument Valley is of little interest to our traveling pair. This is due at least in part to the fact that the valley itself shares many characteristics with the city. It initiates only vague and always critically

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passing interest in our otherwise concerned travelers. It, like the city, is a place to move through. Billy and Wyatt pick up the Stranger (Luke Askew) directly before entering the valley. They also fuel up for the journey ahead, a moment attended by Billy’s paranoia and distrust as he fears that the Stranger will see the money they have stashed in the gas-tank. The journey into the valley is formally remarkable. Laszlo Kovacs’s camerawork is in constant motion and, for that reason, captures a Monument Valley significantly different from Ford’s more static and lingering vision. This is not to suggest that Ford’s camera or, for that matter, his themes are motionless. We have discussed the mobility of The Searchers. It is important to point out, however, that this mobility is infrequently represented through camerawork. The cavalry scene, near the end of the film, with its stately tracking shots, is an important exception. In Ford’s film, motion is for the most part calmly, even statically observed. In Easy Rider, it is watched nervously and anticipated by an equally mobile camera. The camera zooms in and out on the traveling trio, pans along with them, tracks in front or behind them. These shots of motion are interrupted by occasional cutaways to the location’s open terrain and visually impossible rock formations. The composition and editing of the sequence suggest some separation between our travelers and the landscape they travel through. Nowhere is this more evident than in the technically remarkable ascent that begins in a medium shot, the men composed tightly in the frame, and zooms back, seemingly at the command of the Stranger’s perhaps more attentive pointing finger. Billy, as the camera zooms back, rides to the left of the road and seems to push the frame out with him as he moves. Directly before the shot is cut, however, the frame again constricts and squeezes the composition back near the center. The men believe in the illusion of their “escape” but the film’s form suggests their mistake. They are as contained in the wilderness as they were in the big city. And their containment itself is perceptual (see Figure 4.1). The idea of cities enters into the campfire conversation that night. Billy asks the Stranger where he’s from. The Stranger responds by saying, “It’s hard to say.” Frustrated, Billy asks again, and the Stranger teases him, saying, “It’s hard to say because it’s a very long word.” Billy asks again, and the Stranger says, “A city” and elaborates at Billy’s request saying, “It doesn’t make any difference what city. All cities are alike. That’s why I’m out here now . . . ‘Cause I’m from the city, a long way from the city—and that’s where I want to be right now.” The

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Stranger’s words are fairly obvious and fairly clichéd, as words tend to be in the film. The camera, however, tells another story. I have remarked on the fact that Monument Valley, in its extreme verticality and the separation between formations, resembles some surreal cityscape. The campfire conversation takes place in a location that drives the idea home—a Mexican village built right into the landscape. Billy, as always, is loud, abrupt, defensive, and unthinking. While the Stranger chastises Billy for his lack of respect, informing him that they are resting atop an Indian burial ground, the irony of his earlier comment is profound. For not all cities are alike, and this native city upon which they rest is an important exception. The men, however, seem hardly to notice the alternate civilization, which they hurriedly vacate in the morning. Once again, America’s alternatives are lost on our wanderers as they continue their blind ramblings. Hopper’s use of the iconography of the film Western throughout Easy Rider demonstrates his preoccupation with its mythology. In his seminal essay, “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence,” André Bazin states this relationship between the Western and motion through the American landscape quite succinctly when he writes,“It is easy to say that because the cinema is movement the western is cinema

Figure 4.1 Easy Rider (1969). The frame expands as Billy swerves, capturing more of the landscape as it does so. As he swerves back, this momentarily expansive space constricts around him.

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par excellence.”10 Bazin continues, arguing that while the Western cannot be reduced to a set of characteristics, these formal attributes combine with myth and an equally mythic geography, creating a fundamentally American generic form. As always, Bazin’s idea is more suggestive than dogmatic and leaves ample room for interpretation. The idea grows legs, however, when aligned with a statement made at the beginning of the same essay (I have quoted this statement already in Chapter 2, but it bears repeating): “The western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.”11 The shared origins of the Western and the cinema, it would follow, have something to do with the profound interest in motion contained within each. The stability of the Western, even when it ceases to be “The Western,” has to do with its interest in the mobility that comes naturally to the cinematic event. It is precisely this connection between the Western and the cinema in general that intrigued Hopper. Early filmmakers turned to the subjects of the road and travel because they were thematic concerns suited to a new medium that “caught” motion in a way that painting, sculpture, and even still photography could not. The road remained important to the cinema in the years up through the late 1960s, but its appearance in films and its effects on film were simply assumed and not commented on, with the important and trend-setting exception of Breathless. In fact, the road in Godard’s film might have much to do with Godard’s belief all along that he was discovering the cinema for the first time and, in so doing, inevitably discovered also its primal themes. By the late 1960s, when Easy Rider was in production, a similar process of discovery (or rediscovery) was taking place, this time brought about by the collapse of the once-seemingly omnipotent studio system and significant advancements in the tools of the trade. New lightweight and highly portable cameras were being manufactured that not only made taking the show on the road more convenient but more affordable as well. Easy Rider takes place on the road, in part, because the road is accessible in ways that it had not been before. Cameras could move like the vehicles they recorded—could even easily be mounted on those vehicles—and Hopper did not have to pay exorbitantly for union crews bound to the studio. The film’s “location” and its mobility has everything to do with the highly kinetic spirit of the so-called “new Hollywood.” “Old” Hollywood did, of course, go outside. In part a reaction to Italian Neorealist films of the 40s, many noir films explored the city streets—an idea wonderfully realized in

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Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Westerns, especially those of John Ford, also spent much time outdoors. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), a film some regard as the last “classical” Western, is shot in a studio and seems to play self-consciously with that fact. Easy Rider seems to want to open the doors to these worlds once again. The progressive, linear myths associated with these locations, however, are not so easily handled in Hopper’s film. In comments after the release of the film, Hopper did much to romanticize the decision to shoot on the road, exaggerating—in fact, lying blatantly at times about—the linearity of the shooting schedule. Hopper spread the idea that he and Fonda simply mounted their bikes and shot as they went. Peter Biskind and Lee Hill have uncovered a more accurate shooting schedule and have also dispelled the myth of spontaneity that has circulated since 1969. Hopper, continuing to mythologize the film’s location, is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize and film, and God’s a great gaffer.”12 Tom Burke’s interview with Hopper entitled “Will Easy Do It for Dennis Hopper?” captures this bit of romanticization. Hopper said, “[Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson] gave us complete control. They just said, ‘Go and do your thing and come back and show us.’ And we did, man. Except for the Mardi Gras scenes, we just started out on our bikes across the West and shot entirely in sequence, as things happened to us.”13 Hopper’s words are indicative of his own seduction, his own desire to buy into the very myth his film systematically dismantles. Less a banal celebration of its characters’ search for freedom, Easy Rider is a celebration of cinematic freedom, and the proximity of these two worlds—the cinematic and the extra-cinematic—results in a degree of confusion. The film, however, is highly, and I should think selfconsciously, aware of itself as a film about filmmaking, an idea that Hopper takes to its extreme in The Last Movie.14 Hopper is acutely aware of the fact that his characters are relying—rather like Michel in Breathless—on a recycled mythological framework. They exist problematically within what has become a cinematic and not a real landscape. At the beginning of the first campfire scene, Billy articulates the mythic confusion that both characters are guided by: “Out here in the wilderness, fighting Indians and cowboys on every side.” Billy does not appear to understand the parameters of the dying myth of the expansionist West and imagines, like a child, a scenario in which everyone, at least within the rubric of the film Western, is the “enemy”: he’s fighting both cowboys and

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Indians, a paranoid view that cannot be sustained. Along with the Stranger, the men rest on top of an Indian burial ground and, except for the Stranger, seem wholly unaware of the location’s significance. Easy Rider, like Breathless before it, is also interested in exploring the road as metaphor, as a tenuous connective tissue binding international cinematic practice. Hopper is sensitive to the idea of intellectual trade and foregrounds his Godardian and Brechtian influences. His concrete metaphor for the idea of artistic import/export, however, is more problematic. Cocaine, the journey’s primary motivation, was a relatively “new” drug in 1969. Half-bragging, Hopper continues, in comments about the film, to claim that he introduced the country to the substance. The deal, however, also signals the fact that Easy Rider is a film about a new breed of filmmaker, right on down to the rock-star-style deals (drug and otherwise) that “New Hollywood” became famous for. Read in this way, the film’s tragic silence is also a prophetic statement about the naïveté and ultimate failure of the post-Hollywood era. The Search for Language The American Art Film cannot be an imitation of the European Art Film. Simple enough statement. Yes, it’s simple enough, that statement. What’s the answer? What’s the question?15 —Dennis Hopper

Easy Rider continues, and perhaps establishes as iconic to the genre of the road, the interest in language and its relationship to the road found in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Hopper’s characters are, as critics have continued to point out, frustratingly silent. This silence, however, and its occasional, semi-articulate interruptions, foregrounds the importance of language to the cinematic road narrative. It is important to recall that Easy Rider is not a triumphant road narrative but one that ends tragically with the death of its protagonists. Its tragedy, like the tragedy that punctuates Breathless, needs to be understood specifically as a failure in language. This failure in language occurs on two levels. First, the film explores the failure in verbal communication between its two male protagonists. Billy and Wyatt’s dumbness is, for a short time in the film, compensated for by the film’s highly pathetic and unusually (within the context of the film) articulate “voice,” George Hanson (Jack Nicholson). George, a hard-drinking, educated, ACLU lawyer whom Billy and Wyatt meet

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in jail and travel with for much of the film, is a critical figure. He is the voice of the film, there is no doubt, providing both a hearty dose of comic relief and, in his monologues, an equal degree of seemingly right-minded ideology. But Hopper is also careful to demonstrate George’s own problematic removal. Spending more of his time cooling off in jail than fighting for civil rights (unless, it seems, those in need happen to be sharing a cell with him), George’s highly sensible verbal logic goes unheard. Billy and Wyatt, in fact, only half-register it, failing even to comprehend the significance of his death at the hands of the angry rednecks whose appearance in the second half of the film forecasts their own doom.16 In addition to this more literal interest in the failure of language, Easy Rider also explores its own failure to contain itself—its own inability to find a cinematic language suitable for itself. This second, more reflexive understanding of the film’s preoccupation with language is especially interesting in relation to an oft-quoted line of dialogue in the film, an admission of both of the film’s failures: “We blew it.” Both of these linguistic failures coalesce in the film, and the distinctions between the two are blurred, so that the film’s confused visual construction comments on the characters and vice-versa. The strange quote that opens this section finds Hopper struggling with his relationship to both literal language (his statement is characteristically circular and nonsensical) and cinematic language. Unable or unwilling to reconcile his imitative strategies, Hopper, like his film, is tongue-tied. Speaking Parts: Verbal Language and the Road Easy Rider begins its investigation of linguistic failure with a fairly traditional establishing shot of “La Contenta Bar.” Billy and Wyatt ride in on dirt-bikes from frame left to this undisclosed location in Mexico near an automobile wrecking yard where the initial drug transaction takes place. The wrecking yard speaks silently and symbolically about our protagonists and the world they inhabit. Billy and Wyatt are on motorbikes, vehicular symbols of autonomy, freedom, and rebellion. Motorcycles are essentially antisocial, antifamilial modes of transportation; this is the case for reasons that are both practical—they are loud, usually intended for one rider, and physically and linguistically isolating—and mythological. By 1969, the motorcycle’s reputation as the carrier of trouble was firmly in place in part because of real news events and in part because of the cinema;

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one need only look back to The Wild One (1953) to encounter an early instance of this representational tendency. Automobiles, however, and especially the antiquated automobiles that litter the wrecking yard, are symbols of the family rather than the individual on the move, signifying a dead 1950s social and familial conservatism that Billy and Wyatt are quite literally moving against, or so it seems. The dialogue at the beginning of the film is all in Spanish without subtitles, and while translations affirm that the conversations themselves are not especially interesting, the viewer is introduced to a cinematic world where language and basic communication are immediately rendered problematic. The English-speaking viewer is denied a simple linguistic entrance into the film and, to be perfectly accurate, is never really compensated for the loss; in Barthesian terms, we might say that social language has, in the film’s opening, failed us. Like Godard’s characters in Breathless, Billy and Wyatt, despite some expenditure of wind, are wholly unable to communicate with each other or, for that matter, with the viewer. This inarticulateness is important to the film, for it is itself an exploration of the consequences of non-communication. Motion, not language, is the primary seducer in Easy Rider. Hopper claims to have opted for a predominantly “visual” style of filmmaking, a more “pure” cinema. This idea, imported from the French films he claims to have admired, is as naïve as it is distracting. His words, as is so often the case, mask a broader concern in the film to explore the breakdown of the counterculture, an idea that I believe Hopper was loath to admit to if he was responsible for its entrance into the film. The characters in the film are not just quiet, they are self-consciously so, and their quietness needs to be explored for its implications within and outside of the genre. Easy Rider is a film that at every moment seems to concern itself with aurality, with what we might more generally call the “noise” of contemporary existence, and yet the film denies both its characters and the audience access to traditional, verbal communication. Billy and Wyatt begin by speaking Spanish and move, after extended stretches of silence, into the hip, truncated, and socially signifying English of the counterculture. By having his genuinely misdirected characters speak the language of the counterculture, Dennis Hopper levels a critique against it, though the critique still goes unnoticed by generations of fans captivated by the romance of motion, or who pay attention only to the film’s surfacelevel rejection of the dominant culture and its intolerant trappings. In the end, however, the counterculture (or at least its language) has little to say about its situation.

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The scene where the men meet their Connection (Phil Spector) and receive payment for the two containers (motorcycle batteries) filled with cocaine, takes place on an airport runway, a setting that foregrounds the film’s concerns. To begin with, this is Phil Spector more or less playing himself in a film where characters and locations always carry with them a certain amount of reflexivity. Spector, of course, was a recognizable rock figure. Not a performer, but an innovative—perhaps auteuristic—producer, Spector seems to stand in for the pop industry, and filmmakers, I would argue, are a critical part of that industry. Spector is most certainly not a member of the square, dominant culture; he is, in fact, the epitome of what we might call the “landed” counterculture. The cocaine deal, however, places him in a critical light. In the scene, Wyatt refuses to “sample” the product and The Connection, smiling, takes a nose-full. This moment establishes a central theme in the film: making it, even for the counterculture, means moral corruption; it means losing touch. When the tables are turned, when Billy and Wyatt have “made it,” they are guilty of the same. The lines, and the pun is deliberate, between “making it” and “blowing it” are blurred, indistinct. Like the automobile wrecking yard that precedes it, the runway where the deal transpires is an obvious signifier for motion, for modern transportation. The location, which makes anything resembling traditional verbal communication impossible, fascinates Wyatt and terrifies Billy and The Connection. The transaction, which takes place in Billy and Wyatt’s pickup, is largely silent save for a few grunts from the men and the gigantic, almost deafening sound of incoming planes. In the first two scenes Hopper has presented the non-verbal texture of his cinematic world. Billy and Wyatt’s physical existence within these spaces, however, does much to describe their characters. Billy is clearly concerned about the money; he cannot, in fact, keep his eyes off of it when they see The Connection off to his automobile. Wyatt, on the other hand, seems visibly distracted. Wyatt’s body language suggests his ease within the space of this scene in a fashion that signifies beyond it: he moves slowly; his gaze is calm, direct and steady; he exists within space and is not merely contained by it. Billy, on the other hand, cowers within the film’s scope—he is typically hunched over, his motions are jerky, his gaze is shifty at best, he is almost always physically withdrawn. The silence of the film continues through the next scene as Wyatt rolls bills into a corked tube, which he then delicately stuffs into the teardrop tank of his chopper. The suggestion here, of course, is that

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money fuels the American dream and that the dream, like the cocaine that begins the film, can be bought and sold, used and abused. This idea is critiqued in Hopper’s film, as it scrutinizes the dominant as well as a certain segment of the counterculture’s ideals. The counterculture, as it is imagined in this scene, has adopted the fiscal ideals of the dominant culture. Steppenwolf ’s “The Pusher” comments, however superficially, on the action, but the characters themselves do not speak. Wim Wenders, a fan of the film and, perhaps more critically, a legendary rock music devotee, has suggested (but does not take quite far enough) that the now-treasured soundtrack of Easy Rider functions counter to cinematic narrative itself. Wenders observes that, at critical moments in the film, the soundtrack seems to suggest more about these characters and their situations than the characters, the mise-enscène, or the cinematography are able to express. As Wenders suggests, the images comment on the music, and not the other way around.17 Rock music, a preexisting and well-established form of expressive revolution in this country, is simply plugged into the film in order to suggest the idea of revolution; an idea our characters are only passively engaged in. Traditional notions of narrative are disrupted further by the film’s treatment of space and time. In preparation for the journey ahead of them and directly following an abrupt cut that is both visual and aural, for “The Pusher” stops prematurely without any decrease in volume, Wyatt self-consciously looks at his watch and drops it to the ground near his bike. As this action transpires, the camera zooms abruptly in and out, first on him and then on the watch. The rather obvious gesture of the sacrificed watch coupled with Laszlo Kovacs’s camerawork suggests that traditional notions of both space and time will not be adhered to in this film. Indeed, as the men travel to their first resting point with Steppenwolf ’s “Born to Be Wild” on the soundtrack, time and space both seem to collapse. No concrete sense of the length of the journey is provided, and the camera, while typically framing the men from the side in expansive tracking shots, zooms in and out, disrupting spatial constraints and making the viewer’s relationship to the space represented and the characters depicted even more problematic. Lens flares, another taboo of traditional Hollywood cinema, also lend to the riding sequence an amateurish, documentary-like feel, an awareness of the camera’s presence in the proceedings. This formally produced disorientation, however, is part of the film’s seduction, a key

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element in the manufacturing of a viewer willing (forced?) to identify with its characters’ drift. “Traditional” sound enters the film when the men arrive at sundown at a roadside motel. The background music stops and is replaced by the deep grumble of motorcycle engines, one of the film’s alternative dialogues giving way to another. Billy honks his horn impatiently and the innkeeper, an old man, emerges, looks at Billy and Wyatt, and goes back inside. Wyatt yells “You got a room? Hey man— you got a room?” Silently, the old man answers: the vacancy sign in front of the motel changes to “No Vacancy.” This moment, compounded by Billy and Wyatt’s own communicational difficulties, indicates that the world has become increasingly alienating, troublingly non-verbal. Barthes’ ideas about the failure of the sociolect and its relationship to drift returns, this time complete with Saussurean reminders, in the form of literal signs.18 The old man answers through the sign and Billy responds in kind, yelling “You asshole!” and giving him the finger. Meaningful verbal communication is foiled throughout this film and is replaced by half-articulate grunts (from Billy), clipped and vacant “words of wisdom” (from Wyatt), and gestures (most obviously represented by Billy’s up-turned finger). Unwelcome at the motel, Wyatt and Billy opt to camp outdoors. The campfire scenes, here and elsewhere, are the most verbal (though still largely incoherent) moments in the film. Throughout they are preceded by a series of rhythmically organized direct cuts back and forth, a jarring technique that further disrupts traditional notions regarding the cinematic treatment of time and space. The cuts do, however, advance the confused kinetic energy of the film. In their back-and-forth movement, they suggest a certain irreverence with regard to both time and space that is punished in the end. The cuts also demonstrate, I think, a degree of trepidation with regard to cinematic language. The intensely linguistic or verbal moments in the film are always bookended by these rather obvious moments of cinematic language, which indicates the filmmaker’s confusion. Like the characters of the film, who seem unable to advance their relationship linguistically, the film’s form suggests that Hopper is unsure as well as to whether he should advance his narrative or let it stand still. In this first campfire scene, the differences between Billy and Wyatt are drawn more distinctly. Through much of the movie Wyatt is clearly the more attractive character with his supposedly liberated worldview and his quietness in the midst of Billy’s pot-induced babble and more flagrantly displayed uncouthness. In spite of Wyatt’s

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equally questionable morality, the viewer is swayed by his poetic (though uninformed) view if only for its romantic dedication to kinesis. Billy sings of “Going down to Mardi Gras” to get himself “a Mardi Gras queen” and criticizes Wyatt for his silence, saying, “You’re pulling inside, man. You’re getting a little distance tonight. You’re getting a little distance, man.” While Wyatt’s words are certainly less offensive in their gender implications—for, even when Wyatt is face to face with a “Mardi Gras queen,” he seems wholly uninterested—his words are equally lame. He responds “I’m just getting my thing together, man.” Billy’s critique of Wyatt is interesting, for it points out the major flaw in both of their characters. Distance, in Billy’s understanding of the term, has to do with pulling inside—has to do with self-centeredness and self-absorption. Both Billy and Wyatt are “distant” in this way. Their ideas about manhood are borrowed, it seems, from the film Western’s representation of the solitary wanderer—the Fordian hero. Yet all the while both men attempt to achieve a different, positive kind of distance, one that is both geographical and spatial. The breakdown in these characters rests in their inability to reconcile these two “distances”—to achieve spatial distance together, while not submitting to social distance from each other, those they encounter, etc. When the film was released in 1969, detractors were especially angered by the film’s large silent sections and the fact that, in their inarticulateness, Wyatt and Billy could not be “related” to by the youth generation the film appeared to target. That same criticism exists in a number of recent critical approaches to the film. Lee Hill has claimed, Easy Rider can be crude, occasionally incoherent, smug and self-indulgent. The short and clipped dialogue is something of an error in strategy. The shooting script and rough cut were more verbose. America is a nation of talkers, but the richness of regional voices is muffled in the film . . . And, of course, there are no speaking parts for blacks in the film. George Hanson refers to the racism of the South, but he is, after all, a privileged white liberal. The absence of a significant dialogue scene or encounter with a single black man or woman was a missed opportunity to expand the film’s critique of the American Dream.19

I have quoted at some length here because Hill’s concerns with the film’s failure at the verbal level and with what the film does or does not do are intriguing. Like many before him, he suggests that “more powerful dialogue” and a more even hand with regard to gender and race would have advanced the film’s critique of the American Dream.

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Hill’s oversight lies in his assumption that Wyatt and Billy are meant to be read as purely sympathetic characters, as arbiters of some mythic 1960s idealism. I would argue instead that Hopper’s film critiques not only the American Dream but also these two American Dreamers. Their inability to communicate coherently with the world around them or each other makes them unattractive, to be sure, but this is the point. Relating to these characters was precisely what Hopper wanted viewers not to do—or at least not in any simple way. The film is about outcasts, individuals who have removed themselves from society (the viewer is included in this group in his/her relationship to the motion represented on screen) and are forced, in the end, to admit the failure of their vision. They are strangely Fordian characters: like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, they are occasionally interesting or funny; they captivate our attention; we “follow” them; but they are also tragically flawed. The explosions and bloodshed at the end of Easy Rider are a modern-day version of Ethan’s walk back into the wilderness clutching his arm, defeated and alone. Hill has in mind a dream film, an Easy Rider that moves beyond the uncomfortable realm of ambiguity and into the realm of reasoned and sustainable ideology. Easy Rider, however, is not so easy. It is a film that holds up a generation as it was coming to a close and asks its viewers to scrutinize its emptiness. Hill suggests that “regional voices” are “muffled” in the film. While the comment is, on the surface, wholly accurate, it seems to be not an error in, but an important aspect of, the film’s strategy. The silence of this “nation of talkers” is indicative of the listening skills of the film’s protagonists, and perhaps of its viewers. Billy and Wyatt do not see or hear their surroundings because they are not looking or listening, as is made clear in the campfire scene set atop the Indian burial ground. This is made doubly disturbing by the fact that the viewer, in the ninety minutes that the film rolls, might find him or herself in an equally ambiguous moral location. The seduced viewer, perhaps without reasoning why, wants the motion of the film to continue. Stopping means paying attention. The characters do speak, however infrequently, and their language often mixes prophecy with self-referentially. The campfire scene with the Stranger demonstrates vividly Billy’s intolerance and Wyatt’s inaction. The inarticulateness of the conversation that takes place here, a conversation that, as is typical of these sequences, is heavily steeped in marijuana, has generally been explored for its absurdity, its comic pointlessness. But within this conversation can be found a rather telling explanation of the film’s motivations and a rather accurate

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reading of its characters. Also under the veil of smoke can be found an interesting explanation of the film’s confused form and its apparent irreverence with regard to the constraints of both space and time. Wyatt’s seemingly self-referential words at the campfire, directly following his prophetic (though ultimately practical) statement—“I think I’m gonna crash”—are especially useful to this discussion. In the midst of the scene’s pot-induced babble, Wyatt’s, sitting uncomfortably close to the fire, says “I keep seeing things jumpin” all over the place” (emphasis mine). After plucking a moth from the air and rubbing his eyes, he says that the smoke (and the reference is deliberately vague) is getting to him. The Stranger responds by saying “Yeah, but I notice you’re not moving.” This brief exchange of dialogue, despite its giddy circularity, is important for its dual valences. Wyatt is speaking about the film on which he worked as a producer and is commenting on the formal jumpiness of the film itself. Within the film he is also explaining away the seemingly self-referential moment as a drug-induced hallucination. It is the Stranger’s comment regarding the stasis of Fonda and the film in the midst of what appears to be the motion of both that is most self-critical. His statement in fact functions as an admission that the film and its characters cannot or will not go anywhere. In the virtual absence of language, the film’s form begins to express ideas about space, time, and movement that the characters are not fully able to articulate. A film about mobility, Easy Rider, like Breathless, employs a kinetically suggestive formalism from its camera movements, to the lens effects, to the film’s cutting structure, to the changes in film stocks. Some of the ideas appear dated now and have lost their particularly timely efficacy. Others have been absorbed wholesale into the structure of the road film specifically, and mainstream cinema more generally. Still others, through this absorption, have become clichéd. Like the film’s verbal language, however, its formal language requires our attention. Formally Speaking: A Road Grammar Primer While Easy Rider’s form is fairly apparent, it is worth commenting on some of its techniques in detail, as many of these elements of cinematic language continue to be central to the road movie. Because it is a film about movement, the camera work in Easy Rider is both suggestive of motion and is specially suited to capture it. It is also, like the film’s verbal language, constantly shifting. We have explored in passing

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the collapsing effect of the zoom lens in the film and its ability to disrupt traditional notions of space and time. The dolly in or out is primarily a technique of proximity. A dolly in seems to bring the viewer closer to the subject of the gaze, while a dolly out seems to back the gaze up, seems to create distance. The zoom in or out functions differently. It can be observational—like the dolly—guiding the viewer’s gaze, directing or playfully misdirecting it as it peers into the recesses of space. Even in this primarily “practical” capacity, however, the zoom is also expressive. In the films of Robert Altman, for example, it functions poetically, its haphazard meanderings mirroring the randomness and the democracy at the center of Altman’s cinematic world. Because of its inherent optical distortions, however, the zoom also suggests ideas about space, characters’ interactions in and with it, and the viewer’s relationship to it. As we have noted, the zoom creates the illusion of space expanding or contracting around the subject of the gaze. Functioning in this capacity, the zoom is not a suturing device but a poetic component that describes and elaborates upon a character’s relationship to the space he/she inhabits. In Easy Rider, the zoom enters into the formal milieu to illustrate the confused and confusing relationship our characters have with the world they occupy. The zoom in Easy Rider is rarely a singular movement in or out; it is more typically a rapid movement in and out suggesting that, for our characters, the American landscape is an ever expanding and contracting space. Even in its “practical” capacity, however, the zoom in Easy Rider does more than simply direct the viewer’s gaze towards our traveling protagonists. In its often quite supple pan and zoom combinations, in its constant and often quite rapid reframings, Kovacs’s zoom lens aesthetic in Easy Rider comments upon our protagonists’ perceived dominion over and curious disregard for the landscape they traverse, a landscape that, within the space of the film, exists despite their diminished attentions. Even as the zoom seems primarily to facilitate following the motion of our characters (functioning, in this respect, much like it did in televised motor sports in the early 1960s), it continues to elaborate on the psychological state of Billy and Wyatt, whose relationship to space is always fragile. Less obtrusive, though functioning in an equally metaphorical capacity within the film, are the camera movements themselves. The tracking shot and the pan are critical to the road movie, for they allow the frame to “follow” the horizontal movement of the subject in motion. In Easy Rider these camera movements are dexterously handled and have been widely celebrated by fans of the movie. However,

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these movements are not mere celebrations of mobility. They are expressive of some of the film’s core concerns. A curiosity of Kovacs’s work is that it frequently disallows the subject (Billy or Wyatt) to “escape” the frame. The composition of these tracking shots typically places the motorcycle riding men at the center of the frame and keeps them centered until such composition becomes impossible, at which time, typically, the film is cut. Billy and Wyatt, this composition hints, are always “contained” within the space of the road and the recording space of the apparatus. This is an interesting and telling technique, considering that containment seems to be precisely what they strive to escape. Editing, too, is symbolically important in the film. Hopper was intrigued by Godard’s use of direct cutting and wanted to achieve much the same effect of stuttering motion in his film. And yet Hopper, as Peter Biskind’s research has revealed, was a remarkably bad editor: According to Bill Hayward, Hopper’s knowledge of editing came from the hot splicing days, where you cut into a frame every time you make a splice, losing the frame in the process. In the 60s, film editors developed butt splicing, cutting between frames. Consequently he would never cut anything. One day, Hayward asked him to take out a scene: “If we hate it, we’ll stick it back in.” But Hopper stared at him blankly. “Dennis believed,” he continues, “and this was a revelation after we found it out, because he cut for months under this misapprehension— that once you made a cut you couldn’t put anything back. It was absolutely stunning. He was the worst editor that’s ever been.”20

Hopper’s misunderstanding is uniquely suited to the road film; in fact, his logic seems strangely road-based. Decisions made on the road are narratively permanent. The driver along the road can turn around, but the narrative has been inflected by the mistake; it has been changed. With or without the misunderstanding—which may or may not be, also, the product of hyperbole—Easy Rider, which squeezes most of its meaning not from the cut but from the shot and its Fordian resonances, does contain a few interestingly cut moments; moments that render the Fordian shots themselves interestingly problematic. We have already discussed the pre-campfire back-andforth cuts that give way to the confusion over the forward motion of the narrative. The function of this technique, however, is not entirely unlike the function of the dissolve in its ability to connect two discrete moments in time. Like the dissolve, the cuts back-and-forth suggest here a more confused passage of time.

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The direct cut in general, however, is something of a curiosity. At its base, it seems to betray the road and its governing logic, the passage of time. Godard’s Breathless uses direct cutting techniques to emphasize the frustrated kinetic energy of its protagonist, who desires but only momentarily realizes the space of the road. The direct cut fits here, suggesting as it does a degree of impatience. Hopper’s cuts function similarly, demonstrating his protagonists’ disregard for the duration of the road, their inability to patiently absorb its passages. Even their drift seems stripped of pleasure, as it is ultimately only a means to an end. The viewer is enthralled by the landscape while, save for one especially odd, satisfyingly under-lit, silhouetted ascent of a rock formation in Monument Valley, where Billy and Wyatt rather robotically point at what they see, our characters seem otherwise concerned. Changes in film stock are also suggestive of the film’s formal, optical, and psychological distraction. An often-remarked upon scene in the film, the acid-laced Mardi Gras sequence, stands apart from the rest of the film because it is shot in a grainy, under-lit 16mm stock. The change fits nicely into the context of the film, as the characters at this point in the journey are forced to literally see things differently. However, the different stock also has a somewhat less mystical and more practical explanation. The footage was shot much earlier than the rest of the film, by people including Henry Jaglom, as a sort of experiment; the studio okayed Hopper’s project with the provision that he shoot some film and screen his results; the Mardi Gras scenes are those results. An object of critical neglect, however, is the scene’s unusual relationship to The Wizard of Oz, that other, very “Old Hollywood” road film. Like the Wizard of Oz, with its alterations between black and white and color, the 35mm and 16mm worlds of Easy Rider suggest a difference between the realm of the real and the drug-induced realm of the fantastic. Changes in film stocks and a general consciousness about the effect of the “material” of the cinema on the efficacy of the journey have become fundamental icons of the road genre. David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) all begin in black and white. Natural Born Killers, in fact, with its desire to comment on the effect of the media, employs a wide array of visual formats including animation. Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) moves beyond mere black and white and, in a selfconscious mining of The Wizard of Oz and its visual structure, imagines a young Alice who plots an escape that will take her far too long

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to realize in a Kansas-like landscape drenched in an oppressive blanket of red. The use of alternative film stocks to mark a transition between “here” and “there” is absorbed into the road movie vocabulary to such an extent, in fact, that its negation, in films like Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976) or Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is itself a self-conscious acknowledgment of the impossibility of escape. Easy Rider, then, begins to strike a cinematic language peculiar to the road, the lexicon of which is partly borrowed and partly new. What many critics have written off as its stylistic abuses—the film’s formal confusion, its indulgence in “empty” and naïve experimentation—is, in truth, a metaphor for existence: existence generally, but also the film’s specific existence. Easy Rider appeared at the end of the 1960s when, in a moment that has proven rare indeed, American culture found itself at a loss for adequate words. For a period, American cinema reflected upon this loss, and many of these reflections—Euroinflected, ponderous, empty—took place on the American highway. Emptiness, I think, is Easy Rider’s point, and the American road movie spends much of the 1970s contemplating precisely this notion. In looking for a cinematic language suitable to contain its late1960s narrative of the frontier’s second mythic death, Easy Rider begins to articulate the importance of the search itself, empty or not. The film’s highly quotable commercial credo: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere” has, in this way, more to do with the filmmaker’s search than with any of the film’s characters. The film’s sometimes falsely ringing European echoes are a fundamental part of the search. Hopper, intrigued by Godard’s skepticism of things American, adopts a similar position; he finds himself, in fact, using the same confused language of disbelief as the French director. Easy Rider, in other words, is the product of an American director obsessed with French images of America. Godard’s longed-for and always stymied mobility is realized in Hopper’s film; Michel cannot move, but his need to move has translated to the American screen where it becomes more mobile but equally tragic. As we have discussed, the beginning of the 1970s brought with it a flood of American road movies, most bearing the uneasy mark of the genre’s European inheritance. Wim Wenders, an acutely aware German director, however, contributed most consistently to the genre and to the perpetuation of its curiosity with regard to the international movement of cinema itself. His work continues to ask questions about the relationship between the road and narrative cinema.

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Wenders is also conscious of the rate of cinematic exchange and the profound influence of American images on the rest of the world’s image-makers. His 1976 film, Kings of the Road, makes explicit many of the ideas left shrouded or neglected in Hopper’s film. His entire body of work—itself a continuing, expanding road narrative— explores the transportability of images and the metaphorical highway that makes that transportability possible. Through a profound formal sensibility exactly opposite to Hopper’s or Godard’s, Wenders also sets out to redeem the articulate image; he sets out, in fact, to rescue the redemptive and political power of cinematic drift.

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5

Kings of the Road Wim Wenders and the Mobile Home Movie

have referred throughout this book to the cinema and the writing of Wim Wenders, a filmmaker whose much remarked upon distrust of “stories” through the better part of the 1970s resulted in a series of films circling around the history of images. In their overdetermined desire not to tell stories, Wenders’s films from this period end up narrating the historical connection between the road and the cinema that this study has sought to address throughout. Jeffrey Ruoff, in the introductory essay to his excellent collection on travel and the cinema, states that “directors who reject classical narratives and conventional storytelling—such as Wim Wenders . . . have consistently returned to a ground-zero travelogue aesthetic as a means of reinventing the cinema.”1 It is, however, more than rejection of narrative and more than mere reinvention. Wenders is, in many ways, a direct descendant of Eadweard Muybridge, who, in the midst of a farreaching technological revolution, focused his own pre-cinematic apparatus on the mysteries of non-technologically mediated human mobility. Wenders, a child of the postwar, postmodern age, is aware of and fascinated by man’s cyborgian connection to his transportative machines. His cinema uncovers within that connection a resonant statement about man’s tenuous, highly dependent existence in the late twentieth century. If Godardian rapidity has been one “language” by which to describe this state of affairs, Wenders’s quiet patience has been equally influential, informing the aesthetic and thematic shape of countless similarly de-dramatized road movies . In a cinematic oeuvre that for many years appeared to be a continuous journey down one narrative road, Wenders’s Kings of the Road

I

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(1976) stands as a centerpiece. It is a road movie, one aware of and willing to question its own cinematic lineage. Robert Kolker and Peter Beicken in The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire point to the primal roots of these questions and locate them in Wenders’s characteristic response to a 1987 questionnaire that asked, “Why do you make films?” Wenders, in a move that destabilizes his by then–legendary narrative skepticism, answers the question by means of a story, here of his childhood: I was twelve years old when I made my very first film, with an 8-mm camera. I stood by the window and filmed the street below, the cars and pedestrians. My father saw me and asked: “What are you doing with your camera?” And I said: “Can’t you see? I’m filming the street.” “What for?” he asked. I had no answer. Ten or twelve years later, I was making my first short film in 16 mm. A reel of film lasted three minutes. I filmed a crossroads from the sixth floor, without moving the camera until the reel was finished. It didn’t occur to me to pull away or stop filming. With hindsight, I suppose it would have seemed sacrilege to me.2

While Kolker and Beicken are particularly concerned with Wenders’s anecdote for its placement of the paternal (fathers and sons are critical to Wenders’s work) and its mythologizing of cinematic desire, I am most interested in the filmmaker’s narration of a thematic thread and its formal expression. In both episodes, as a boy and as a young man, Wenders shoots “the world,” as it is realized in the form of pedestrian and automotive traffic, from a window, removed, as it were, from that world. Wenders’s desire to respect the truth of time and space (this is how he frames it), finds expression in the long take. Also critical to the anecdote is the fact that the young Wenders, in response to his father’s interrogation (and, in fact, in his initial response to the question addressed to him on the questionnaire) is left speechless: “I had no answer.” In the tradition of the road film makers and the pre–road film makers that precede him, Wenders is interested in the function and organization of language and its relationship to the road. Yet here his thoughts and elsewhere his films explore the realm of inarticulateness. It is, in fact, this inarticulateness, this inability to maintain communication or community, that pushes many of Wenders’s protagonists onto the road where, perhaps strangely, sometimes futilely, they begin to rebuild both structures. Wenders’s films are always about home, though that physical and social structure itself is infrequently glimpsed. An overbearing sense

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of displacement, what Michael Covino has referred to as a “worldwide homesickness,” marks his characters, defines them and their wandering.3 Like Ford’s Ethan, Wenders’s wanderers long for community, but something buried in their personal history, often itself distinctly domestic, makes sustained connection impossible. Disconnected and set adrift, Wenders’s characters move, but the director’s critically aware aesthetic decisions problematize that movement, calling its motivations into question. Wenders’s patience, in other words, allows the viewer the time and space to contemplate the tragedy of his characters’ wandering, a luxury always just beyond the viewer’s grasp, for instance, in Easy Rider, where spectatorial perception is as corrupted (and deliberately so) as the characters we follow. Kings of the Road, Wenders’s sixth feature film, functions as a sort of treatise against corrupted perception and charts the progression of that corruption. Set against the desolate landscape of postwar Germany, the film’s answer to Ford’s Monument Valley, Kings of the Road engages in an act of critical inquiry into the collapsing sign systems of contemporary culture. Bookended by a pair of first-person interviews with elderly cinema operators, the film’s low-key narrative opens on cross-cut shots of motion and stasis. Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler), a runaway husband, frantically drives his Volkswagen into the water, and Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), an itinerant repairer of cinema projectors who is disconnected, it seems, from anything save rock and roll and his own perpetual movement across the German borderlands, rises lazily in the morning for a shave. Similarly, the film ends with cross-cut shots of simultaneous motion: after their journey together, the men part—Bruno in his truck, singing “King of the Road” and Robert aboard a train. It is, however, what lies between these technically masterful moments that comprises the bulk of the film’s 176 minutes. This between space, too, functions according to the logic (or at least the illusion) of real time, and Wenders’s form, unlike that of Hopper or Godard, is consciously opposed to editorial devices that aggressively disrupt temporal or geographical unity. Wenders creates the illusion of uncut action by allowing, perhaps forcing, the camera to ponder otherwise unfilmed or unfilmable events, those daily and unremarkable activities with which the film is so concerned: shaving, defecating, talking, and (most importantly for our purposes) driving. His eye is ponderous, scrutinizing, at times lingering, and his ear is equally inquisitive. It is precisely this complex and inclusive understanding of the narrative process in general, and the cinematic

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narrative process specifically, that makes the film remarkable for its thematic as well as its formal work. Like Godard, Wenders is keenly aware of the importance of language to the cinematic process. In fact, both filmmakers seem to operate, in part, according to a literary logic. But where the visual and aural syntax of Godard’s Breathless is fragmented, a syntactical construction that finds its way into Hopper’s work as well, Wenders’s film is a self-conscious exploration of a largely silent, strangely salient run-on sentence. These alternative approaches to the road, forking as they do in opposite directions, suggest what remains the road movie’s primary modes: the fragmented and chaotic or the slow and contemplative. Both routes, however, lead to the same underlying critique of modernity and its human costs. Between Here and There: Road Signs and Articulate Motion Desiring the camera to engage in a great rescue mission, arresting, recording, and memorializing what otherwise continually vanishes in the visible realm, Wenders understands that filming is a “heroic act” directed at the preservation of a phenomenon and its underlying reality. Robert Kolker and Peter Beicken.4

Wenders’s repeated cinematic “rescue missions” are not just heroic because the filmmaker captures people, places, and things that he deems threatened by the passing of time; they are heroic also in their attempt to preserve what Wenders takes to be a critical and decaying way of seeing. To Wenders, this mode of perception is threatened by a shrinking attention span and a collective spirit grown complacent with imagistic and sonic inundation. This is the same mass cultural shift in perception that the elderly female cinema operator interviewed at the end of Kings of the Road objects to and finds “exploitative” in the ultra-violent and pornographic images that have invaded rural German screens. It is precisely this objection to sensory bombardment that characterizes the slow-moving and meditative Kings of the Road as a reaction to or perhaps even against Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. Wenders himself was seduced by, but leery of, Hopper’s film. He focused much of his attention, as did many of Hopper’s contemporary critics, on precisely those details that Wyatt and Billy ignore as they journey between Los Angeles and New Orleans: the American

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landscape and the “honesty” of the characters’ simple movement through it. In spite of Hopper’s form, this landscape seized Wenders’s attention and reminded him of America’s cinematic past as it was realized in the American Western and particularly the films of John Ford. However naïvely, Wenders sees in John Ford’s work what Roland Barthes might term a “respect for the whole” that is lacking in Hopper’s film.5 Wenders’s characters and the film that contains them drift, but the pace of their movement, even the formal construction of the circuitous journey itself, allows rather than forces the spectator to drift in a more Barthesian manner, to not respect the whole as it is presented, to chart out his own path toward cinematic pleasure. Moving against the by-then popularized notion of the road movie as a perpetual, chaotic, sped-up Kerouacian gooooo!, Wenders’s film, perhaps ironically, is about slowing down, a process linked in Wenders’s understanding to notions of home, both at the micro and macro level. The road’s supposed disconnectedness allows these characters to connect with each other, with their past, with what they have left behind, with what lies ahead. Perhaps most critically, the viewer is also connected, also communicated with. With Kings of the Road Wenders tries to bring the spectatorial senses to something closer to “the truth,” that illusory something that Wenders continues to search for in his contemporary documentary and fiction work as well. His task in Kings of the Road, however, is fundamentally similar to Hopper’s. Both filmmakers seek to critique their own historical moment: where Hopper uses the exaggerated and fragmented language of the present to point out the flaws of 1960s American culture, Wenders renegotiates the cinematic language of the past and rallies it in a critique against his present. While Wenders actively explores the aftermath of a divided Germany, his film is also a very telling critique of American popular culture. Kings of the Road is, in fact, one of the cinema’s most intelligent examinations of America. Like Godard before him, Wenders is interested in the evolving history of cinematic language and frequently evokes that history, particularly its American roots. Unlike Godard, however, Wenders seems intent on clinging to and finding salvation in the past. He remains nostalgic where Godard is hesitatingly allusive and deeply critical. Kolker and Beicken articulate the difference in the following terms: “Everything Godard does is critique as well as homage, an investigation of the image as well as an embrace. Wenders, however, is more taken with America than he is critical of it. The Godardian artifice of

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interrupting narrative with semiotically rich graphics was not to be a favored device.”6 This idea of being “taken with America” is fundamental to any understanding of Wenders’s cinematic world. Contained within Kolker and Beicken’s phrasing of the situation is the transportative idea upon which Wenders’s continued explorations of America are based: America is something that can “take” the subject somewhere. America, in other words, is inherently mobile. Wenders’s film opens on a set of formally, temporally, and geographically explicit titles: “In black and white . . . Wide Screen 1:1.66 . . . Original Soundtrack . . . Shot in 11 weeks . . . Between July 1st and October 31 1975 . . . Between Hamburg and Hoff along the Frontier with East Germany.” This text divulges the basic “elements” of the film; Wenders seeks to expose, not to conceal. Wenders’s attention to microscopic details is also evidence of his reverence toward and faith in the cinematic (decaying though it might be). Along with the German title of the film, “Im Lauf der Zeit” or “In the Course of Time,” the text demonstrates a profound preoccupation with the functions of space and time. For Wenders, images—specifically of the cinematic variety—are a sort of salvation, a means by which to fix (to stop as well as to repair) space and time. In his literary opening to this intensely visually oriented film, he emphasizes the importance of “betweenness”: the film exists both temporally and spatially “between” edges. This is an idea hinted at more subtly in the reference to the wide-screen format of the film, its implied expansiveness. Borders and frontiers are of obvious importance to a post–World War II West German filmmaker, as much perhaps as they were to Ford’s mythic exploration of the West. They are of equal concern, however, to a filmmaker interested in discerning the lay of the cinematic road and the borders of cinematic history, and Wenders is guided by all of these impulses. This idea of betweenness is the essential grammar of Wenders’s cinematic language. Even the “story” of the film itself, minimal though it may be, is caught between the interviews that begin and end the film, interviews that foreground Wenders’s nostalgia for a passing (maybe passed) mode of perception. His cinema is frequently about individuals caught between spaces, moments, or conditions. These characters are on the verge of teetering either one way or the other. Wenders is interested in these narratives that revolve around the spaces in-between because they represent an indecisiveness, that critical, inconclusive period where “possibility” reigns.7 His form is unified with his theme and itself maintains a posture of hesitating

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betweenness. His camera wanders in Kings of the Road, moving between the two main characters and their unique spaces and situations, observing but never commenting decisively, and the long take is its basic communicational unit. The narrative “proper” of Kings of the Road begins with an ideal visual realization of the betweenness that governs Wenders’s cinematic language. A remarkably neutral, seemingly disconnected and fairly high-angle establishing shot of the German countryside pans slowly to the right to follow a barely perceptible, rapidly accelerating car followed by a trail of dust clouds. From this point on, Wenders cuts between his characters, who remain unnamed through much of the film, and their independent actions. The first cut is to Robert driving rapidly with his head out the window, followed by an interior point of view shot of a photograph of a house that Robert carefully tears into fragments and throws out of the window. These shots from the interior of Robert’s car recall Godard’s early treatment of Michel in Breathless. In fact, the kamikaze-like movement, however fleeting, that Robert here realizes is precisely the motion Michel seeks through most of Breathless. The imagery and the pacing create a feeling of unboundedness surrounding this perpetually bounded character; it suggests unbridled and undirected kinetic energy, as well as fragmentation, signaled in part by Robert’s treatment of the photograph, a visible reminder of the road movie’s abiding domestic obsessions and an image the film will keep returning to. Robert imagines himself to be moving away from this space when in truth he is moving toward an understanding of it. Simultaneous with Robert’s kamikaze run, Bruno rises slowly from dreams that have clearly disturbed him—“How can you dream such shit?” he says to himself, stretching and preparing himself for his morning. Bruno, who will turn out to be the “mover” of the duo, the character that most seems to fit into the category of the Fordian wanderer, moves slowly, carefully. His vehicle, a truck first glimpsed in long shot, is stationary, home-like. Bruno engages in a variety of unremarkable domestic activities: he talks to himself, dresses, and begins to shave. Though Bruno’s screen-time is intercut with the rapidly approaching Robert, the shots of Bruno convey a sense of pensiveness and slowness. The camera seems to contemplate his plodding morning ritual and, especially in contrast to the shots of Robert, the camera adopts a pacing similar to Bruno’s. Bruno’s existence on the road, on the outskirts, is remarkably ordinary and familiar. Where Robert imagines himself to be moving away from home,

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here we are introduced to a character who moves with his home; a home decidedly lacking the human ingredients that make a home something more than an architectural structure. There is also something of a Neorealist sensibility to these images of Bruno engaged in the repetitive activities of his alienated daily existence. Wenders’s techniques for arriving at this idea are remarkably similar to those of the Neorealists as well: unobtrusive editing, deep field composition, and a premium placed on mise-en-scène rather than virtuoso cutting or expressive camera placement. Commenting on the visual style of Kings of the Road, Wenders indicates his desire for a strictly visual language (an idea we explored in Hopper as well but which seems, somehow, more genuine in this context): “I wanted a completely cinematic feel. Working with Robby [Müller, the film’s cinematographer] guaranteed that. He knew that the language of the film would be cinematic, but that it would be made under entirely new circumstances . . . The last thing I wanted was for it to look like a documentary film.”8 Wenders demands a cinematic language capable of teasing out and lingering upon the ordinary activities that occur between “events,” yet he distinguishes between what he understands to be “cinematic” and “documentary” practice. The distinction, strange as it seems, underscores Wenders’s faith in a very particular aesthetic. What Kolker and Beicken identify as Wenders’s “articulate spaces” in fact have much more to do with Wenders’s salvational attempts to allow the inarticulate (or at the very least, the ignored) to signify through artful, deliberate, painstaking arrangement. Also in this early series of shots between Robert and Bruno are several preliminary reminders of Wenders’s desire to explore a means of non-verbal communication. Robert, in the midst of his mad race to nowhere, pauses momentarily at a gas station—not to refuel but to silently (in fact, using sign-language) warn a young girl playing in front of the station not to hitch rides with strangers. The moment is played out in universal gestures. The two characters gaze at each other, and with a slight turn of the head in the direction of the passenger seat he invites the young girl to join him. She shakes her head in a negative answer. He shakes his finger back and forth in a sign of disapproval. This easily overlooked moment in the film is remarkable for its emphasis on non-verbal signs as well as its clues as to the reasons behind Robert’s mobility; he is literally a character in search of the displaced fragments of his childhood.9 Robert warns the girl not to become a mere passenger and not to forsake her control over her

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own motion, as he himself is about to do when he joins Bruno as a passenger. The moment in the film is also interesting in terms of Robert’s occupation. We learn later in the film that Robert researches the developmental stages of reading and writing in young children. Robert’s unspoken conversation with the young girl resonates with longing, the longing for the innocent perception of and communicational honesty of children. Robert quickly resumes his kamikaze journey and, after driving his VW into the water directly in front of a baffled and eye-rubbing Bruno, silent “conversations” once again take precedence. The first of these conversations begins with Robert’s absurdly squeaking shoes and a brief verbal comment about the noise. It continues through a series of non-verbal signs, gestures, laughs, and nods. Bruno and Robert watch the car sink into the water together and with it, Robert’s control and autonomy. This act of automotive suicide, made all the more interesting by the fact that Robert’s car is a German-made VW, does not abort Robert’s movement through space; it simply forces him into a temporary state of passengerhood.10 And so their journey together begins. The rapid cutting, used only at the beginning and end of this film, has functioned to draw these characters together, to unite, through the glue of editing, their apparently very different existences. Through it all, however, Wenders is careful to signify the elements that divide these characters and their independent desires for meaningful and honest verbal communication. Aggressive cutting will return at the end of the film to re-divide the two men. Their journey together begins with a series of shots from the interior of the truck, further illustrating, in their composition and organization, the idea of division, of the essential space in between. Here, Wenders uses a standard shot/reverse shot pattern with the camera placed directly between the as yet unnamed characters. The cutting pattern typically used in classical Hollywood film to facilitate the rhythmic flow of conversation is subverted here to signify differently. The characters remain silent, frustratingly so. The cutting pattern intensifies the silence in that it facilitates that which does not occur. While we expect the men to initiate a conversation based upon our familiarity with this cinematic convention, Wenders denies us the comfort of having this promise fulfilled. The gazes exchanged between the men, however, and the more-than-a-little-ironic lyrics of the song playing on Bruno’s portable turntable—“the more I see you, the more I want you. The more this feeling grows and grows”—serve as alternate communicators. The desire suggested by the exchange of

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gazes and the song’s lyrics, however, is far from simple. For the subject and object of this desire remains multiple. On one level, the men desire words of each other. This desire, however, has the effect of silencing them. Equally critical, Bruno and Robert wish to comprehend the space they find themselves traversing and their fit within that space; for while this landscape is, as Kolker and Beicken suggest, articulate, it articulates emptiness; a state the men fight (albeit pathetically) against.11 Metaphorically, all of this attention to betweenness functions to comment on what lies between the film’s two male protagonists. On the one hand, there is something between them, some cultural material that makes their emergent relationship impossible. On the other hand, something else, a peculiar kind of bond against which they both rebel, is also forming, facilitated in part by their movement through space. The details of their journey together combine to make this partnership even more problematic. Through much of the film, Bruno and Robert are palpably alone together. They do not share the road with other vehicles. In fact, it is only the pauses in their journey together that bring the men in contact with other people. The journey itself is isolating, but life and community exist between the spaces of the journey. Interestingly, however, these immersions into the world of community, these pauses, make Bruno and Robert uncomfortable. As in The Searchers and Easy Rider, stopping means communicating and communicating leaves one vulnerable. In Ford’s and Hopper’s films, stability facilitates vulnerability to attack or invasion in the physical sense. Here, the attack or invasion is internalized and has more to do with memory and personal psychology than with external threats. Bruno’s truck, in this way, comes to resemble the lonely homestead in The Searchers. It is a place of uncomfortable, ritualistic community, but it is forever isolated and vulnerable; a mobile homestead. As they drive together in Bruno’s truck, the camera backtracks, allowing the truck to perpetually follow its own movement. The characters remain visible behind the slight glare of the windshield. Critical to the composition of these shots, however, is the apparent division of Bruno and Robert, marked by the line that separates the two front windshield panels. A series of very subtle dissolves resembling Ford’s use of the technique in The Searchers suggest the idea of lapsed time and distance traveled. Placed within this series of dissolves, however, is a peculiar cutaway to the lighted, plastic Michelin Man that decorates the front of Bruno’s truck. This exact cutaway will be used elsewhere in the film when, for the first time, Bruno inquires about Robert’s life.

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In this later scene, Bruno asks what Robert does besides “test driving.” Robert begins to describe his work as a children’s doctor and divulges that he has separated from his wife. Bruno responds by saying, “I didn’t ask you about that. There’s no need to tell me your stories.” Robert is anxious to confess and hopes to arrive at some sort of personal understanding through a closer, more self-revelatory relationship to words. Bruno, on the other hand, resists the intimacy associated with language and is embarrassed by Robert’s candor. Bruno indicates that he simply wants to know who Robert is, and Robert arrogantly claims that he is his story. His comment is followed by a cut to Bruno’s ornamental Michelin Man. Kolker and Beicken have commented on this cutaway’s placement in this later scene: “The sudden appearance of the glowing, jolly, unchanging advertising figure serves to reduce Robert’s evasive overstatement, and, at the same time, as a reference point—similar to the trees and passing train in the earlier montage, or the moon and clouds seen through the truck’s skylight later in this sequence—it deflects our concentration, widens the spatial context, defuses the moment.”12 The glowing Michelin Man’s ironic function, however, is more complex. In widening the spatial context and in its service as a reference point, the logo functions also as a critical reminder of direction. The Michelin company is, of course, most famous for the production of tires. Their guides and maps, however, are equally important, and the connection to this product is especially apt given these characters’ search for direction, particularly communicational direction, over the course of the film. While his significance in North America is somewhat diffuse, Bibendum (the Michelin Man’s proper name) is an important and loved figure throughout Europe, a character whose presence along the sides of roads, on the front of maps and guides, etc., is a reassuring constant.13 Critical to the company’s understanding of Bibendum is the fact that he is given a mythically signifying “voice.” He becomes the motorists’ “spokesperson,” a critical role predicated upon his ability to make out itineraries for potential motor tourists. Key to Bibendum’s function to the traveler is his assurance of safe arrivals. In a film more concerned with the spaces between, his presence is a puzzling reminder of the impossibility of destinations. In an especially relevant essay in Mythologies, Roland Barthes unravels the peculiar and mythic language of France’s Blue Guides and decodes the guides’ ability to homogenize the mysteries of travel in their attempt to narrate and rate that process. The Michelin Guides serve a similar function with the intent of creating safe, knowledgeable

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travelers. The Michelin Man, a mythic symbol for “direction” or “guidance,” is ironized in this film about characters who seem to lack direction and guidance; his appearance seems to hint at their unspoken (perhaps unspeakable) desire for both. Bibendum expresses what Bruno and Robert cannot. The figure is another silently articulate signifier speaking on behalf of our similarly silent, verbally inarticulate protagonists. Wenders’s characters are silent for a reason: the filmmaker is disturbed by language’s ability to conceal the truth he hopes to arrive at imagistically. In this way, his cinematic work is further connected to the theories of Roland Barthes, who consistently argues for the integrity of the image and language’s ability to conceal or distort that integrity. This is an idea that Barthes struggles with throughout his career, and it is most fully realized in his 1980 book Camera Lucida. The book, which is part investigation into the existence of photography and part search for his mother, is skeptical of the cinema. Barthes’ description of photography, however, sounds uncannily like Wenders’s cinematic rationale: The photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed . . . . In the cinema, whose raw material is photographic, the image does not, however, have this completeness (which is fortunate for the cinema). Why? Because the photograph, taken in flux, is impelled, is ceaselessly drawn toward other views; in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter. . . . Motionless, the photograph flows back from presentation to retention.14

It is strange that a film so concerned with the idea of motion on its surface should fit so comfortably into Barthes’ notions regarding still photography. While apparently supporting the language of motion, however, Kings of the Road most eloquently speaks the language of stillness. Wenders’s characters are allowed a presence in time and space that does not seek to eradicate the stillness of non-activity. They perform, inasmuch as the cinema can be said to allow such performance, the act of reality, which is at once active and inert; they perform the non-cinematic. This is, as Wenders will claim throughout his career, in part the influence of Yasujiro Ozu, whose famously static,

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low angle shots were equally unflinching. When Barthes discusses the supposedly pure representational system of photography, he suggests that it is unique in its ability to transform itself into the “weightless, transparent envelope” of the thing itself.15 Wenders, in focusing relentlessly on the traditionally non-cinematic, reveals a kindred desire. This battle between language and image is played out beautifully when, fairly early in the film—and, therefore, also early in Robert and Bruno’s relationship—the men are required to repair a malfunctioning sound system in a rural cinema. Key to the scene is the fact that the audience for the upcoming “event” is a group of wide-eyed and anxious school children. The innocence of children is enviable in Wenders’s world and, in fact, the film will end with a reminder of the perceptive powers of children. As the children wait and are told to be still by their elders, Bruno and Robert go to work behind the screen. They are backlit and, therefore, throw gigantic shadows on the screen before the children, much to the children’s delight and amusement. Bruno and Robert, suddenly aware of their performative situation, play out a scenario in pantomime and begin to beat each other in cartoon-like fashion to the howling satisfaction of the audience. As other critics have pointed out, this is a moment of previously unrealized intimacy between Bruno and Robert. Shortly after the pantomime, in fact, both men rebel against it and discuss their disgust and discomfort with the openness of their gazes toward each other and the performative nature of their “show.” What is critical to the scene are its multiple layers of signification. The men have arrived to reunite sound to image. In the process, however, they act out a scenario where sound and image have been disconnected; in this respect they have returned to cinema’s primitive pre-history, with which this study began. The children, who fail to obey the words of their elders, are entranced by the spell of the silent shadow-play before them and read its signs unproblematically. For the men, it is a different story entirely. This passionate, adventurous, childlike language has died, and the viewer is reminded of its death by the hangman’s noose that, at the end of their “show,” swings between them. The Inexpressible Need to Speak Robert is paralyzed—which, ironically, is what keeps him in motion both here and throughout the film—by a need for language that manifests itself in a variety of ways.16 When they first stop for gas early in the film, Robert rushes across the street to use a phone in the

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window of an empty building as if coming up from a sea of silence for a breath of verbal communication. This action is repeated often throughout the film as he attempts to reconnect, at least verbally, with his wife, from whom he has, we learn, run away. Following the shot of Robert struggling with the phone Wenders cuts to an interior shot inside the car; Robert, after his attempt at a phone call, sleeps as Bruno attends to the vehicle. This shot pans up to capture the telephone lines upon which Robert so desperately relies. The shot then dissolves into a shot of the road upon which Bruno and Robert travel composed in an identical manner, stretching out in the same direction. The lines in the road are thus aligned with the telephone lines. As these formally rhyming images suggest, the road has become a substitute for verbal communication. Both characters rely on distance for their survival: Robert on “long distance,” signified by the phone lines, and Bruno on social and geographical distance, signified by the road. Neither alternative, however, is held up as an ideal. Robert is also deeply attached to the written word. He carries with him a pad and pen through much of the film and leaves a variety of brief, sometimes cryptic written notes for Bruno. Robert is also especially concerned with newspapers and the printed word, primarily because of its connection to his youth as the son of a newspaperman. In fact, Robert’s interest in the press—or at least the produce of the press—is really only cinematically rivaled by that of Michel in Breathless, who goes through newspapers (presumably searching for his own name) at an alarming rate. Bruno also has a relationship with the printed word: he reads and seems to have an intimate knowledge of maps of the German countryside. He also reads American literature in the form of William Faulkner. These choices in reading material do much, then, to describe Bruno and Robert. Robert is interested in “the truth” and has been trained to believe that the truncated language of the press will provide him with facts, with answers. Bruno’s relationship to language, on the other hand, is like his relationship to geography, thus his parallel interest in maps. Reading from Faulkner’s Wild Palms, he stumbles over the word “loon” and asks Robert for a translation. In asking, however, he fails to place the troublesome term in context and Robert tells him that a loon is a crazy person. Like his existence on the road, Bruno here demonstrates a desire to forget about the past or the future (the words before or after) and focuses on the moment, or the troublesome word. He is, in fact, a character who needs to put himself in context.

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Robert’s textual obsession is evidenced early in the film when he notices a group of children playing with greased newspaper boats in a small stream on the side of the road and asks if he can have one of their boats. He picks it up and restores it to its original form and function by beginning to read it. In a sense, he is already looking for his father, who is a newspaperman. More importantly, however, the moment illustrates Robert’s practical, routine relationship to language, a relationship that he actively laments when he describes, near the film’s conclusion, the details of his linguistic research. The children take the printed word and reform it, make it transportable, turn it into a playful vehicle. Robert, on the other hand, is left reading and searching for clues not in the “real” world of the road, but in the “representational” realm of the written word. It is, in fact, in another newspaper from his father’s press found on the side of the road that Robert finds the motivation to visit his father in Ostheim. This solo journey to Ostheim occurs roughly in the middle of the film and constitutes a fundamental shift in what has hitherto been the film’s primary visual and narrative logic, a logic based on pairs. Robert leaves Bruno and their communal ride, leaving a short note for Bruno so that he might be picked up later; he understands that their journey together is not yet complete. Bruno, alone again, continues his routine, and the film cuts between Bruno and Robert. In fact, this middle section resembles the beginning and end of the film in its crosscutting between separate characters and locations whose connectedness the spectator has grown accustomed to. Kolker and Beicken point out this moment’s unusual structure: “Wenders—who, like most postwar European filmmakers, tends not to use editing as an expressive device—makes one of the most interesting edits in his work, a dissolve that links Bruno’s actions with those of Robert in his father’s print shop and connects two actions of communication.”17 Bruno and Robert are connected formally by a series of cuts from one character and his location back to the other. Yet the sequence foregrounds the fact that they are also finally disconnected in the physical sense. They are out on their own attempting to re-engage with the world of social interaction: Bruno with a young woman who runs her grandfather’s cinema and Robert, perhaps more critically—for it will remind Bruno of his need to contextualize his own life—with his father. Robert’s father runs a small printing press, yet another tie to the realm of linguistic communication, albeit written. His encounter with his father also revolves largely around a verbal problem—namely, his

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father’s verbal domination over Robert and Robert’s deceased mother. The scene contains within it a sense of emergent violence, and Wenders’s camera, which typically keeps its distance from such emotionally explosive moments, frames the men separately in oneshots, thereby also accentuating the gulf between father and son. Robert demands silence of his father exclaiming, “If you start talking, I’m leaving!” He remains speechless for over two hours and ends up publishing a paper overnight with the headline “How to be able to respect a woman.” Unable yet to find his own conversational voice, Robert responds in the written language he inherits from his father and, in this tentative language, points to a dilemma few critics of the film have acknowledged. While the father/son relationship is central to the film, it is finally a film about silent and concealed mothers. Bruno’s own quest somewhat later in the film will flesh this idea out more fully, but in this scene it is Robert’s anguish over his father’s abuse of his mother that is he crucial motivator behind his return home and, perhaps, his confusion in his own marital life. This episode is crosscut with Bruno’s episode at a rural amusement park and cinema on his route and his interactions with the young woman who runs the cinema. Like Robert’s, Bruno’s episode is also an attempt to communicate meaningfully. His mode of communication, however, is primarily visual, and it is really his highly reflexive film loop that narrates Bruno most effectively. Sitting half-interestedly through the porno film being shown in the theatre, Bruno notices a small blank spot in the screen. He tells the young female operator, who is inexperienced and cannot work the phone, to call the projectionist’s booth. Bruno, then, investigates on his own and finds that the operator has devised a scheme whereby, through placing a small mirror in front of the projector, he is able to have his own little show reflected on the opposite wall. Bruno interrupts the projectionist’s show and his masturbatory act, causing the projectionist to leave in an embarrassed fury. Cleaning up the mess of spilled film on the floor, Bruno occupies his time by splicing pieces together that seem to narrate his own feelings about himself, sexuality in general, and the current exploitative state of West German cinema. The loop contains images of sex and violence, precisely the inundating images the film objects to, and in its cyclical repetitiveness suggests the monotony of the modern world. Both men, in their journeys away from each other, attempt to connect with and make sense out of aspects of their lives they have been running away from. And both of their attempts revolve interestingly

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around women. Robert seeks to learn the truth of his father’s relationship with his mother and his own troubled marital existence. Bruno, as we learn later, seeks to escape the emptiness he feels with women. Easy Rider explores similar terrain but never attempts to explain the motivation behind Billy and Wyatt’s nearly all-male community. In both films, women figure merely as pauses in the action; they are tied to stationary existences. In Hopper’s film they are other peoples’ wives, residents in the commune, or whores. In Wenders’s film women function in a similar capacity but they are also memories—distant, foggy, and uncomfortable memories the men in the film have about the women in their lives. Both men need to reconcile these memories in order to “see the world differently.” Near the end of the film, after he has parted ways with Bruno, this time permanently, and reconciled his relationship with his father, Robert makes a final attempt to see the world differently. The scene takes place at a railroad station, a location rich with symbolism of change, of forward and positive movement. Robert notices a young boy writing in a notebook and asks him what he is writing. Robert, nostalgic as he is for perceptual and verbal innocence, is fascinated by the boy and his ability to observe and narrate his surroundings unproblematically. Kolker and Beicken comment on this moment in the film when they suggest, “Many of Wenders’ adult characters— most especially Travis in Paris, Texas—are struck to the point of dumbness by the treacherous slippages of verbal communication, the uncertainties occurring between the spaces of intent, language, and meaning. But the child, and especially this child at the railroad station, is aware of no treachery, or danger. He simply beholds the world and writes a description of it, trusting fully the authenticity of his perceptions.”18 The child in this scene has the ability to name with absolute confidence everything that Robert points out: “a man with a suitcase, an empty suitcase, a grin, a black eye, a fist, throwing a stone . . . ” It is precisely this innocent, pristine understanding of subjectivity that Robert longs for. He also understands all too well how temporary this ease of perception is. This scene also echoes the scene of extreme tension and verbal and physical excess just prior to this one, where Bruno and Robert momentarily regain language only to learn, once again, of its impossibility. In the scene, the men, drunk on American whiskey, lose their way on the road and stumble upon a deserted U.S. Army observation hut on the GDR border, a structure whose interior is covered in American

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graffiti. It is in this structural reminder of America’s global reach that the men have their lengthiest and most interesting discussion. Robert, upon being interrogated by Bruno about his career as a “children’s doctor” responds, “I’m not a children’s doctor . . . I work on the borderline . . . linguistics and pediatrics . . . I don’t have a practice . . . I evaluate research on the first months of reading and writing . . . At that stage, letters and figures are an adventure. Later, writing becomes a routine and this imaginative phase is forgotten . . . There was a boy for whom lines were paths along which letters moved by means of a motorbike—a pen—. ‘I’ and ‘E’ always rode together. ‘I’ was clever and pointed.” Bruno replies with: “That makes me ‘I’ and you ‘E.’” This discussion of childhood language maps out the premise of this examination. Language for both men—primarily verbal for Robert and visual for Bruno—has become merely routine, is no longer an adventure. And, it seems, both characters are motivated by a desire to return to a state of linguistic and physical exuberance. Cinema, for Bruno, is a means to an end and, once its mysteries are revealed, does little but occupy his time. It is, in short, part of his routine. His discussions with cinema operators suggest a desire to return, through their stories, to a romantic, mythic time when the cinema was meaningful, true, mysterious—an adventure. Even his vain attempts to take pleasure in, for instance, the fairly dry story of the Maltese Cross, that oddly shaped device in the projector that draws film at the rate of twenty-four intermittent frames per second, indicates his desire to find something new, something pure in his merely practical and mechanical relationship to cinematic language.19 Similarly, Robert seeks, through his interactions with children, a way back to the primitive, exciting, and pleasurable stage in linguistic development when language is still true, when language reveals, rather than concealing or wounding. He lives out his desires by proxy, interacting with kids while he remains absurdly quiet. His moment at the depot with the young and linguistically pure boy, however, lays bare the despair this character feels. This is especially evident in the exchange that punctuates the scene. Envious of the boy’s control over language, Robert trades his sunglasses and his suitcase for the boy’s observational journal. Robert cannot access the language he desires and so, at this late stage in the film, opts merely to study it once again. It is finally Easy Rider’s dialogical and visual inarticulateness, its inability to speak the language it so desperately wishes to speak, that causes Wyatt right before his prefigured death to say “We blew it” to a

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still reeling Billy. Both Wenders’s and Hopper’s films are quiet, save for their rock and roll soundtracks that act as a pop-cultural chorus for the film’s verbally challenged protagonists. Kings of the Road, however, elucidates the gaps in Hopper’s film by attending more faithfully to the progression of time. Bruno and Robert’s journey is not exclusively a spatial journey but a temporal and linguistic adventure as well. Their journey is as much a reconciliation with history, both personal and national, as it is a movement toward the future. Revealing as this is, however, the film ends with both characters returning to routine—Robert back home and Bruno back to his mobile cinema repair circuit. As he sings the words to the Roger Miller song “King of the Road,” it is clear that, for Bruno, to be “taken with America,” and an illusion of America at that, is still preferable to his German reality. Breathless, Easy Rider and Kings of the Road all make reference to or otherwise critique America’s pop-cultural mobility. Bruno, in fact, comments on the process directly when he proclaims, in the scene in the observation hut, that “the yanks have colonized our unconsciousness.” For Bruno, perhaps for Wenders, however, this colonization— aggressive though it may be—has become a highly seductive, albeit false salvation. It has become a temptation every bit as desirable, every bit as impossible as Roberts’s domestic fantasy or Sue’s dream of Hollywood in Ulmer’s Detour. The road and its attending mythology are important parts of this seduction, though in Kings of the Road and through much of his career, Wenders has also been careful to underscore the unyielding despair of this option, an option that results in a host of quietly mobile victims. American Culture on the Road and Postmodern Victimology

imagine America without all the false images and I see a great and beautiful and generous and open country, a country one could only dream OF, a country one could only dream IN. Where you could be at home yet on the road at the same time. They have that in America: MOBILE HOMES. Wim Wenders, 198420

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Wenders’s poem is premised upon a basic misunderstanding of America, or more accurately, of American cinema, as a possessor of true images. The America Wenders envisions manifests itself metaphorically in Kings of the Road in the form of Bruno’s truck, a home on wheels that allows him to be simultaneously “at home” and “on the road.”21 Wenders is fascinated by America’s mobility, and this fascination stems in part from what he takes to be his own country’s perplexing immobility.22 Hitler’s wartime Germany was intensely and dangerously mobile, set upon the decimation of “obstacles”—be they borders or groups of people. Postwar Germany was in every way marked by its stasis, by its inability to move beyond or out of its history. Wenders has, on many occasions, attested to his own anxiety with regard to his country’s history, particularly this aspect of it. These ideas of cultural mobility and stasis, however, are fundamental to Wenders’s cinema, which began, theoretically at least (for the young pre-filmmaking Wenders was an avid viewer and thinker), in a period when American culture—in the form of pinball machines, rock music, cinema, soda, and jukeboxes—was being absorbed into German culture. The artifacts of American culture, it might be said, were welcomed as replacements for German culture.23 Bruno has generously appointed his vehicle with these artifacts. As Robert says in a moment of hostility in the film, Bruno’s truck is literally a museum on wheels; more critically, it is a museum of American popular culture, containing defunct jukeboxes and fragments of neon signage. The truck literalizes the idea of America’s cultural mobility, containing remnants of its ascendancy that Bruno totes around the German landscape as a means of negating his own and his country’s history. But the spectator is left wondering why Bruno feels compelled to remain in constant motion, bringing with him these American signs as he drives around the country restoring functionality to motion picture houses. The reasons behind Bruno’s motion are hinted at in the sequence involving the trip to his childhood home on the Rhine. This moment, late in the film, is critical in that this process of self-discovery is achieved with Robert’s assistance. It is, in fact, on Robert’s suggestion that the men embark on this leg of their journey. The fact that this scene contains one of Wenders’s most discussed cinematic “borrowings” is critical. Bruno’s “memories” are contained in a film canister both literally and figuratively; literally, in that the comics and personal belongings he unearths under the stairs are preserved in

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a film canister and figuratively in that the entire scene is narrated in quotations: Once I stole a scene from The Lusty Men for a film of mine: in Kings of the Road, when Bruno goes back to his place of birth and finds an old box of comics under the stairs, that’s a copy of a scene at the beginning of The Lusty Men, where Mitchum goes back to the house where he was born and takes out a dusty box in which he’s kept a few coins, a rusty revolver and a rodeo programme. That’s my favourite scene, and not only in this film. In a few shots and not many minutes, Nicholas Ray says everything that the cinema is capable of saying. What it’s capable of saying and how. That’s why you can’t really call that kind of stealing theft. (If I imagine this homecoming scene in my head, even in my memory I like the flow that the story has: without any pressure, without any sense of haste, every shot gradually becomes a sign in some sort of runic script, that you slowly see and hear. A song. . . . )24

Wenders’s unusually cryptic narration of the process of “stealing” links the process to the emergence of language: “Every shot . . . becomes a sign in some sort of runic script.” Wenders acknowledges here that Bruno’s story is told using the borrowed language of Nicholas Ray. The mobility of America that so fascinates Wenders is here realized. The film canister grounds this process diegetically, for it suggests that Bruno’s memories have been usurped by American cinematic memories. Replacing Ray’s gun, a signifier of violent memory, with a film canister, Wenders suggests the centrality of the cinema and its images to the formation of Bruno’s identity. This process of discovery brings Bruno to tears because its terms have presented themselves. He realizes that he has insulated himself against history and the future, as well as his own emotions, by participating exclusively in imported culture and refusing to pause, to reflect. His denial—of his past, present, and future—can no longer be sustained. This moment of self-realization, however, is short-lived and tentative, as was Robert’s earlier in the film. The two men do not discuss it and make haste to return to the road after very little reflection. Bruno is forced to recognize the repressed material that has led to his nomadic, insulated, and isolated existence but still returns to that existence. Like Ethan at the end of The Searchers, he is compelled to return to the wilderness and to his itinerant routine. Wenders, a filmmaker of imagistic subtlety rather than narrative fulfillment, allows Bruno to contemplate his existence without narrating it. Bruno later remarks to Robert, “I’m glad we went to the Rhine.

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For the first time I see myself as someone who has gone through a certain time . . . and this time is my history. This feeling is quite comforting.” Comforting, perhaps, but brought about by violence and discomfort. This moment of discovery occurs during a pause in the motion of the film. The pause itself, and the memories that surface because of it, cause Bruno to act out in a rare moment of violence and emotion: he smashes windows and sobs. More interesting, however, is the fact that he refuses to give the pause any further time. Robert wants to spend the night, wants to stop, and, we presume, wants to force Bruno into a deeper state of contemplation. Bruno, however, feels compelled to move on and maintain his wall of illusions.25 Bruno’s existence on the road is predicated on the re-creation and maintenance of an artificial sense of home. For Bruno, this re-creation is fundamentally American, because part of the pain of his real history is its Germanness. The fact that this moment of the film is told in quotation, is in fact a borrowed moment from Nicholas Ray’s earlier film, demonstrates the inescapability of the circle that Bruno has created for himself. Looking to America, Bruno—and perhaps Wenders, too—has forsaken his own past, his own roots, his own “cinema” as it is manifest in the canister that contains this past. His occupation as a cinema repairman also demonstrates the degree to which this character exists in order to perpetuate the cinema’s illusion, or at least the projection of its illusion. This moment on the Rhine is certainly not the film’s only moment of violent self-recognition. As we have explored already, Robert’s interactions with his father earlier in the film function according to the same logic. Robert and Bruno’s fight near the end of the film in the American outpost hut is similarly structured. All three of these moments involve a pause in the motion of the film, a coming to terms with personal history, and a recognition of the fact that—however uncomfortable, however impossible—this “personal” material needs to be made public. This is particularly the case at the outpost, because after their discussion of language and child linguistics, their conversation becomes more openly volatile; in fact, they participate, in their drunkenness, in the honest language of children—and it hurts. This is in part because, once again, Robert attempts to call his wife on the telephone in the outpost. Bruno, who has mumbled his disapproval of Robert’s continued attempts to reconnect, calls Robert a coward and claims that, contrary to what Robert believes, he is afraid not of his wife killing herself—like the stranger’s wife in an earlier scene who, in an act of domestic desperation drives her car into a tree—but of his own inability to live without her. Robert, in turn, accuses Bruno of

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being a passionless shell of a human being. This brutal honesty is more than either of them can handle; they are, after all, adults and not children. The moment turns violent, and the camera positions itself at a distance from the action and allows the fight between the two men to draw to a conclusion before re-entering in this interesting, less idyllic reenactment of their earlier shadow-play. The camera, which has entered the personal spaces of these men throughout, keeps its distance at this moment of real violence. This is another intensely personal moment of intimacy between Bruno and Robert, but one they must work out on their own. The end of the fight returns the conversation to the question of sexuality. Bruno, in a rare moment of honesty and self-reflection, admits that he is loneliest when he makes love to a woman and that, in fact, sex—like language, like the cinema—has become routine for him. This film, which so many critics have explored for its comments on the paternal chain, is at its base deeply anxious about the feminine in general and about the maternal specifically. Robert’s encounter with his father revolves around the question of the mother and her forced silence. Bruno’s interaction with the young cinema operator midway through the film turns momentarily ugly when he questions her about her life at home and she states that she lives with her daughter and intends to keep things that way. Finally, Bruno’s return to the maternal in the form of his homestead indicates the degree to which his movement has, in part, been motivated by a running away from the female and the memories associated with the maternal. The film’s search for language never escapes the language of the father (in its many manifestations) though it suggests the possibility that an answer lies with the mother. “Every Man Is an Adventurer . . . Women Just Look On” Our final section borrows its title from the 1976 German poster advertising Kings of the Road, and its assertions with regard to gender— specific to the film but also relevant in a far more general way—require our attention. Wenders writes of the situation in the following manner: “This film is the story of two men, but it doesn’t take a Hollywood approach to the subject. American films about men—especially recent ones—are exercises in suppression: the men’s true relationships with women, or with each other, are displaced by story, action and the need to entertain. They leave out the real nub: why the men prefer to be together, why they get on with each other,

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why they don’t get on with women, or, if they do, then only as a pastime.”26 Far from romantic, Wenders sees his sometimes exclusively male spaces as problematic, even symptomatic. Like the turn-of-the-century images of male mobility this book begins with, Wenders’s images are most typically of men in motion. But Wenders is interested in interrogating masculine movement where Muybridge and Méliès simply presented it, Muybridge with his purported interest in its “scientific” mysteries and Méliès with an interest in its magical potential. Wenders is concerned with the psychology of masculine movement more than its biology. This is the vague “nub” to which he refers in the previous fragment. Wenders is also interested in exploring the male freedom to move at will, outside of the domestic realm. Nowhere is this concept more interestingly examined than in the episode involving the mourning stranger whose late-night stone throwing in the quarry near Bruno’s truck awakens Robert. Invited into the truck, the stranger recounts a tale of failed domestic life and marital crisis and his wife’s dramatic solution. The stranger’s wife had grown “fed up with the bed, the washbasin, the kitchen, the lamp, the painting” and in a fit of desperation, drove her car into a tree, killing herself and tragically punctuating her existence in an act of momentary and immensely violent mobility. Though never shown, this act of self-violence is told graphically and emotionally in a way that exposes the supreme narcissism involved in Robert’s vain and half-hearted attempt to end his domestic life by driving into a pond. Dissatisfied with the stasis of the domestic, Robert opts in favor of motion and, symbolically, the drive into the pond functions as a sort of re-birth. The stranger’s wife, on the other hand, is afforded only as much motion as is required to end her life in an act of final and decisive stasis. The moment is one of many “signs along the road” for Robert and Bruno. And, while the change is not immediate, it does eventually send them searching for answers to their own curious domestic crises: Robert seeks his father as a means of resolving issues with his mother and Bruno seeks his mother. Wenders’s world, at least in this film, is exclusively male. But the film serves to critique the cinematic exclusivity of the male right to mobility and escape; in fact the film questions the very terms of mobility and escape. The English title of the film and the film’s closing musical motif, then, are ironic, for the film questions the nobility of mobility. In fact, the film suggests the vanity of its wanderers and

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seeks answers through a reconnection to the realm of the female. The masculinity of Kings of the Road is, in part, a reaction to Easy Rider, where women are reduced to domestic servants and whores. Myths of nationalism, however, are also fundamental to Wenders’s film. America, whose national/political body is traditionally conceived of as female—the Statue of Liberty being only the most visible reminder of this concept—is central to Hopper’s narrative. Images of “America” turn up everywhere in the film, from Wyatt’s decorated bike, helmet, and jacket to the flags that decorate the storefronts along the side of the road, to the more subtle iconography of the American landscape. Peter Fonda has told interviewers repeatedly that “‘Easy Rider’ is a Southern term for a whore’s old man, not a pimp, but the dude who lives with a chick. Because he’s got the easy ride. Well, that’s what’s happened to America, man. Liberty’s become a whore, and we’re all taking an easy ride.”27 In Hopper’s film, the “female part” is America, and part of the project of that surprisingly patriotic and nationalistic film is to demonstrate the ways in which she is being abused, neglected, and disrespected by its men. In Kings of the Road nationhood is masculinized, in part because of postwar Germany’s inherent associations with the unfortunate paternal image of Hitler. The fight the characters are engaged in is against the oppressive weight of the paternal (read: German). In their reliance on the false images of America, however, it seems that Wenders’s characters have inadvertently found substitute mothers. Kolker and Beicken argue, “Wenders escapes the dilemma (of paralysis and violence) by creating works that are forever about movement. Instead of allowing his characters to succumb (only a few of them do), he sets them on the road and hopes that salvation will be found in the controlled motion of an automobile. . . . Wenders replays the myths of male odyssey, the belief that movement will produce experience, that change will satisfy desire. In their transience, they yield to the inevitable or struggle against it in a curious combination of passivity and motivation, inertia and energy.”28 The controlled movement to which Kolker and Beicken refer is, as we have examined, inscribed by the mythic language of America, a country where Liberty is a lady and men can re-birth themselves through the process of wandering self-discovery. Wenders is keen to the myth and acknowledges it; his poem, after all, refers to “The American Dream” and not to the American reality. But again and again his films, and his own biographical and poetic writing, foreground the often painful necessity of this dream. Our final chapter,

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which explores late twentieth-century contributions to the road movie genre, is also concerned with dreams and with the curious position the mobile American male body occupies in the cinematic subconscious. Like the films that paved the way for them, the films of Oliver Stone and David Lynch, are, at their base, films about disconnectedness. They are also, however, highly articulate pleas for connection.

6

Roads and Movies as Another Century Turns Oliver Stone and David Lynch

his chapter, like Chapter 1, is poised at the fin de siècle and hopes to illuminate a new generation’s social and technological concerns as they are expressed along the cinematic highway. The chapter closely examines the late twentieth-century films of two filmmakers with established relationships to the cinematic road. Although their routes are different, like their cinematic predecessors of one hundred years prior, each uses the road to comment critically on the costs of modernity. Oliver Stone, whose Natural Born Killers (1994) we will explore closely, has returned repeatedly to the subject of desperate and destructive mobility since Salvador (1986). The noirish U-Turn (1997), sort of a Detour with the lid blown off, was received with very little fanfare. Its look—the film was shot using airplane surveillance stock—and its mobile generic obsessions punctuate (though it may only be a comma) a career-long and sometimes both terrified and terrifying investigation of American vulnerability. This vulnerability, Stone’s work suggests, peaks at moments of mobility: at war overseas, along the motorcade, or, as Jim Morrison’s nightmare visions in The Doors (1991) and the whole narrative trajectory of U-Turn or Natural Born Killers would have it, along the Western American highway. David Lynch nurtures a similar relationship to the subject of mobility, one that has cropped up repeatedly in his work since Blue Velvet (1986). The mock-ironic family values at the center of the Lynchian universe, some critics have suggested, set his particular road narratives apart from the supposed anti-establishment sentiments running through the road movies of the 1960s and 1970s. A careful examination of his 1999 The Straight Story, however, reveals that the

T

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film’s own wry subversiveness lies in its ability to frankly represent ideas that the road movie (Lynch’s included) has both thrived upon and concealed since its inception. The often-horrific chaos of the Lynchian imagination arises from breakdowns within both the familial and the linguistic order, concepts central to our previous analyses. Oliver Stone and David Lynch’s work at the end of the twentieth century also establishes a critical link between the literal, physical road and its metaphorical counterpart, the road along which our culture’s vast quantities of information must travel. These filmmakers, in other words, have developed an approach to the road movie that has flexed to accommodate the postmodern condition, a perhaps decreasingly physical era of rapidity. As I hope to indicate, these films, exemplary though they are, exist within a larger turn-of-the-century gravitational pull toward the road as a critical cinematic location, a pull that expresses itself in a variety of ways ranging from the barely articulate but still somehow intriguing Dumb and Dumber (Peter Farrelley, 1994) to Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000); from Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003) to Alexander Payne’s more conventional Sideways (2004); from the painfully defeated Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005) to the muted, almost-Wendersian Pacific Northwest, mid-age angst of Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006). In spite of their inherent differences, road movies have always been about communication, about the need, and sometimes the inability to “tell.” In the information age, however, the genre’s interest in this idea has increased exponentially as we stand, as they stood a century prior, gape-jawed, contemplating the human effects of a new era’s technologies. I have argued in previous chapters that modernity has been defined in large part by our transportational machines, especially the automobile. The technology of postmodern existence, however, is less discrete and, critically, is less a matter of moving “matter” than moving information, strings of numbers, binaries, and frequencies. Postmodern ecstasy, of the sort that Jean Baudrillard discusses, is a giving-in to this fact: it is joy in the chaotic, technological traffic we find ourselves in. When I use the term “the information superhighway,” then, I refer not only to the worldwide Web to which the term has traditionally referred, but also to the more general web that is postmodern existence. This web intersects in interesting ways with our literal highways. Oliver Stone’s fin de siècle film, Natural Born Killers, is especially interested in the relationship between this postmodern flow

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and the figure of the road. The film reorganizes the road movie’s terms, capitalizing on the genre’s ability to critique the particular misdirection of contemporary culture. Oliver Stone: Natural Born Killers and Cinematic Channel Surfing1 There are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean. Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure . . . Roland Barthes, S/Z2

So it’s a road movie/prison movie crossed with 90s media; criminals are perceived in the movie via the media. In the old days they would have had an independent existence—in Scarface you don’t see much media—but in the 90’s version of the gangster movie (or at least in this one) they exist only through the media. Oliver Stone3

Though it seems like an odd pairing, Roland Barthes’ comments regarding the study of narrative structure and Oliver Stone’s comments regarding Natural Born Killers share much in common. Stone, himself a dabbler in Eastern philosophy and religion, is as concerned with narrative structure as is Barthes. Stone’s film, which attempts to dramatize many of the world’s late-twentieth-century stories, is nonetheless contained within a single structure. While Stone wants to point out that his film is not only a road film, Natural Born Killers begins and ends on the road. Structurally, the road functions in a way similar to the Barthesian bean: it has emerged as a highly symbolic master narrative that is concerned with a variety of topics including criminality, the media, the family, the human psyche, and the postmodern condition. The cinematic road has, it seems, absorbed the landscape of contemporary existence, and Stone’s film skillfully draws the connection between the flow of media and the flow of symbols and signs along the road. Natural Born Killers takes the Bonnie and Clyde myth and both updates and hyperbolizes it for the information age. It is the story of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), an outlaw

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couple on the run from their violent domestic pasts and from society, who go on a rapacious killing spree that appears primarily motivated by the sheer pleasure they take in harming others and being talked about for doing so. It is also a postmodern parable of the information age. In a 1993 Cineaste interview with Gary Crowdus and Richard Porton, Arthur Penn claims that all along his landmark late-1960s film was intended to be allegorical and not historical. In 1967, it was a film about 1967 and beyond; not necessarily a film about Bonnie and Clyde’s historical moment.4 Natural Born Killers is similarly allegorical, similarly larger than the narrative that (barely) contains it. Contrary to Stone’s attempts to distinguish generically between road movies and films about the media, road movies have always taken an interest in the flow of information. But where Bonnie and Clyde exploit the media in an attempt to mythologize themselves, Stone’s film explores the competing desire of the media to mythologize itself. In fact the media, embodied by exploitation TV personality Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), seeks Mickey and Mallory out in an attempt to boost ratings. The police, too, are seen as an extension of the media, or at least as pandering to the media’s perceived powers: Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore) is a self-adoring cop in search of increased book sales and his own sensational mythologization. From the very beginning of the film, Stone attempts to demonstrate the symbiotic and cannibalistic relationship between the media and criminality in a way that echoes and perhaps pays homage to Bonnie and Clyde. After an intensely violent and jolting prologue in a diner, the credits roll in front of an obviously projected background of various “media images.” Also in the frame are Mickey and Mallory in a hyperkinetic toy-like car directly in front of the already competing images of the credits and the media/stock footage. Mickey and Mallory are here envisioned as quite literally riding off into a media frenzy/sunset in search of a multi-media narrative form adequate to “tell” their stories. The moment formalizes the connection between the road and postmodern culture by transcribing to the visual realm the decay of American culture catalogued in Baudrillard’s America. The American landscape, Stone suggests, no longer exists. It has been replaced by a sort of “drive-thru” movie. Mickey and Mallory drive gleefully through the flow of media images and give in to the drift of modern culture. The viewer’s position in all of this, however, is less stable. Stone literalizes, but perhaps banalizes, his characters’ search for narrative space by switching formal and contextual modes throughout

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the film—at the price, some of his critics have argued, of narrative continuity. In a 1994 interview in Sight and Sound Gavin Smith asks Stone, “In terms of its form, doesn’t the film raise a lot of questions about the medium of cinema? For instance, the idea of a unified, coherent text is all but swept away—or is the film only superficially incoherent?” Stone retorts with a laugh that the film is perfectly coherent to him and asks in return, “Is it my fault for not having clarified? Possibly, but haven’t I been criticized eternally for being heavy handed?” 5 In Natural Born Killers, Stone does not escape his heavy-handedness. It is difficult for him to identify, however, because unlike his previous endeavors, Natural Born Killers is simultaneously ideologically and formally heavy-handed; it is visually and aurally anarchic because the film is concerned with a foreboding sense of late twentieth-century cultural anarchy and the havoc that confusion has played on the human psyche. That psyche, Stone suggests, has itself become another product of media culture. Mickey and Mallory undergo several critical transformations during their journey, but perhaps the most critical change they undergo is the switch from the oral tradition—leaving “one clerk alive to tell the tale of Mickey and Mallory”—to visually-oriented documentation. This shift to a kind of video tradition is a modern twist on the several photographing scenes in Bonnie and Clyde, where members of the Barrow gang pose for photographs (sometimes with a captive) in order to perpetuate their own myth. Wenders, too, has a thematic interest in the preservational potential of photography, especially “instant” Polaroid photography; in The American Friend (Der Amerikanische Freund, 1977), Ripley nearly drowns himself in a mass of Polaroid photos, and photojournalist Philip Winter, in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), is similarly obsessed. Oral narrative, which Mickey and Mallory abandon, is perhaps the most complete of narrative forms in that it presumes the critical “presence” of the narrator. Mickey and Mallory, who so desperately seek to legitimize their own existence, begin their story with the “human element” still intact. Their myth is perpetuated from mouth to mouth, or at least from mouth to media. The pre-credit scene in the diner, that site of so many road film encounters from Detour to The Postman Always Rings Twice, is a case in point. After a hyperbolically violent showdown with a group of sexually delinquent rednecks—shot in a color-rich stock equal to the scene’s thematic exaggeration—Mallory advises the petrified waitress, who has witnessed the entire scene, with

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the following words: “When them people come in here and they ask you who done this, you tell ‘em Mickey and Mallory Knox did it, alright? Say it!” Orality, here and elsewhere in the film, is an acknowledged necessity in the perpetuation of the myth, and it fuels the pair’s murderous road trip. As the film progresses, however, the teller becomes less critical because he or she can be effectively replaced by technology. A fundamental turning point that speaks to this issue occurs at a Native American lodge. After Mickey inadvertently kills their Native American host, Mallory, in their escape, is bitten by a rattlesnake. As they seek out the anti-venom in a fluorescently lit super-drugstore, Drug Zone, the situation turns violent. A clerk, another Native American, who has been watching the story of Mickey and Mallory on Wayne Gale’s sensationalistic American Maniacs from behind the pharmaceutical booth, is held at gunpoint. But the clerk reminds Mickey that the duo always leave one person alive to tell the story. Mickey, in a transitional moment, laughs and says, “If I don’t kill you, what is there to talk about?” Like many road movie protagonists before him, Mickey has learned that his own—in his case, extremely violent—motion is his story. And though he doesn’t comment on it at this point, the recording of Mickey and Mallory’s exploits via surveillance and security cameras will become central to the film’s understanding of this contemporary imagistic crisis. As in so many heterosexual outlaw road films like Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy, the road in Natural Born Killers is figured as a space between crimes. It is also a space where the characters attempt, in a variety of ways, to reaffirm their broken heterosexuality, to renegotiate their fragmented family structures. In Bonnie and Clyde, a roadside motor lodge becomes an important, failed alternative domestic site, and, later in the film, a roadside roll in the hay “cures” Clyde of his impotence. In Natural Born Killers, Mickey and Mallory, in an impromptu “ceremony” complete with blood letting, are married on a bridge overlooking a deep canyon (see Figure 6.1). The episode resembles the roadside marriages our first chapter ended with. Both those earlier films and Stone’s are premised upon generational hemorrhages, a perceived need for the younger generation to escape the domestic confines of the older generation, albeit to establish their own domestic situations. But where our early 1900s elopers are, in the end, re-absorbed back into the familial, Stone throws physical, mental, and media abuse into the mix, a frightening combination of ingredients that, rather like the murder that starts Kit and

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Holly (Sissy Spacek) on the road in Badlands, results in the slaughter of Mallory’s sexually abusive father (Rodney Dangerfield) and her dangerously silent mother (Edie McClurg). Mickey and Mallory must “escape,” but we are always painfully aware of their fate; they are doomed to repeat the cycle. Violently programmed, the “I Love Mallory” sitcom, which awkwardly parodies their familial disharmony and their brutal solution, will be rerun in perpetuity. Stone’s masterful crane shots lend to Mickey and Mallory’s roadside marriage scene a warped kind of majesty. While the canyon and much of the road scenery in the film suggests John Ford, the irony of our socially, morally, and mentally inept protagonists within this landscape is equally foregrounded. Their “togetherness,” symbolized rather obviously by the bridge and its own geographically connective function, is as problematic as it is inevitable. This idea is driven home in the roadside motel room scene (Mickey and Mallory’s first failed domestic site) where Mickey’s sexual interest in their female hostage causes Mallory to leave Mickey temporarily and commit murder in her own act of sexual violence, at a gas station no less. Movement, the location not so subtly reminds us, is fueled by unfortunately fractured domestic interpretations, by incomplete, inappropriate simulations of community. Stone’s film, in fact, is quite concerned with the consequences of simulated culture. When security video cameras have not caught

Figure 6.1 Natural Born Killers (1994). Mickey and Mallory’s transitory wedding recalls the confused domestic aspirations of road-bound characters nearly a century prior.

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Mickey and Mallory in action, reenactments are staged for Wayne Gale’s trash/trauma television show American Maniacs. This is the simulacra realized and fed by the public’s need, fostered as it is by the media, to be eyewitness to such events. In fact, at one point in the film, Wayne Gale’s crew reviews a reenacted version of one of Mickey and Mallory’s early murders of a cop. Complaining about the ethics of cannibalizing a previous show, one of Gale’s editors says, “We really raped and pillaged the first show to do this.” In a statement that in many ways seems to represent Stone’s sneering attitude regarding contemporary culture, Gale says—and the shot is repeated to foreground the centrality of the idea and, perhaps, to test its underlying thesis—“repetition, works David.” By referring to the simulated cultural process that he participates in and perpetuates as “junk food for the brain,” Gale acknowledges both the cheapness and addictive qualities of his products. This “junk food” has, as American culture always has, international appeal, as is suggested by the montages of French, Japanese, and Chinese Mickey and Mallory “fans.” Junk food, Stone indicates, has superseded “real” culture; it has fostered what we, along with Baudrillard, might refer to as “the death of the real.” The death of the real is enacted most dramatically in the final narrative sequence in the film. The scene rewrites the slow-motion, balletic death scene in Bonnie and Clyde, only here it is the media, in its “human” form, that is riddled with bullets. The scene is positioned directly prior to an extended media-montage sequence composed of 1990s news footage complete with the sound of changing channels, itself followed by the final credit sequence, which depicts flashback images from the film and a flash-forward of Mickey and Mallory in a mobile home with their newly-started “post”-nuclear family, driving happily down the American road. Wayne Gale has, by this time in the film, himself transformed into a camera-toting media maniac after the jail riots that were (surprise!) incited by the television broadcast of Mickey’s interview with Wayne Gale. Before shooting Wayne Gale, Mickey says to Mallory, “Let’s make some music, Colorado,” quoting Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, and the couple proceeds to open fire on the already half-dead Gale. All the while, Gale’s also dying video recorder is aimed at the scene as well and we witness the scene in large part through the eyes of this video camera. The scene solidifies a relationship between the camera and the gun, commenting not only on technology’s ability to take the place of the human, but on the connections between the image and violence. As Mickey and Mallory make clear, the camera is all they need to “tell the tale.”

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Natural Born Killers critiques that which Bonnie and Clyde only refers to obliquely: the corruptive force of the visual media.6 Stone’s film is a highly self-conscious meditation on the relationship between the media and criminality, and his point is clearly that the two are complicit in each other’s acts. But this is a dangerous line of interrogation for Stone, whose own film came under the gun for purportedly instigating violent acts of criminal mimicry. The lines between fiction and reality are often blurred by Stone, by his critics, and by his audience, particularly those who miss the irony of his films’ violence altogether. In Gavin Smith’s interview with Stone, this line of questioning is pursued when Smith comments, “This film suggests doubt about film’s suitability as a medium of truth or to represent reality.” Stone replies, “How often have we heard, ‘The book had more density’? Reading allows you to experience multifaceted points of view and depth that you don’t get in a movie. I feel the limitations of movies because I’m interested in writing. In a sense this movie for me has pushed to the limits of 2D.”7 While Stone’s response seems rather cryptic, Gavin Smith’s question contains a trace of what will become a central motif in the road films that follow Stone’s. Smith comments on the film’s critique of image culture and seems, in a veiled way, to be referring to the film’s referencing of the multiple acts of violence that, caught on tape, have come to define that part of the 1990s. These filmed or otherwise recorded moments from the time frame in which the film was made—the Rodney King beating, the O. J. Simpson chase, the Menendez Brothers trial, etc.—“suggest doubt about film’s sustainability as a medium of truth.” These moments, which constitute the very landscape that Mickey and Mallory drive through, have coalesced, menacingly, with cinematic and fictional television images to shape Mickey and Mallory’s mythological existence. This is, to be sure, the terrified realization of the information superhighway as I have defined it earlier. The informational elements that constitute it are undifferentiated fragments of information, some fictional, some “true,” but almost all violent. Mickey and Mallory have, in a hyperbolic extension of the type of ecstasy Jean Baudrillard describes, given in to these images; they have let themselves be defined by these images and they have reveled in this definition. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey and Mallory are concerned about their mythic status, not as populist heroes acting out the fantasies of the depression-era poor but as postmodern killers indulging in arbitrary and cartoon-like violence for seemingly little purpose save for a

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desire to become famous. This idea of self-created, deluded heroism is indicated especially in the montage sequence mentioned earlier, where throngs of adolescents (presumably of the age when our “heroes” were themselves most violently abused) proclaim their empty admiration for the images of Mickey and Mallory. But Mickey and Mallory’s stardom has a lineage; they become vessels for alreadyestablished, already-mediated public notions of violent criminality. In preparation for his interview with Wayne Gale, Mickey shaves his head in homage to his sensationalized, real-world serial killer forefather Charles Manson and asks about the ratings for shows dedicated to him himself in comparison to shows on his “competition.” Mickey decides, after finding out that Manson “beat” him, that it’s “tough to beat the king.” Stone, too, acknowledges his film’s ancestors. Natural Born Killers, like The Wizard of Oz, Thelma and Louise and, on a different level, Bonnie and Clyde, begins in black and white; like the Western, many of which are “road narratives,” the film also begins in Monument Valley. Stone, like Mickey, pays homage to the “kings” by including references to the John Ford Western and to himself with Scarface. Herein lies the conundrum Baudrillard finds himself in. At what point does one’s critique of postmodernity become a contribution to it, and what are the consequences? There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions, and part of what makes Stone’s films so frustrating to his critics is his playful walk along the edge of both extremes. By the end of the film, Mickey and Mallory have literally captured the apparatus and “produced” their own show. This act, however, takes place only after their confinement and momentary stasis and separation in jail. In fact, the prison bloodbath that they perpetrate is enacted in a desperate attempt to gain access, once again, to mobility and each other—to be back in that car hurtling through the seductive mediascape that, for this pair, is indecipherable from the literal landscape. Indeed, it is this final image that the film ends with: only the “show” has been altered significantly; the “channel” has been changed. Mickey and Mallory, as the credits roll, now bob and weave through the traffic of images in a Winnebago full of kids. This is, as Mickey (and Ulmer’s Al Roberts as well) would have it, their “fate” (see Figure 6.2). Stone’s warped Winnebago, however, does more than simply suggest what is certain to be the perpetuation of a violently mobile line. Like the couple’s roadside wedding, in fact, the image returns us in no subtle way to the cinema’s core turn-of-the-century concerns. Though

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perhaps dancing along a more problematically comedic edge than many of his early cinematic predecessors, Stone is similarly skeptical of technology’s effect upon the social and the familial. Where these concerns were expressed in exclusively vehicular terms as the nineteenth became the twentieth century, Stone also interrogates the increased mobility and rapidity of our information. Rapidity, instantaneity, and repetition, in fact, are the real villains in Stone’s film. This ideological trinity, however, also forms the film’s aesthetic foundation; it practices what it preaches against. These ideas, the risks of unthinking rapidity, are even more aggressively called into question and perhaps even answered in David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999). Revising the Postmodern American Road Movie: David Lynch’s The Straight Story The Straight Story is a film by a director obsessed with the evocative power of the road. Since Blue Velvet (1986), David Lynch has returned repeatedly to this conceptual locale in films like Fire Walk with Me (1992), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Drive (2001).8 His early 1990s television series Twin Peaks (1990) traced the consequences of getting lost on the road, both literally and figuratively, an idea perfectly encapsulated in the program’s opening image of a road sign along an empty highway. The Straight Story, however, is a conundrum, one that requires consideration in

Figure 6.2 Natural Born Killers (1994). Riding off into the media sunset: Mickey, Mallory, and the mobile domestic.

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light of the director’s road-repertoire and of the road film’s substantial past. What follows is an argument for the film’s ideological consistency within Lynch’s body of work and within the broader context of the road film itself. Lynch, like his road-bound predecessors, finds between the road and the cinema a deep, significant, and sustaining connection that allows him to investigate, in ways that are infrequently discussed, issues of family and communication, the abiding interests of the road movie, its ancestors, and its offspring. Alvin Straight—the film’s road-bound protagonist, played by Richard Farnsworth—undertakes a journey significant not only for its destination but for what lies before that destination. His journey is an attempt at self-contextualization. A sense of what lies before The Straight Story—those other road films that pave the way for Lynch’s contribution to the genre—supports reading The Straight Story as an attempt to correct what precedes it, a cinematic revision that mirrors Alvin’s own narrative reconciliation. The Straight Story doesn’t bathe, however resentfully, in the contemporary condition—as films such as Easy Rider or even Natural Born Killers appear to—but rather suggests a return to the pre-modern. Lynch, in a manner that seems to move against his postmodern dedication to the disconnected and the arbitrary, finds in the road a tenuous form of connectedness and meaning. It is a space linked first and foremost to the family, or at least a Lynchian version of family, and its cinematic point of reference has less to do with Two Lane Blacktop (1971) than with the Wizard of Oz (1939).9 As with The Wizard of Oz, the road in Lynch’s films is a space of reunion, not rebellion; a space of community and communication, not of solitude and silence. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, like so many of Lynch’s protagonists, seeks adventure and the unfamiliar, but finds instead a makeshift community with which to reconstruct her identity away from home. It is not until she regains consciousness at film’s end that she realizes that her “adventures” were peopled with her own family and community, the familiar in disguise. The road functions similarly in Lynch’s films, providing his protagonists with “alternative” families that, ultimately, bring them back to an appreciation of the “traditional” family. Lynch’s films repeatedly place his characters on the road to find connection, community, and family in a world grown impatient with and insensitive to these more “stable” ideas and institutions. While his earlier films explore the creation of imperfect, alternative communities memorable for their terrifying freakishness, The Straight Story takes a different road. The postmodern spectacle created by Lynch’s

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bizarre, ad-hoc communities has tended to overshadow the motivation his characters have had to create them in the first place. As a result, his films have been misread as celebrations of anti-establishment perversity rather than lamentations for a perceived loss of familial stability. The Straight Story responds to this misreading. Joy Rides: David Lynch and the Postmodern American Family David Lynch’s familial understanding of the road indicates his commitment to traditional family values and his critique of the contemporary breakdown of those values. More than a critique of modern media culture, his films repeatedly position themselves against the breakdown of the familial unit. The trajectory from Blue Velvet to the more overtly familial The Straight Story, however, is not necessarily an easily followed one. Key to each of Lynch’s films is his desire to depict characters who, perhaps without fully knowing it themselves, set out on the road not to escape but to rebuild families, however warped those re-domesticated structures might ultimately be. In an interview with David Breskin, Lynch was questioned, as he often is, about his politics and especially his well-known support of Ronald Reagan. In response to a question regarding patriotism, Lynch offered the following, quite telling response: “The thing is, America is suffering such a . . . everybody’s got a . . . maybe it’s changing a little bit now, it’s coming back a hair. But for a while we were all so down on ourselves, it was not one bit cool—just the word ‘patriotic.’ Because we’d done a lot of things in the name of that that were so, so bad. Anyway, it’s a losing game and it has nothing to do with the films I’m making.”10 Lynch’s relationship to politics, it seems, is very much like his relationship to the familial, an idea both his comments and his films lend credence to in spite of his hope that his films have nothing whatsoever to do with this “losing game.” Both political and familial structures seem boring, “not one bit cool.” Lynch’s films, in fact, feature characters receding from and rebelling against both structures. The false starts that mark his words, along with his tendency towards denial, suggest that perhaps, like his characters, Lynch too has sought to recede from that which is not cool: the family, patriotism, etc. His films, however, resolve with an unflinching desire for and faith in structure. The road—away from and back to structure—arises in his films as an integral element in the community-building process.11

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Lynch’s 1997 “road” film, Lost Highway, is an extreme articulation of the filmmaker’s obsessions and a paranoid culmination of ideas brewing in the filmmaker’s mind at least since the 1980s. The film was his last before The Straight Story, and it revisits, with uncanny, occasionally off-putting clarity, some of the themes that the director has made a career of: voyeurism; the existence of alternate, though frighteningly familiar, realities (an Oz idea Lynch is seduced by); and most critically, the breakdown of the familial, or potentially familial, unit. The film is about the growing rift between a white, upper-middleclass couple. It is a film that, in spite of its title, rarely takes to the literal road. Instead, the road in the film is equated with the psychological travel its protagonist, Fred (Bill Pullman), undergoes in his dream/fantasy state. This fantasy state, where doubles exist and where the impossible seems ordinary, is introduced in the film by a series of highly kinetic shots of a broken yellow highway line from the front of a rapidly moving vehicle. It is this strange and fast-moving image, an exact facsimile of the image used to convey road travel in Blue Velvet (analyzed below), that opens and closes the film. The image itself is one of disconnectedness: the lines are broken, uneven, crooked, and lead (we suspect) nowhere. The dotted yellow line is a metaphor for the protagonists’ fragmented identities. It is similar to its ideological opposite: the linear, connected, yellow brick road of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz. In Fleming’s film, the road, while as much a product of the unconscious as Lynch’s, is ultimately a catalyst for familial and self-unification; it leads, we might say, to wholeness, and in the end it leads home. Lynch’s dotted yellow line in this film leads to fragmentation and disorientation. It also structurally resembles the very idea of narrative about which this strange film is so deeply concerned. Narrative, the line suggests, goes nowhere, is itself disconnected, crooked, an illusion—an idea upheld by the body of Lynch’s work, which simultaneously participates in and defies narrative linearity. This idea is driven home by the thematic details of Lost Highway. The couple receives anonymously sent VHS cassettes on their doorstep, fragmented narrative pieces of their private lives together, portions that not even they have access to in their memories because they occur while they are sleeping. The pieces, out of context and with no identifiable source, are threatening not only because of their voyeuristic implications but because they lack narrative wholeness and linearity; they are critically incomplete. They are all the more threatening because as the narrative develops, these dream-like narrative fragments seem to

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have a source—a slightly diminutive, pale and extremely creepy individual known in the credits only as the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), a product of Fred’s unconscious mind. But Fred’s interactions with this “character” suggest also that what his unconscious mind fears most is the dissolution of his relationship with his wife Renée (Patricia Arquette). Lynch’s film argues, strangely, that the individual and his/her unconscious desires and fears are to blame; the road away from domestic unity unfolds across the landscape of the unconscious. When those desires and fears take the shape of media technology (i.e., the strange videocassettes that greet the couple each morning) and threaten the stability of the domestic sphere, they are all the more terrifying. This interest in the fragility of the domestic can be traced back to Lynch’s earliest films: from the fractured “family” tree of The Grandmother (1970) to the nightmarish domestic scene in Eraserhead (1976). The Elephant Man (1980) similarly concerns itself with the familial, John Merrick’s fondest memories being of his mother.12 The explicit connection between the familial and the road, however, is more recent. In Blue Velvet, the road makes a brief but highly kinetic appearance and functions as a disconnected, otherworldly space where Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and his gang torture the young, naïve, and insatiably curious Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan). Frank’s gang forms a sort of ad hoc family, its members assembled precisely because, in their societal and familial status as outsiders, they belong nowhere else, a trait shared by a number of road-bound characters. Frank’s confused relationship with Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini) indicates this character’s tortured sense of family: he is both daddy and child, she is both mommy and baby. This confusion has functioned to make Frank himself wholly inarticulate, notwithstanding his liberal use of the word “fuck.” Charles Drazin’s Blue Velvet monograph focuses on the critical role played by family in the film. Drazin writes that “this sense of Jeffrey as the surrogate son is at its strongest when Frank kidnaps him and takes him on a ‘joyride.’ It’s like a family outing.”13 Drazin is correct, But equally critical is the road’s effect on Frank, who has a brief and pathetic roadside moment of articulateness. As the car radio plays in the background, Frank mouths words from the song that seems to express his own state: Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” Frank’s act of applying lipstick to and then kissing the mouth of Jeffrey is a Lynchian act of adoption. Jeffrey, who was fairly deeply implicated

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already, has become irreversibly a member of Frank’s self-created and destructive family unit. In the car, before being punched by Jeffrey, Frank mutters to Jeffrey, “You’re like me.” This strange initiation, however, takes place not in the traditional domestic sphere but alongside an abandoned road (see Figure 6.3). Frank, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, constructs his family from the individuals he encounters along it. In this way, Jeffrey is like him. Both characters seek wholeness: a heart, a brain, courage. At the end of his adventure, however, Jeffrey is able to return home to his family with a new appreciation for the “strange world” beneath the surface of Lumberton and for his own surface-level existence. This familial resolution is unavailable to Frank, in spite of his confused and perverse attempts to achieve it. Wild at Heart extends hyperbolically Lynch’s Wizard of Oz notion of the road and incorporates its elements far more frankly, a fact not lost on Lynch scholars and written about rather extensively in Michael Chion’s 1995 book on Lynch. Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are, like Mickey and Mallory in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde. Also like Mickey and Mallory, they are consumed with an alternative, roadbased notion of family that runs counter to their restrictive, abusive home lives. Lynch, who is always interested in exploring what lies beneath the Rockwellian façade of American family life, is especially interested in its stasis. This stasis transforms Sailor and Lula into a constantly and dangerously mobile pair perpetually dodging Lula’s murderous mother (Diane Ladd) who, we learn, was responsible for the death of Lula’s father and who didn’t intervene when Lula was raped by her uncle as a young girl. For all of its wildness, Wild at Heart’s ending begins to articulate ideas that will become central to and less ironically handled in The Straight Story. Lula, against the wishes of her mother, goes with her young son, Pace, to meet Sailor when he is released from prison. Attempting to gently leave Lula and their son because “it makes sense,” Sailor is assaulted by a band of thugs and, in his semi-conscious state, is advised by a hallucination of Glenda the Good Witch to return to Lula. Following this overt allusion to The Wizard of Oz, and a nicely handled tracking shot of Sailor running over the roofs of cars (tellingly, stuck in traffic) to reach Lula and their son, Lynch’s tone changes momentarily. The high-pitched irony and bloody absurdity of the preceding scenes is punctuated by a series of deep focus shots of the reunited trio and the moment seems genuine,

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Figure 6.3 Blue Velvet (1986). The view from the back seat: Jeffrey looks on as his ad-hoc family decides his fate on the side of the road.

the family reunited in this midst of absurdity. The Straight Story, I will demonstrate, is a feature-length extension of these moments. Alvin . . . I Don’t Think You’re in Laurens Anymore: Or, “If You Want to Send a Message, Go to Western Union”14 The Straight Story follows the already-established Lynchian trajectory in every way and makes unambiguous several of the director’s previously veiled concerns about the decay of the American family. In this way, the film can be understood as Lynch’s attempt to “straighten out” the postmodern road film’s reputation. Reviews of the film were prone to commenting on the film’s inconsistency within Lynch’s body of work, on the film’s seductive straightness. Brendan Lemon’s review of the film for the New York Times, “Even Auteurs Need a Break From Themselves,” falls into this category: “And for those who think that Mr. Lynch, best known for movies with sadistic, drugenhanced sex and small town violence, must have discovered Iowa’s dark side—the creepy-crawlers beneath the corn—the news is that The Straight Story is Disney’s cleanest non-animated picture since Son of Flubber.”15 Other reviewers, in a gesture of critical snobbery, were eager to point out all of the weird “Lynchian moments” contained in the film that “less sophisticated” viewers were missing. This was Kevin Jackson’s tactic in his review of the film for Sight and Sound, which attends to at least two “Lynchian” moments: “To be sure there are a

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few sequences showing Lynch in a more familiar vein, such as Alvin’s encounter with a woman who has inadvertently become a serial ‘bambicide’ (‘Every week I plough into at least one deer—and I love deer!’), or his dispute with the identical twin mechanics who spend more time sniping at each other than tinkering with engines.”16 My understanding of the film, however, is somewhat different. I don’t see it as a warped, Lynchian vision in a wholesome disguise, nor do I see the film as being a departure from Lynch’s usual fare. On the contrary, while its presentation differs slightly, The Straight Story’s ideology is perfectly consistent with Lynch’s concerns regarding the family and the road’s power as familial redeemer. Unlike the frenetic Wild at Heart, the chaotic and disturbing Lost Highway, or the haunting Blue Velvet, Lynch’s The Straight Story is patient, slow, linear, and, it seems, about relatively ordinary people. The film is based on the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly Laurens, Iowa man without a driver’s license who, upon learning the news of his brother’s stroke and his own escalating ill-health, decides to drive his ride-on lawnmower across the state to visit him in Mt. Zion, Wisconsin. Unlike Lynch’s other films, which contain notably violent and grotesque moments, The Straight Story garnered both a “G” rating and Disney distribution. While his films have always been about family, The Straight Story is a family picture. On the one hand I wish to argue that, with or without the official stamp of the Disney logo, Lynch has been making, at least ideologically, Disney films all along—films that, in spite of their apparently subversive surfaces, turn repeatedly on themes of familial unification. The “Bambicidal” moment Kevin Jackson refers to is a joke on Disney’s quintessential product. The larger and more interesting joke, however, would seem to be the film’s ultimate approval and replication of Bambi’s (1942) central themes, particularly of the notion that families are meant to be together and that misdirected human actions, undertaken most typically in the name of “progress,” pulls them apart (see Figure 6.4). The Straight Story, in its familial familiarity, moves against the road genre’s perceived thematic grain and pronounces most clearly Lynch’s variant treatment of its perennial concerns. Lynch’s film quite frankly holds on to and attempts to reaffirm the traditional family, an idea he hints at even as he loses grip of it in his other films. In an interview with David Breskin, Lynch comments autobiographically on his own family life in a manner that is relevant here:

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It was like the fifties: there were a lot of advertisements in magazines where you see a well-dressed woman bringing a pie out of an oven, and a certain smile on her face, or a couple smiling, walking together up to their house, with a picket fence. Those were pretty much all I saw . . . they’re strange smiles. They’re the smiles of the way the world should be or could be. They really made me dream like crazy. And I like that whole side of it a lot. But I longed for some sort of . . . not a catastrophe, but something out of the ordinary to happen. Something so that everyone will feel sorry for you, and you’ll be like a victim. You know, if there was a tremendous accident and you were left alone. It’s kind of like a nice dream. But things kept on going, normally, forward.17

Here, Lynch speaks to the evocative power of the ordinary, the clichés of a 1950s boyhood. Ordinariness made him “dream like crazy” and, by extension, we are to assume that his films are the slowly emerging products of those childhood dreams. The Straight Story, on the other hand, is a replication of the quotidian; it is an exceedingly ordinary tale about a man who did an extraordinary thing. Lynch’s choice of words—the theme of his description—is quite illuminating, however. When Lynch speaks of a “tremendous accident” he seems to be speaking quite specifically about a roadside automobile accident. Such an event, he suggests, would interrupt the linear momentum of the familial trajectory. Alvin’s journey, much like Lynch’s family life, keeps “on going, normally, forward” in spite the

Figure 6.4 The Straight Story (1999) examines the mortal consequences of a culture moving too fast.

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occasional obstacle. Somehow, though, this normal, forward motion (at least to those initiated to Lynch’s previous work) is capable of making the viewer dream like crazy. Where Lynch’s previous films were a litany of those “out of the ordinary things” longed for in his early family life, Alvin Straight’s story is a case study in normalcy. Alvin is a dedicated father to his grown, though mentally juvenile, daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), and his journey is in the name of family unification, in the name of putting old familial grudges to rest. It is a “matured” road film and a feature-length version of Lynch’s faith in the redeeming power of the familial bond. Alvin Straight, we are led to suppose, was himself once an adventure-seeking wanderer. We learn that he was more often than not an absentee father, and when he tells Rose of his plans to visit his brother, he states in a manner pregnant with possibilities, “Rose, darling . . . I’m gonna go back on the road. . . . I’ve gotta go see Lyle” (italics mine). Contained in his words is the indication that the road for Alvin was once a mechanism for familial escapism. In this film, it functions differently. Alvin takes to the road in spite of his community’s urging to the contrary and in doing so exhibits a geriatric remnant of the free spirit earlier road films explored. The narrative, however, is careful to demonstrate that his is most decidedly not an act of abandonment but one of recuperation. Once the community has been made aware of his determination, it sets out to assist him; the journey itself, we are reminded, is being made in the name of community. He is outfitted, after a failed attempt to make the journey on his run-down lawnmower, with a newer, more powerful one owned previously by a local and amiable dealer. His daughter Rose buys groceries (mostly in the form of wieners) to fill his cooler. He even buys the local elderly hardware salesman’s “grabber”—“for grabbin’ things,” Alvin tells him—a transaction that the salesman would prefer not to make, but makes nonetheless. The community unites in the name of the journey and, in doing so, facilitates it. This theme of non-abandonment is an especially important one as it relates to Rose. Rose, while apparently self-sufficient, is, as Alvin reveals later in the film, a little slow. Her speech resembles a series of gasps and her look is spookily hollow. Alvin’s connection with his daughter is, however, one of extreme care and dedication. A call to Rose is the only call Alvin makes on his entire journey, the phone his only indulgence in non-lawnmower technology. This relationship

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between parent and child is an especially important one that Lynch invokes constantly throughout the film. It is in part what appears to justify the Disney mark at the start of the film. It is also, as we’ve seen, a theme common to all of his films. Rose, we learn, was once herself a dedicated parent to four children of her own. As Alvin explains: “One night somebody else was watching them and there was a fire. Her second boy got burned real bad. Rose had nothing to do with it but on account of the way Rose is, they figured she wasn’t competent to take care of all them kids and they took ‘em all away from her. There isn’t a day goes by that she doesn’t pine for them kids.” As Alvin speaks, the camera pans to the campfire in front of him. Fire, in Lynch’s cinematic universe, is an important symbol and one that has everything to do with the family. In Wild at Heart, Lula’s father is doused with gasoline and burned to death, a plan her mother had been in on all along. Here it functions similarly to split the family apart. Later in the film, just before Alvin speeds out of control as he attempts to descend a hill, a controlled fire roars as the local townspeople watch with pleasure on lawn chairs. One woman comments that “that old Rumelthanger place was an eyesore.” Lynch’s critique is subtle but effective. Home and family, this moment suggests, have become too easily disposed of in contemporary culture and, in fact, their destruction is itself spectacular, an idea sentimentally explored in Bambi as well. This spectacular destruction is at the center of Lynch’s other work. The Straight Story, however, allows us to read those destructive moments as critical of themselves. While its intentions appear different, The Straight Story’s structure is strangely similar to the road films of the 1960s and 1970s. Like Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) in Easy Rider, Alvin encounters a variety of familial “options” on his journey. Alvin tells the story of his daughter’s children to a teenage runaway he passes on the road and re-encounters later at his campsite. The encounter contains some of the film’s most memorable, if slightly sappy, dialogue. It is also the point at which the film’s concerns with the familial bubble to the surface. Alvin’s comments regarding Rose’s children follow his observation that the runaway herself is pregnant, about five months along, she tells him. After narrating Rose’s story, Alvin offers the following: “When my kids were real little I used to play a game with ‘em. I’d give each one of ‘em a stick, one for each of ‘em, and I’d say ‘now you break that.’ ‘Course they could, real easy. Then I’d say,

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‘Tie them sticks in a bundle and try to break that.’ ’Course they couldn’t. Then I’d say, ‘That bundle . . . that’s family.’” The runaway, for whom the road had been functioning as an escape from the responsibility and connectedness of family, leaves a bundle of tied sticks near the campsite for Alvin to find the next morning, indicating that she has seen the value in his story and that she intends to return to her family. Alvin and David Lynch seem, here and elsewhere in the film, to have stepped into the murky waters of Western Union–style message sending, a method Lynch himself has, as the quote that opens this section makes clear, been critical of. Alvin’s stick story is Lynch’s most frank pro-community argument to date, and it stands in direct defiance of what appears to be the road film’s privileging of the individual. But the road film itself has suffered from this misreading. For, while road films like Easy Rider do focus on the wandering of the individual (or pair of individuals), this self-inflicted, social disconnectedness is not uncritically romanticized. The characters themselves might be only partially aware of their situations; in Easy Rider, Wyatt realizes that he and Billy have blown it, and, at the end of The Searchers, Ethan returns to the wilderness, unable to participate in the community he has been away from for so many years. Rarely, however, does the character adrift on the road espouse so directly the virtues of community and of family. At its most basic level, Alvin’s story is about the importance of sticking together and his slower-than-typical journey is in the name of retying the metaphorical bundle. Later in the film, Alvin encounters yet another familial option. When his lawnmower breaks down toward the end of his journey, Alvin resides temporarily with what appears to be a Lynchian ideal Midwestern American couple, secure and playful in their relationship, smiling in precisely the way Lynch describes his own parents— plainly, but happily. His tractor, however, is repaired by the bickering twins Kevin Jackson discusses. The caricature-like brothers, exact twins with the last name “Olson,” provide an opportunity for Lynch to reinstate the centrality of the familial. After settling his bill, which takes some correcting on his own behalf, Alvin tells the story of his own brother, claiming that “no one knows you better than a brother that’s near your own age. He knows you and what you are better than anyone on earth. My brother and I said some unforgivable things . . . but I’m trying to put that behind me, and this trip is a hard swallow.” Alvin’s words, here, are interesting in relation to Lynch’s road-logic. Alvin is trying to “put that behind” himself through the act of the

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journey. He puts distance, in the physical and psychological senses, behind him in the process of moving forward. And moving forward, in this film and in all of Lynch’s films, is a move toward the familial. While the road film has in recent years relied quite heavily upon the twin notions of speed and chaos, Lynch’s film, in the tradition of fellow AFI alumnus Terrence Malick’s Badlands (also starring Sissy Spacek) or Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, relies on a leisurely photographic pace. Unlike Malick’s or Wenders’s films, however, Lynch’s protagonist, Alvin Straight, is as patient as the narrative that contains him. He is not the young, frustrated, and aimlessly angry Kit of Malick’s film or the equally aimless and endlessly fidgeting Robert Lander of Wenders’s. He is, instead, an elderly, experienced man with a destination he’s determined to get to. He is the opposite of Elsaesser’s unmotivated hero.18 Because of this pacing, the film, more than Lynch’s other films to date, allows the filmmaker to indulge his well-publicized love for the painterly subjects of Edward Hopper, a tremendous visual influence on Malick as well.19 The resultant film is a slow-moving, cinematic piece of agrarian Americana and one that captures the beauty, if not the repetitiveness, of the Midwestern American landscape. The film’s establishing shots look especially Hopperesque (Edward, not Dennis) and recall, though in a more extended fashion, the opening shots of Blue Velvet. The absurdly simple Lumberton, with its smiling school children and its redder-than-red fire truck complete with waving crew, are here replaced with the more realist rural landscape of Iowa cornfields, deserted main streets, a water tower, and a slightly large woman sunning herself on her lawn while eating brightly colored coconut snowballs. These shots are potentially misreadable, their tone confusing to audience members familiar with Lynch’s treatment of similar subjects in his previous films. The initiated smile wryly in anticipation of the shocking event that will set this quiet, simple setting upside down, as it does in Blue Velvet when Jeffrey’s father suffers a stroke while watering the front lawn and Jeffrey, in his sophomoric, summertime boredom, seeks a form of adventure his immobilized father and television-watching mother and aunt can’t provide him with, which he gets in spades. Audience expectations are played out further in the opening scene’s masterfully handled form. The soundtrack is quiet, save for the high hum of insects, and the camera dollies in slowly from its perch above the sunning woman. It moves slowly, its motion seductively voyeuristic, and it refuses to pause or focus. The viewer is given

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a point of reference, however, as the camera pauses just short of a window, through which the inner activities of the home cannot be seen but, it seems, can be audibly discerned. The faint sounds of creaking and fumbling register on the soundtrack as the camera remains motionless at its post. Then, from within, a deep, dead thud, followed by silence and an immediate cut to the outside of a downtown bar, where a group of elderly men (again, heard more than seen) decide who is going to go and check on Alvin, who was supposed to meet them there. It takes little time before the agent of the thud is identified as Alvin, who has fallen to the floor, unable to prop himself up. Lynch, however, handles this revelation delicately, not ironically. The camera, paused in front of Alvin’s window prior to his fall, is rightly figured as voyeuristic; its voyeurism, however, is critically incomplete. It is forced to reside just beyond the interior action, a position the camera will find itself in repeatedly in the film. It is not until the camera is accompanied, as it were, by members of the community—by the man elected to check on Alvin, by a concerned neighbor, by Alvin’s daughter Rose—that the camera is “allowed” indoors. This is careful planning on Lynch’s part, and it indicates the degree to which Lynch requires that these subjects be treated with dignity. This somewhat atypical introduction to Lynch’s characters suggests that we have been invited to participate in the community being observed, a theme that the film will continue to visit. As we’ve seen, the notion of community, and especially familial community, is common to Lynch’s films. The spectator’s position within it, however, is illustrative of something quite different. In Blue Velvet, the spectator is also implicated as he/she hides in the closet with Jeffrey and watches Dorothy Vallens undress. In the former film, however, the viewer is subjected to Hitchcockian scrutiny; our own voyeuristic desires, aligned as they are with Jeffrey’s, are called into question. The Straight Story’s careful preamble ensures a different, inscrutable sort of connection at once less voyeuristic and more “familial.” Different as it seems, however, the film also follows in the tradition of Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet, both of which explore, though in different ways, the need to move beyond the family in order to finally appreciate the family. The impetus for the movement in the film is also of a piece with the prior films. Trauma, of a physical sort, sets the characters into motion. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey’s father’s stroke sets Jeffrey “free” into the world outside of the family; in the end, however,

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he happily returns home, a situation not unlike Dorothy’s blow to the head in The Wizard of Oz. Here, Alvin’s estranged brother suffers a stroke. The older, wiser Alvin, however, doesn’t seek adventure but seeks a reestablishment of their fraternal affection realizing, as his own health and his brother’s health diminish, that their time on earth is limited. I have noted The Straight Story’s eerie, silent opening, but the film maintains a stance against silence that is unusual, particularly because this is a road film in which only one man is on the road. Alvin’s daughter Rose suffers from a severe speech impediment. Alvin and his daughter, however, share a deeply significant relationship that revolves largely around verbal communication; as noted earlier, he even calls her as he makes his journey. Alvin’s trip, in fact, is motivated by a need to reconcile the gulf of silence that has developed between himself and his brother Lyle. Lynch’s choice of Harry Dean Stanton in this role is critical as well as cross-referential. Stanton, along with his fleeting role in Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop (1971), is perhaps best known for his role in Wim Wenders’s road movie, Paris, Texas (1984), where he plays Travis, a mute wanderer in search of his own past. Lynch’s film insists on the importance of human—and, more specifically, familial—contact; while this is much the same point made in Wenders’s film, it is made in a radically different, sometimes more puzzling fashion. Alvin’s journey is therefore also one of linguistic significance. Alvin is a man who contains within himself a generation of pent up emotions regarding his daughter, his deceased wife, his tour in World War II, and his relationship with his brother. His code has been to remain silent, and the film documents his own undoing of that code. His journey thrusts him—though thrust may not be the best word for a film that moves so gently—into situations where he is forced to discuss each of these matters and put words to the emotions that have immobilized this once–free roaming man. At one point in the film Alvin shares war stories over a small beer in a bar with another old man with similar memories; Lynch’s masterful sound engineering makes audible even the minute sounds of their memories, as the noise of the bar fades and the faint sounds of battle fills the atmosphere. Alvin’s discussion of the importance of family with the young runaway earlier in the film functions similarly, giving voice to another set of memories and emotions. In its pacing, the film is also an immensely thoughtful reaction to the speed of modernity from a director whose work rarely functions

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as such a legible articulation of criticism. Lynch’s slowing down of the image—in sharp contrast to the frenetic blur of dotted yellow lines of Lost Highway—and the film’s insistence on actual, meaningful, maybe even old-fashioned, human contact is played out unironically and comments critically on contemporary society’s movement away from the dialogical. Communication technologies, critical elements to the postmodern road film—often, as in Natural Born Killers, in the shape of the media—are all but absent in this film about Alvin’s need to see and speak with his brother. True to the film’s preamble, this much anticipated conversation remains private: the film ends quietly and immediately after the brothers greet each other on Lyle’s porch. Lynch goes to great lengths in the film to create a cinematic pacing true to Alvin’s journey. This film moves against all of the rules of pacing and cutting that seem inherent to late 1990s filmmaking. It is methodical, highly reliant on a rich and evocative mise-en-scène, slow, and edited in a continuous, fluid, invisible fashion. The only formally bizarre moments in the film involve the use of the zoom lens (accompanied by rapid cuts), which, since Easy Rider, has been a central formal technique of the road movie. Here it is used to convey a sense of rapidly approaching danger, as when Alvin nearly crashes his mower, and the effect is quite remarkable and jolting in this film that otherwise moves extremely slowly. Kevin Jackson detects something peculiar about Lynch’s formal manipulation of Alvin’s slow-moving trek across the prairie: “The Straight Story also has the best crane-shot joke in years: the camera catches Alvin’s puttering progress from behind, rises into the sky with epic majesty, then gracefully sweeps down again—to reveal Alvin, about four feet further down the highway.”20 More than a joke, however, the shot reinforces the film’s central theme, casting in bold relief the loneliness, the solitary slowness of Alvin’s Midwestern trek. This is not man’s tendency to wander glorified; this is man’s need to get somewhere, however slowly. In his own comments about the film, Lynch has been especially complimentary to cinematographer Freddie Francis for his patience with Lynch’s requirements for these technically masterful and moving helicopter shots of Alvin Straight and his lawnmower; these shots reveal, time and time again, the lonesome perseverance of the film’s senior protagonist. The Straight Story, in its studied slowness and concern with the movement of one man, is a film strangely reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s “motion studies.” In a curious way, Lynch’s film brings

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us, once again, back to the beginning of cinema. Muybridge’s work frequently concerned the motion of one sartorially and technologically stripped down man. Some of his studies took the bearded and grizzled photographer himself as their subject, placing his naked body in front of his pseudo-scientific numbered grid. Muybridge’s work, influential as it was to the direction cinematic technology would ultimately take, was also strangely anti-technological in its attention to the artificially arranged movements of his “natural” and “organic” subjects: men, women, horses, and a variety of other animals. The bulk of his work was also undertaken in the midst of an international, technological revolution, one in which the technology of transportation played a central role; we might make analogous connections to Lynch’s film, itself the product of an era of massive communicational transition. Muybridge’s gaze toward the naked bodies of men and women walking, or even the horse’s gait, can be explored as a reaction to the swiftness with which these changes were taking place, as a reaffirmation of man alone. Lynch has reacted to technology similarly and has, in The Straight Story, sought to slow man down and analyze both his motion and his emotions removed, to whatever extent this is actually possible, from the technologies with which he has become inseparable, which have, in fact, separated him from the communities he once relied upon. Lynch, to this end, also gives the subject of his own motion study a destination. Where his previous films critiqued the postmodern condition by participating in its chaos, The Straight Story achieves its criticism by denial. Lynch, then, finds the elusive—as opposed to the lost—highway. The film’s success, it seems, hinges upon a Troglodytic reaction to technology and an almost neo-Victorian notion of family that Lynch’s films and the tradition they belong to have always sought to disseminate.

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Epilogue

New Directions and Intersections The Road Reworked and the Case of Abbas Kiarostami

ur final chapter teetered on the brink of the twenty-first century. By way of an epilogue, I’d like to briefly consider the continuing cinematic fascination with the road and its meandering course through both familiar and new territory beyond, at least partly, American and European traditions. The year 2005 saw the re-release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Professione: reporter, 1975), a film that finds David Locke, a British citizen educated in America and played by road movie veteran Jack Nicholson, struggling with his own and a recently assumed identity as he drives an oversized and conspicuously red American convertible through the deserts of Africa and along the coast of Spain.1 Twenty years after its initial release, Antonioni’s film seems, somehow, both more at home and more alien at a moment in our cultural history that finds the international community and not just intellectual European or Europeaninfluenced auteurs interested in the topic of alienation and the road’s peculiar capacity for commenting upon it. Our media, in fact, are consumed with what seemed, for a time at least, to be a widespread but curiously elitist thematic tick. No longer confined to the big screen, America’s fascination with space and place now finds us contemplating yet another season, for example, of MTV’s Road Rules, which, in its own albeit sometimes revoltingly juvenile fashion, is built along the road movie’s crooked backbone. Where the road movie gloried in its sometimes hardearned ambiguity, however, Road Rules and its somewhat more “mature” reality offspring, The Amazing Race, demonstrate on a

O

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weekly basis the desire for structure and community that always lurked in the road movie’s background. Alliances, these and other socalled reality programs want us to believe, prevail. Alvin’s stick metaphor, his idea of the unbreakable bundle, in other words, has become a central and no longer a veiled aim. But the veil, as we have seen, was never really so opaque. The cinema’s road-loners have always been held up for spectatorial inspection, even as they scrutinized the somewhat less attractive alternatives that surrounded them. Perhaps arising from the same nervous nostalgia that pulled Muybridge’s lens in the direction of the unadorned mobile human body, perhaps issuing from the same giddy anxiety that caused the Lumières to capture the automobile’s ability to tear apart the human as well as the communal body they so revered or Griffith’s desire to depict repeatedly the perceived harm this oddly attractive technology might cause the familial body, the road movie, its generic precursors as well as its international progeny, are the curious and often confusing product of modern cultural apprehension. The road, the internal combustion engine, and the cinema have always intersected and, romantically defeatist as their themes of alienated existence might have been as these intersections become more abundant in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the films themselves often bear the traces of an albeit faltering faith in the necessity of community, the need for communication. In a peculiar way, the road movie seems to be driving in reverse, an idea that guides David Laderman’s approach to the genre and what he perceives to be its decadal creep toward conservatism. The road itself, however, has changed very little since the turn of the century. Our experience of it, our interaction with its increasingly unambiguous motivations since the 1970s, has, however, grown more elastic. Where Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), exposes the modern sickness of the American family and a host of other disintegrating structures by blindly and unsuccessfully fleeing from them, the contemporary road movie quite frequently exposes the same sickness through its highly motivated though typically understated attempts to re-assemble those not-so-easy pieces. This pattern is played out in David Lynch’s The Straight Story, but it is present also in the work of filmmakers less commonly associated with the structures of family and home. And, intriguingly, the contemporary road movie aesthetic seems to owe more to Wenders’s ambling mobility than to the potentially misreadable hyperkineticism of, for instance, Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

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What during the 1980s was perceived to be the youthful and deeply Euro-inflected alienated angst of Jim Jarmusch—a somewhat subdued anguish that expressed itself in the wandering sub-narratives of Stranger than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), and Night on Earth (1991)—has not so much changed focus as it has come into focus in recent years. The quiet and often painfully comical desperation in those films, the turmoil that sent his characters adrift, was a desire for and profound inability to find significance and, oddly perhaps, stability in the contemporary world. His 2005 film, Broken Flowers, drives the point home, quite literally. Don Johnston, played with characteristic nonchalance by Bill Murray, is a disconnected and deeply depressed “techie” who takes to the road to find and possibly reconnect the broken and scattered elements of his misdirected personal life.2 The film is coolly unsentimental about the whole thing, yet its movement is decidedly opposite the motion in Rafelson’s film, right down to its replication of the former film’s—perhaps that decade’s—low-key tonal qualities, its apparent but usually deceptive directionlessness.3 Vincent Gallo’s much maligned The Brown Bunny (2003) is similarly deceptive. As with the genre’s international explosion in the 1960s and 1970s, Gallo’s film is the product of newly mobile and affordable—almost ridiculously so now—moving image technologies capable of reorganizing the road movie’s basic grammar. Gallo takes full advantage of the transportability of the extremely compact, high-quality digital camera. The film, like so many of the films explored or referred to in Road Movies, is a fundamentally auteurist film; Gallo’s credits for the decidedly minimalist The Brown Bunny reads like a perfectly executed Pauline Kael-style parody of the cult des auteurs: he is actor, producer, director, camera operator, set designer, makeup artist (one wants terribly for him to be credited as caterer as well). Uncomfortably close to its subject/creator, the film takes the positional metaphor of spectator as passenger to its logical extreme. It also rather vigorously rearticulates the highly problematic notion of the author alone in a manner that is at once desperate and, perhaps because of the desperation, troublingly romantic. Gallo achieves these effects through what one can only hope is a self-aware but still quite dangerously narcissistic self-absorption. He has, in other words, literalized and de-sublimated what we might call the classical road movie–era’s own contradictory impulses. Critical of “square” culture and its hypocrisy and control, road protagonists of the 1960s and

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1970s nonetheless couldn’t help but replicate its ills; they were, after all, contained by a narrative structure even if that structure envisioned itself as being anti-. More than unmotivated, however, Gallo’s Bud Clay is unlikeable, uninteresting, and unconnected; he is, in fact, almost unwatchable. And this is, perhaps, the point. Like the road protagonists that precede him, Gallo’s character moves in search of something approximating stability. The film, like those earlier films, is painfully obsessed with family, with shattered relationships, broken lines of communication, and seeks, largely within its final fifteen minutes, to feebly explain those obsessions. The film’s semi-legendary final oral sex scene is, in this way, a comment on deficiencies in other more critical forms of orality. Where American images of the road have become somewhat less ambiguous in their call for community, however, the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, perhaps due to their uncommonly and perhaps even deceptively straightforward design, appear to be impenetrable. The road is a recurring trope in Kiarostami’s cinema and is the explicit foundation of much of his recent work: Taste of Cherry (1997), Ten (2002), and 10 on Ten (2003). 4 What follows, then, is an attempt to situate Kiarostami’s remarkable dedication to the miseen-scène of vehicularity within the larger historical and generic frame established in these pages. Looking closely at Kiarostami will allow us, in fact, to evaluate the ground Road Movies has covered and, no doubt, will raise what are in the end difficult-to-answer questions regarding the road’s peculiar but undeniable auteurist appeal, an appeal Jarmusch and Gallo indulge in domestically but which reaches much farther.5 While our popular culture in general is interested in the road and the narrative potential of the journey, the particular spell these narrative elements cast upon the auteur (self-conceived or otherwise) has been a deliberate organizing feature of this book. Kiarostami’s work widens the sphere and his films, in their self-consciousness, might allow us to better understand the road and its influence on our evolving notions regarding cinematic authorship. Communication and community, our perennial concerns in this book, are central concepts within Kiarostami’s own critique of contemporary culture, but they are freighted here with the additional burden of commenting on the myth of authorial isolation.

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Postwar European Cinema and the Road to Kiarostami6 Kiarostami, though he is famously loath to list his “influences,” has acknowledged his admiration of and debt to Italian Neorealism and his alienation when faced with Hollywood films from roughly the same period (Italian and American films were screened regularly in the Iran of Kiarostami’s youth). As influential as it had been to the formation of the French New Wave, Neorealism was integral to the formation of pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian film culture. Often no less romantic or melodramatic, Neorealist films presented Kiarostami with something simultaneously new and familiar. In a 1997 interview with Nassia Hamid, Kiarostami explains this apparent contradiction with characteristic aplomb: “For the first time I saw people who were very close to the people who were around me in Iran.”7 These people who seemed familiar to Kiarostami were often engaged in narratives of mobility. Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), with its postwar landscapes of desolation, its stinging images of social and economic displacement, and its narrative structure revolving around its protagonist’s tenuous access to mobility, is a clear influence on Kiarostami’s filmmaking practices, and Kiarostami’s earliest work is markedly descended from its modes. Bread and Alley (Nan va Koutcheh, 1970), Kiarostami’s first film, is a wordless eleven-minute piece tracing a boy’s sometimes frightening, obstacle-laden walk home from school. Like the young boy in de Sica’s film (Enzo Staiola), for whom the spectator feels an unyielding sympathy, the boy protagonist in Kiarostami’s film is irresistible as he struggles to complete the seemingly simple task of returning to his house. Both in its presentation and in its reliance on the emotional significance of children, it is Kiarostami’s ode to Neorealism, or at least to de Sica’s brand of it. It also establishes the road—or, more generally, mobility—as a central and guiding metaphorical idea for Kiarostami, an idea that has followed the filmmaker through his most recent work. It was the Neorealists’ attention to spatial depth and temporal duration that, for André Bazin, was the cinema’s salvation, and the journey in Kiarostami’s work exploits both of these critical qualities. Writing specifically of Neorealism’s oppositional treatment of time, Bazin, in “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” argues, It is perhaps especially the structure of the narrative which is most radically turned upside down. It must now respect the actual duration

188 ROAD MOVIES of the event. The cuts that logic demands can only be, at best, descriptive. The assemblage of the film must never add anything to the existing reality. If it is part of the meaning of the film, as with Rossellini, it is because the empty gaps, the white spaces, the parts of the event that we are not given, are themselves of a concrete nature: stones which are missing from the building. It is the same in life: we do not know everything that happens to others. Ellipsis in classic montage is an effect of style. In Rossellin’s films it is a lacuna in reality, or rather in the knowledge we have of it, which is by its nature limited.8

Bazin’s ideal aesthetic, it seems, is one of skilled authorial self-effacement. This logic opposes, for example, Rudolf Arnheim’s notion of “film as art” in its practiced denial of the artistic function.9 Critics and supporters have pointed to the religious undertones in Bazin’s reasoning, his fear that cinematic artistry would result in a dangerous form of demagoguery and a problematic denial of reality’s own, unmediated grandeur. Style, in the Bazinian realm, is a form of trickery, and so the main stylistic units of the cinematic form—the shot and the cut—must adopt a seemingly more “democratic” nature. It is, in fact, Neorealism’s allowance for perceptual choice that Bazin values, though he is keen to advertise his awareness that this democratic illusion is itself a stylistic choice. Kiarostami’s mobile realist narratives function interestingly within this Bazinian logic and the curious, observational situation of the journey becomes his primary narrative device, one that allows him to draw attention also to the critical fissures in the logic itself. Bicycle Thieves, for example, also appears to have influenced Kiarostami’s at times quite subtle brand of extra-cinematic cultural criticism in a manner that, strangely perhaps, reaffirms the author’s position and affords an alternative though complimentary realist element. De Sica’s film about mobility and access contains within it a wry commentary on the ease with which American culture, especially American cinematic culture, travels across national borders. In the film, Antonio’s (Lamberto Maggiaroni) hard-earned employment requires that he affix posters for American films (one featuring Rita Hayworth) onto the walls of the city that contains him. Bread and Alley’s swinging contemporary jazz soundtrack achieves much the same effect, though at the aural level, and his later films will feature even more centrally the scattered but carefully selected signifiers of Western and American culture. His narratives, frequently focused on his characters’ mobile struggles, render these scattered signifiers and the ease of their transnational assimilation all the more ironic.

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Though it appears to run counter to the realist agenda, Kiarostami’s films, to a perhaps even greater degree than their Italian predecessors, are in conversation with the world outside the frame and, in this way, acknowledge the frame and the framer themselves. One of Kiarostami’s early short features, The Traveler (Mossafer, 1974), similarly straddles the border between authorial effacement and acknowledgment. In the film, Qasem (Hassan Darabi), a soccerobsessed village boy, journeys to Tehran hoping to see an important game. His difficult-to-finance journey is facilitated in part by an image-making scam he and a friend perpetrate on the local villagers. Setting up a camera and inviting passers-by to pose for a small sum, the boys appear to be operating an amateur portrait studio. But there’s a punch line here, because the camera has no film. Kiarostami frequently allows photographic or cinematic technologies to enter his highly self-aware narratives, and in The Traveler the joke is quite plain: image making is a method by which to become mobile. This seemingly autobiographical idea takes on deeper significance in Kiarostami’s later films, where the process of filmmaking is rendered visible. A complex and extended study of this process takes place in Kiarostami’s Close Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990). An account of Hossain Sabzian (who plays himself in the film) and his cinematic scam—he pretends to a rich family that he is the renowned Iranian filmmaker Moshen Makhmalbaf—the film proposes the equally fascinating idea of image-making as key to social mobility. Many of the film’s concluding images feature Sabzian and Makhmalbaf himself aboard a motorbike, literalizing the film’s interest in the connections between social and physical movement. Like the 1960s work of Godard, Kiarostami’s films are self-reflexive, similarly skeptical of the curious mobility of Western culture.10 One of Kiarostami’s early Godardian experiments is explicitly concerned with highways. The Solution (Rah Hal e Yek, 1978) is a formal, eleven-minute film following a man on an isolated mountain road as he rolls a newly repaired tire to his stranded automobile. This short film addresses several key Kiarostmian themes—themes that his feature-length films of the 1980s and 1990s would revolve around more explicitly. Key among them is the idea of transportable culture—here, of the imported variety. The film’s protagonist drives a French Citroën and wears a Vietnam-era American M-65 field jacket; his actions are set to Western classical music. Like his Italian and French predecessors, the protagonist in this short film is surrounded by signifiers of cultural mobility at the moment of his own problematic stasis.

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This interest in the road and its ability to comment on the reach of non-domestic cultures, as we have seen, is also at the center Wim Wenders’s work, and is especially critical to Kings of the Road. Though his recent films (some American-made) have diverged somewhat from his original method, Wenders’s films, like Kiarostami’s work, seemed markedly descended from Italian Neorealism. His interest in the sometimes excruciating duration of events (especially driving) materialize in a cinema, like Kiarostami’s, reliant on the long take. These limit-defying mobile shots in Wenders’s films also glimpsed signifying transitional landscapes, almost Bazinian in their extremes. This contemplativeness was, also like Kiarostami’s work, frequently tempered by the naïve, sometimes starkly learned point of view of children, an idea both directors gleaned from postwar Italian cinema. But Wenders’s key metaphorical expression of modernity was mediated through images of traffic—a doubly significant idea in Wenders’s road films that, as indicated earlier, were obsessed as much with the international traffic of cultures and ideas as in the physical traffic of bodies and vehicles. Traffic is also a crucial Kiarostamian theme, and it figures prominently in both Breaktime (Zang-e Tafrih, 1972) and Regularly or Irregularly (Be Tartib ya Bedoun-e Tartib, 1981), both fifteen-minute films featuring the sometimes dangerous act of crossing busy highways, as well as in Fellow Citizen (Hamshahri, 1983), a fifty-two minute film exploring a traffic cop’s attempts to direct the flow of vehicles. What does all of this traffic in Kiarostami’s work mean? Two-Way Traffic: Standing at The Euro-Persian Cross-roads In his ties to Neorealism, the French New Wave, and the New German Cinema, Kiarostami is implicated in the circle of Western auteurs similarly interested in the metaphorical potential of the road. But we won’t be abandoning him there. Kiarostami’s use of the road as a critical tool also has domestic roots that extend much further back. In fact, the journey was an especially important philosophical and poetic conceit in the Middle Ages, when Persian culture found itself at what Godfrey Cheshire has identified as its own metaphorical crossroads—with Western empirical thought forking roughly to the left and Eastern esoteric thought forking roughly to the right.11 Cheshire comments on the importance of the narrative structure of the journey to the form of Iranian philosophical thought, turning

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to the scholarly research of French Iranologist Henry Corbin, a scholar whose writings explored the links between Western and Persian thought. Via Corbin, Chesire identifies the importance of the journey or quest-like structure to two key Persian thinkers of the Middle Ages, Abu Ali Ibn (known as Avicenna in the West) and Shihabuddin Suhrawardi. Cheshire writes that both philosophers “gave their most evocative accounts of ‘Oriental philosophy’ in fictional tales that recount a journey or quest, a narrative paradigm significantly shared by most of Kiarostami’s films.”12 Kiarostami’s films, then, are in conversation as much with Persian philosophy and literature—traditions that have historically pondered notions of Western cultural influence—as they are with Western theoretical constructs or the history of cinema. Nassia Hamid, in her interview with Kiarostami, asked the filmmaker to comment on the self-conscious exposure of the filmmaking apparatus in his “Koker trilogy”—Where Is the Friend’s Home? (Khane-ye doust kodjast?, 1987), And Life Goes On . . . (Zendegi va digar hich, 1992), and Through the Olive Trees (Zire darakhatan zeyton, 1994)—a process of exposure that, by now, has become something of a Kiarostamian icon. Even his films that are not explicitly about the process of filmmaking are marked by booms falling into the frame, members of the crew interrupting the narrative fantasy, and the like. The question itself invokes the notion of Brechtian distanciation—a Western influence Kiarostami, in his response, is careful not to deny. He is equally careful, however, to complicate the issue further by, once again, citing a more traditional, or at least more local, source in a way that also suggests the parallels Kiarostami detects between the act of directing a film and the act of directing traffic: I found distanciation in Taazieh (the traditional folk theatre depicting the Shi’ite account of the murder of Imam Hossein, the son of Mohammed, by the tyrant Yazid, which is performed each year on the anniversary of the event) . . . This year I went to a village near Teheran to watch a Taazieh . . . at the moment Yazid is supposed to chop off Imam Hossein’s head, they were served tea, and Yazid signaled with a nod for his to be placed next to him as he continued with the decapitation. These things really helped me. I saw how nothing could affect this scene. For example the lion, which was played by a very old man wearing a lion skin, became tired—and went to lie down in the shade of a boulder. He began to smoke a cigarette. A smoking lion. I didn’t see anyone laugh at this. He could be the lion and not be the lion.13

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Kiarostami points to the free flow of traffic he allows in and out of his own films: his films are open to both traditional and modern influences in precisely the same way that they are, to the spectator, open (for some, frustratingly so) to interpretation. Taste of Cherry’s memorable coda, which exposes cast and crew as cast and crew, functions according to the same logic as Kiarostami’s image of the smoking lion: Homayon Ershadi, the actor playing Mr. Badii, is and isn’t Mr. Badii. Kiarostami’s work is, one might suggest, positioned at an intersection between traditions that have used the form of the journey to comment upon the contemporary condition. Kiarostami, while studying for his entrance exams at the School of Fine Arts in Teheran, was himself literally employed at the intersection: he was a traffic cop, an occupation explored semi-autobiographically in the previouslymentioned Fellow Citizen. In a way, however, all of his films are about traffic—literal, automotive traffic, to a certain extent, but also the transhistorical, transnational traffic of ideas, words and images—and the effect this other type of traffic has upon human mobility, both physical and psychical. This idea is at the heart of Taste of Cherry, a film whose narrative structure is defined by a series of dusty and circuitous roads in the hills just outside of Teheran. Taste of Cherry begins in the interior of Mr. Badii’s Range Rover. A series of shots establishes the location, an urban environment atypical of Kiarostami’s films. The traffic at the beginning of the film seems to be primarily traffic in bodies as men approach Mr. Badii’s slowly moving car offering their service to him without asking what that service might involve. These are men in search of employment.14 The irony of this moment, though, will not be fully realized until later in the film, when we learn that Mr. Badii, who refuses these initial offers of assistance, does indeed seek a laborer. His journey, we later learn, is an attempt to convince those he encounters to help him the next day by returning to his pre-dug burial site either to rescue him, if he fails in his attempt at suicide, or bury him if he is successful. From its opening frame onward, however, the film is relentlessly (though slowly) mobile, as Mr. Badii returns repeatedly to the site with a different potential assistant each time: a young Kurdish soldier (Ali Moradi), an Afghani seminarian (Hossein Noori), and an elderly taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri). The last of these three finally, though reluctantly, agrees to help Mr. Badii. The bulk of the film, quite critically I think, occurs between Mr. Badii’s unknown past and his unknowable future. Positioned as so many of

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Kiarostami’s narratives are at the intersection between here and there, past and present, the film focuses relentlessly on the here and now, a focus attained in part by Kiarostmi’s own stripped down aesthetic of proximity. The litany of “foreigners,” of outsiders, contributes to the film’s deep feelings of alienation throughout. Each character narrates himself as a stranger in a strange land, a land of ill-defined borders—definitions that are certainly pertinent to Kiarostami’s own highly mobile star-auteur situation. This sense of solitude is the film’s primary formal device. As Mr. Badii makes his way out of the city, shots alternate from roughly his point of view as he gazes upon the changing landscape he traverses to shots of Mr. Badii himself. These scenes are shot by a cameraman who has, it seems, become Mr. Badii’s passenger and his real accomplice, and their overall effect is to render Mr. Badii’s isolation all the more palpable. Through the vehicle’s windows, however, and faintly on the soundtrack are the traces of human labor. The city itself is expanding outward, and all around Mr. Badii are signs of this process of building, signs of “progress,” signs of what we might wish to call “urban traffic.” Early on, Mr. Badii encounters a pair of children “playing cars” in an abandoned Volkswagen. Their exchange seems almost incidental. They are on the screen briefly and might merely remind the viewer of earlier Kiarsotami films that took children as their protagonists and of Kiarostami’s Neorealist inheritance. Unlike those earlier children, however, these youngsters are merely playing at mobility, mimicking its rituals while remaining static. The moment hints at a change or interruption in the flow of traffic. As if to reinforce this idea, Mr. Badii, who makes a fairly elaborate U-turn several minutes later, passes them once again. Badii, the imagery would indicate, is moving in circles while the children, desirous as they might be, are unable to move at all. Shortly after this encounter, Mr. Badii chances upon another indicator of these problematic traffic patterns. He passes a brightly colored and isolated phone booth from which emanates one side of a heated conversation. As is so often the case in Kiarostami’s films, we hear the man in the booth screaming about his precarious economic situation but we don’t see him until later. Spectators are only privileged to a long take of Mr. Badii, who seems distressed by the conversation but moves on with a renewed plan to offer this man money for his services, which, at this point in the film, are not only undisclosed but carry with them decidedly perverse undertones.

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Kiarostami’s unusually limited perspective functions to foreground Mr. Badii’s problematic and painful isolation. Throughout the film, this sense of alienation is interrupted repeatedly, though fleetingly, by his string of passengers, some more talkative than others. It seems that he is unaware of his own desire for community, but the camera gently reveals Mr. Badii’s dilemma as well as his need. One scene in particular draws upon the road movie’s perennial desire to investigate the wanderer’s unspoken need for community and communication. Hypnotically following the winding, dusty path of Mr. Badii’s vehicle, the camera, seemingly reacting to an unexpected noise on the soundtrack and Mr. Badii’s own expression of concern, adopts a wider, more distanced angle revealing Mr. Badii’s situation: one of his Range Rover’s wheels dangles dangerously over the edge of a cliff. He is quite literally spinning his wheels and getting nowhere, but the laboring masses in the hills gather to remedy the situation and return vehicle and driver to their former mobile state. Perhaps unaware of it himself, Mr. Badii is reliant upon the community, even for his isolationist endeavors. This never-articulated need for community plays an increasingly central role as the film continues. Kiarostami’s own relationship to the subject of mobility is a decidedly conflicted one. His films are, essentially, exports. In a 1991 interview for Cineaste, Kiarostami joked that films currently rank with pistachio nuts, carpets, and oil as Iran’s major exports.15 Taste of Cherry, even more than his earlier films, is an especially dense, poetic and, I think his critics would argue, non-populist (read: exportready) film. But it is also a film about reclaiming or returning to the local and the dangers of a culture that too readily embraces “exports.” This language of imports and exports, a language so central to Iran’s history, is also the language of traffic. Taste of Cherry clearly testifies against the one-way movement of this traffic. An especially wry joke in the film’s preamble plays with this notion. Mr. Badii, after being threatened by an economically strapped worker who suspects that he is making sexual advances, spies a man in a bright red shirt moving rather chaotically and picking up debris in the valley below the road he and his Range Rover traverse. Mr. Badii tracks the man’s movement across the valley floor and, after a series of cuts between the man and Mr. Badii’s outward gaze, we see him drive ahead and pause to wait for the man. As he waits, a large dump truck, ironically dumping loads of dirt into a ditch (precisely, we learn later, the services Mr. Badii seeks), can be seen outside of the driver’s side window. As the man enters the frame, the letters U-C-L-A can clearly

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be read across the front of his shirt. This appears to be a not-so-subtle joke about the reach of American culture, its ability to move about freely and globally. It is also a reference to the film-school culture that has deemed Kiarostami auteur of the moment. Most importantly, however, it is a comment on the notion of displacement, an idea that permeates all of Kiarostami’s work and is especially central to Taste of Cherry. The children encountered earlier, the man in the phone booth, and in fact all of the characters in the film, especially Mr. Badii himself, are characters in search of place, and each exhibits varying degrees of comfort or confusion with regard to this search. The fact that these characters, as well as each character Mr. Badii encounters in the film after the bag collector, discuss their not-local origins suggests that, in Kiarostami’s world, we are all away from home. Or perhaps, to use Dorothy’s words from that yellow-brick paved studio road film made at the apex of Hollywood’s Golden Age, “There’s no place like home.” Mr. Badii spends the entire film attaching familial names to the passengers he picks up on the road. His pre-suicidal hours are spent with a surrogate son, a surrogate brother, and a surrogate father; an artificial and desperate paternalism, in fact, seems to form the core of Mr. Badii’s turmoil. While the details are never revealed in any precise manner, the film’s penultimate and most painfully static scene occurs at what we presume to be Mr. Badii’s home. The camera takes his preparations in from a distance as we watch, through illuminated windows, Mr. Badii’s barely discernible figure scurry about, gathering items within a structure so alien, so barren, so empty that, as the scene quietly unfolds, our own “presence” begins to fade; we begin, in other words, to drift away from this character to whom we were barely attached to begin with, a character whose own final movements toward detachment have, perhaps oddly, revealed his need for community. As it does in all of the films examined in this book, the road and its associated activities arise in Taste of Cherry and in Kiarostami’s work more generally to remind us of our own perhaps irreparable dislocation: from each other, our spaces, and our presumed moment in the temporal order. As we have seen, this anxiety, this fear that social chaos and disconnection is the cost of modernity, has ridden along with the cinema since its inception, forming the core of what on the surface appeared, in the 1960s and 1970s to be the most radicalized of generic categories. Kiarostami lends to the image of the cinematic

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road a form as alienating, as desperate, and as sorrowful about this state of affairs as the journey itself. His travelers, and there are many of them, are no more a “celebration” of some mythic mobile freedom than Godard’s or Wenders’s. His cinema depicts mournful journeys toward an equally mythic stability, and this stability always dances— drives, I suspect, is the more appropriate term—around notions of family. Ten (2002) pushes this familial element, always running through Kiarostami’s work, to the foreground. Unusual within the history of the road movie, its predecessors, and its post generic offspring, where so many of the drivers are barely articulate males, Ten focuses relentlessly upon one highly articulate female driver and, as its title would suggest, ten of her transitory conversations.16 The film is shot digitally from the dashboard of her usually moving vehicle, and its conversations refer repeatedly to the site of the domestic, a trait the film shares with many of Kiarostami’s films and, as we have seen, connects it to the road film’s own circuitous and sometimes deceptive history. Speaking of this thematic strain in Kiarostami’s work, Godfrey Cheshire writes, “The importance of place as aesthetic grounding has a corollary on the emotional and thematic levels: the idea of home. In most Kiarostami films, the characters are seen moving away from or toward home; whichever direction they are taking, or even when they are not in motion, home remains the constant reference, the lodestone.”17 Never allowing the camera to exit the vehicle, Ten hyperbolizes this concept. Home and its myriad anxieties are constant subjects, though the location itself remains conspicuously invisible. This visual elision, I think, is the core of Kiarostami’s particular critique and has much to do with his quietly confrontational notion of cinematic authorship. Like that which remains thematically invisible in his films, Kiarostami as author is both self-effacing and insistently present. Mania, the driver and in some ways the center of the film, is the divorced and recently remarried mother of Amin. The first of four “chapters” focused on Amin, the film’s first scene sets into motion (here quite literally) the film’s domestic concerns.18 Invisible for the first fifteen or so minutes of the film, Mania is subjected to her son’s stinging and also quite sad critiques of her mothering skills, her choice of a new husband, and even her driving. In our forced scrutiny of Amin, we notice his T-shirt, a Joe Camel promotional item. Here, Kiarostami’s assessment of import/export culture capitalizes on the strange Western commercial conceptualization of the Middle East: a

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tobacco-peddling cartoon figure. More critically, however, our forced perspective causes us to bear witness to Amin’s anguish. Loud, emotionally volatile, and, for the most part, rather frighteningly male, the ten-year-old is only borderline sympathetic. He is also, the film subtly reminds us, a product of his equally volatile and confused domestic situation. In interviews, Kiarostami frequently discusses his affection for the automobile’s escapist potential, its privacy. He complicates both notions in this film, critically invading its privacy and demonstrating, ultimately, his characters’ inability to escape, conceptually at least, the broken domestic site (see Figure 7.1). Far from an escape, though containing moments of great communicational significance, these drives are a part of Mania’s and a part of her son’s revised domestic routines. That the film’s fifth and its final scenes are identical (Mania picks her son up from her former husband in both scenes and Kiarostami only slightly alters the footage), illustrates the point. In addition to her son, Mania picks up and engages in conversations with her sister, two women roughly her own age, a pious elderly woman, and a prostitute. She has brief, largely gestural exchanges with other drivers, and one vehicle-to-vehicle exchange with her jeep-driving ex-husband over what the evening holds for young Amin. All the while the digital apparatus, which focuses alternately on driver and passenger, unobtrusively records what seems to be the dream structure (though differently gendered) of Cesare Zavattini, who, in the 1940s, imagined a film recording “90 minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens.”19 What Zavattini, Bazin, and Kiarostami are aware of, of course, is that nothing is something, that absence is simply a more subtle, perhaps more insistent brand of presence. Mania’s mobile routine—her several passengers, her several conversations, her several routes—all reflect upon issues central to questions of cinematic authorship: consistency and control. Engaged as she is in an evolving form of self-authorship, Mania’s mobility itself is a critical, physical expression of her attempts at control, and there is an undeniable, palpably realist pleasure in seeing this control express itself randomly. Allowing for the uncontrolled, in other words, is Mania’s principle form of control. But behind all of this controlled chaos rests an uneasy author, not altogether prepared for this implied self-effacement, not quite willing to relinquish his own fleeting control over the proceedings. At a key moment in Ten, Mania collects her friend, a woman of about her own age, whose boyfriend, upon whom

198 ROAD MOVIES

Figure 7.1 Ten (2002). Mother and father (in separate vehicles) plan Amin’s immediate future—will he or will he not spend the night with his mother?

she has become problematically dependant, has left her. Through their conversation the woman attends rather obsessively to her scarf, finally letting it slip partially, revealing her closely shorn hair. Mania compliments her friend’s beauty and encourages her to let the veil slip entirely. This unveiling finds its corollary in Kiarostami’s own self-revelatory acts. This film so filled with statements against dependency is a profound statement in favor of connection. Mania’s own emergent sense of independence is assembled from the conversational fragments she amasses in transit. Communication and community, in other words, are her salvation. This idea is not only in keeping with Kiarostami’s other work but seems, perhaps even more critically, to inform his increasingly frank authorial unveilings in his most recent work. Kiarostami’s oddly academic structures—alphanumerical titles and structures, for instance, in ABC Africa (2001), Ten, 10 on Ten, Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003)—hints at his faith in “lessons” and reminds us of his earliest work making educational films, ostensibly for children.20 These films, by virtue of their didactic structures, are also actively in the business of creating communities. Speaking to the camera as he drives along the outskirts of Teheran in 10 on Ten, a conceptual documentary on the Kiarostami process,

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Kiarostami appears both supremely self-absorbed and also seemingly desperate, like so many of his characters, to make a connection, to find an audience. He explains his filmmaking methods, all the while warning that his way is not the only or the best way. He is in many ways like Mr. Badii and like Mania, isolated but longing to be listened to. Kiarostami makes himself a perfect vehicle for understanding the communicative desires of the cinematic author, who has, since the cinema’s birth, been drawn to the subject of transportation and who, in this age of supposed proximity, fears his own sometimes selfwilled distance. Distance, separation, the disintegration of community, and the evaporation of communication are the perennial concerns of the cinema and are especially central to the cinema of the road which has consistently turned its attention to the human costs of modernity. We are returned once again to those foundational, turn-of-the-century images of Muybridge walking, reaffirming the human subject at a moment of unprecedented, widespread technological advancement. At a moment of even broader technological and global growth, Kiarostami’s humanizing journeys have grown similarly expansive and radically self-reflexive. In interview with Geoff Andrew, Kiarostami comments in a manner that suggests something of the future of the road movie, its evolving concerns and its continued relevance. His words also form an intriguing coda for this book: The journey is very important to me. It’s like all my roads: you don’t know how far they go, there are no signs telling you where they lead, and you don’t know where they end. But it’s important just to be moving.21

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Bibliography

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Notes

Introduction 1. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 63. 2. Since the late 1960s, in fact, Baudrillard had been considering the cultural and philosophical impact of automobility. In 1967, he anticipated America, writing that “mobility without effort constitutes a kind of unreal happiness, a suspension of existence, an irresponsibility.” See Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des Objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 94. 3. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1991), 138. 4. See Christopher D. Morris, The Figure of the Road: Deconstructive Studies in Humanities Disciplines (New York: Peter Lang, 2006) and Katie Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) for more on the intertextuality of the road. 5. Except in direct quotes, English film titles are used throughout followed, after the first usage, by the original release title. 6. Baudrillard, America, 28. 7. Ibid., 79. Abbas Kiarostami, while certainly not alone in this, extends the reach of this transnational relay to Iran, where he creates films, also about vehicularity, that think critically about the influence of Western culture. That these films are, according to some critics, “export-ready”—ready, in other words, for consumption by a largely Western audience—complicates the issue, but only in the most fascinating way. Kiarostami’s films are examined in detail in Chapter 6 of this study. For more on the complexities of “imports” and “exports” in Kiarostami’s work, see Devin Orgeron, “The Import/Export Business: The Road to Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry,” CineAction (June 2002): 46–51.

210

NOTES

8. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 5 9. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. 10. See David Laderman, Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 247. 11. David Laderman,“What a Trip: The Road Film and American Culture,” The Journal of Film and Video 48: 1–2, (Spring-Summer 1996), 55. Laderman’s “The Road Movie Rediscovers Mexico: Alex Cox’s Highway Patrolman,” Cinema Journal 39 (Winter 2000): 74–99, a detailed examination of Cox’s 1992 road movie, similarly attends to what Laderman calls “the contradictory textual fissures” of the road movie (95). 12. Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson, eds., Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Movie (London: Creation Books, 1999). I should note, too, that this list-making tendency slips into more scholarly examinations of the genre as well. 13. Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 228–29.

Chapter 1 1. My use of the word “attraction” is informed by, but different from, that term’s widespread use in early cinema scholarship. I am, of course, thinking here of Tom Gunning’s “Cinema of Attractions” and reactions to that highly influential theoretical formulation. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62, for Gunning’s slightly retooled version of the original article, which appeared in Wide Angle 8 no. 3/4, (Fall 1986): 63–70. For an equally influential response to Gunning’s idea, see Charles Musser, “Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 203–32. My argument is also indebted to Jonathan Auerbach’s “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 798–820. Auerbach argues, in a manner that holds sway over this and subsequent chapters, that “If motion largely defines the distinctive logic of the medium, helping to distinguish moving pictures from other media, then moving pictures that make such movement their primary subject would seem to hold the key for understanding how viewers learned to negotiate the shift from showing to telling” (802). Identifying, as he does, the immense popularity of the chase film, Auerbach hints at this alternate notion of attraction, an attraction, I

NOTES

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

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contend, that did not reach its peak and peter out at the end of its 1903–06 cycle (as Miriam Hansen seems to suggest) but is still very much a part of our cinematic understanding of narrative. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Early American Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 46. For a recent and quite remarkable collection tracing the history of the cinema’s interest in the subject of travel, see Jeffrey Ruoff, ed., Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London: BBC Educational, 1994), 17. Christie’s work, an educational companion to a BBC program of the same name, is a highly articulate and popular re-framing of the research Gunning, Musser, André Gaudreault, and others had undertaken some years earlier. Minus the anxiety and hysteria at the core of her (and, for that matter, my own) research, The Last Machine also interestingly presages Lynne Kirby’s excellent work on locomotion and the cinema. See Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). My end date here is not entirely arbitrary. 1915 is the end-date of Kemp Niver’s expanded Library of Congress catalogue, Early Motion Pictures, which will be explored in some detail towards the end of this chapter. It is also the year of D. W. Griffith’s epic narrative film The Birth of a Nation. See Kemp Niver, Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress, ed. Bebe Bergsten, intro. Erik Barnouw (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1985). Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. This representational obsession is not, of course, confined to the cinema. Kris Lackey’s RoadFrames and Roger N. Casey’s Textual Vehicles both explore the profound impact automobility had on literary production, both at the formal and thematic levels. Lackey’s book focuses on the American highway in literature and Casey examines the American literary fascination with the automobile. Casey’s book also offers a very concise and lucid history of automobility in the United States. See Roger N. Casey, Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in American Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), and Kris Lackey, Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Warren James Belasco, using travel magazines, trade journals, and diaries, explores the history of American road touring in Americans on the Road. Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From, Autocamp to Motel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–54. Musser’s

212

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

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chapter, aside from providing a highly detailed history of pre-cinematic screen practices, also does much to establish the early narrative organization of these projected images. See André Gaudreault, “Film, Narrative, Narrations: The Cinema of the Lumière Brothers,” Early Cinema, 71–72. For more on the history of this implicit agreement and the particular relationship between travel and the cinematic situation, see Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative,” Early Cinema, 123–32. Musser also does much in this essay to historicize travel’s role in the cinema’s narrative trajectory. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1977), 166. Ibid. Musser, “Rethinking Early Cinema,” 205. Ibid., 213. Gaudreault, in invoking the “narrative road,” quotes Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 44. Gaudreault comes closest to this understanding, both in his evocation of Claude Brémond’s definition of narrative from Logique du récit— “The message should place a subject (either animate or inanimate) at a time t, then a time t + n, and what becomes of the subject at the moment t + n should follow from the predicates characterizing it at the moment t”—and in his examination of Chris Marker’s narrative experiment, La Jetée (1963), where still shots linked together through montage (and, incidentally, voiceover narration) create “story” sans the first level of narrativity (i.e. movement and alteration within the mise-en-scène). Gaudreault, “Film, Narrative, Narration,” 68 and 72; Claude Brémond, Logique du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 99–100. This is a state of affairs, I should add, that Musser and others have sought to remedy. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 111. Ibid. Brian Winston, “Sight and Sound A-Z of Cinema: Z-Zoetrope,” Sight and Sound 8, no. 7 (July 1998): 28–30. What Winston overlooks and what needs more critical attention is the fact that Muybridge, himself a rather flamboyant showman, would eventually take his images and his ideas “on the road.” Part informative lecture, part entertainment, Muybridge’s lecture circuit is another embodiment of the attraction. Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 28. Hendricks quotes from The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 25, 1870. While smartly and thoroughly researched, Hendricks is prone to hyperbole (his title indicates as much, relying as it does upon a patrilineal logic that recent

NOTES

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21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

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scholarship has convincingly questioned). Musser’s work on Muybridge in The Emergence of Cinema provides some much-needed balance and is especially attentive to Muybridge’s complex relationship to the “business” of images. It is, however, Hendricks’s ability to weave into his biography contemporary reviews of Muybridge’s work that makes this an invaluable piece of scholarship and a brilliant glimpse into Muybridge’s own carefully constructed public image. See also Robert Barlett Haas, Muybridge, Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Anita V. Mozely, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years (Palo Alto: Stanford University, Dept. of Art, 1972); and Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man who Invented the Moving Picture (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972). Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge, 29. This spirit and the details of Muybridge’s mobility are documented in both Hendricks’s and Haas’s biographies. They are smartly and poetically expanded upon, as is Muybridge’s general fit within the shifting technological grid of the turn of the century, in Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking Press, 2003). The sense of adventure examined here, this restlessness, no doubt accounts in part for Muybridge’s much earlier journey from his native England to the United States. Mobility for Muybridge, in other words, was a principle and longstanding concern. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge, 19. Hendricks quotes from The Daily Alta California, San Francisco, February 19, 1868. The Daily Alta California, San Francisco, August 3, 1877, quoted in Haas, Muybridge, Man in Motion, 94. The Post (1877), quoted in Haas, Muybridge, Man in Motion, 94. Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implementation of Perversions,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 507–34. Of course the images and their own reproducibility are a part of this revolution, a notion Walter Benjamin reminds us of. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217–51. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 160. Projection, of course, was dependent upon a light source, typically a magic lantern. The device also served as a printer. Like Muybridge’s traveling operations under the pseudonym “Helios,” the brothers had developed, on a much more portable scale, a traveling motion picture studio. For a concise history of these developments, see Christie, The Last Machine, 23. See also Tom Gunning, “New Thresholds of Vision: Instantaneous Photography and the Early Cinema of Lumière,” Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era, ed. Terry

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28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

NOTES

Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001): 72–99, for an excellent historical contextualization of the Lumières that suggests the importance of the brothers’ amateur roots in the formation of their unique relationship to the world around them. Gunning’s “New Thresholds of Vision” illuminates the parallel between the brothers’ aesthetic sensibilities and a related movement in amateur photography. For the sake of clarity, I include only the approximate English titles of the Lumières’ films followed by their number in the catalogue. Musser’s ideas are found in the notes that accompany the DVD collection of Lumière films, The Lumière Brothers’ First Films. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Miriam Bratu Hansen, intro. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 31. Ibid. Ian Christie comments in passing on a special magazine publication entitled L’illustration, whose sole purpose was to explain the screen trickery to which audiences were being so frequently exposed. See Christie, The Last Machine, 84. Christie, The Last Machine, 21. The titles actually read “Oh . . . Mother will be pleased.” Ibid. And, I should add, something that J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash seemed most acutely aware of in its troubling eroticization of the same. David Cronenberg’s 1997 film of the same name recapitulates the idea. For more on the Lumières’ roaming cameramen see Christie, The Last Machine, 23. From the notes accompanying The Lumière Brothers’ First Films. In many ways combating what in truth was, from the beginning, a debasement of Siegfried Kracauer’s understanding of the relative “realism” of the Lumières and the artifice of Méliès, recent scholarship has suggested the diversity of both. Elizabeth Ezra, for example, has indicated the highly cinematic character of Méliès’s approach and has unearthed the sometimes veiled narrative logic that governs his tricks. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, and Elizabeth Ezra Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 95. Méliès’s “role” in the film suggests a degree of self-consciousness that moves well beyond need or self-promotion. Ibid., 98. Paul Hammond, Marvelous Méliès (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 117.

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43. Christie, The Last Machine, 20. 44. For more on what remains one of early cinema’s most recognizable shots, see Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 354–55. 45. Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–1904,” 129. 46. This remains a popular movie premise, from Jan de Bont’s bus thriller Speed (1994) to James Cameron’s fatally romantic shipboard romance, Titanic (1998). David R. Ellis’s highly parodic Snakes on a Plane (2006) takes the premise to its illogical extreme. 47. Charles Musser, for example, has argued that “of all the symbols of urban life, Vitagraph was most enchanted by the automobile, which was still a vehicle for the well to do.” See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 410. While the fact that the automobile was a central early cinematic subject is incontestable, the critical social role of this thematic focus has been left largely unexamined. 48. For more on this see Auerbach, “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema.” 49. This reliance on a vehicle linked with tradition, decidedly anti-technological, and inextricably tied to “the land” finds its ultimate expression in David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999), a film that, like these, finds its protagonist ambling toward familial reunification. 50. Though Niver assigns the film the 1912 date (it was, according to his research, both shot and registered in that year), the film’s opening title card suggests that the film was made the year prior, in 1911.

Chapter 2 1. New editions of Barry Keith Grant’s Film Genre Reader would suggest, in fact, that even the notion of a “strict” generic approach is something of a misnomer, as the field of genre studies continues to flex to accommodate a wide array of approaches. See Barry Keith Grant, Film Genre Reader III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 2. Corrigan’s formulation, as we have seen, is substantially more complex and considers, in a manner typically neglected by the scholars writing in his wake, the critical and often non-cinematic cultural forces that come to bear on genre generally and have resulted, through a not altogether easy alchemy, in the road movie in particular. See Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls, 137–60. 3. Hosted by Gig Young, the program was part of the “Warner Brothers Presents” series and functioned as a sort of behind the scenes sneak preview intended to generate interest in Warner Brothers’s latest project. 4. The film’s influence upon the cinema’s creators continues to be a highly documented fact. See, for example, Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman, eds., The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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Classic Western (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), where the longevity of the film’s hold upon the cinematic imagination is remarked upon repeatedly, both in the book’s preface and within the essays themselves. This recent collection of essays, however, is most remarkable for its ability to bring together perspectives on the film from an especially broad, not necessarily cine-centric group of thinkers. David Laderman, Driving Visions, 36. For more on Klinger’s highly relevant stance on the possibility of “subversive” genre, see Barbara Klinger, “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited: The Progressive Genre,” Barry Keith, ed., Film Genre Reader III (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2003), 87–90. David Laderman, Driving Visions, 37. Ibid., 36. The first quote is reprinted in Tom Milne, trans. and ed., Godard on Godard (New York: De Capo Press), 44. The second quote is from Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction a une veritable histoire du cinema, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions Albatross, 1980), 92. See Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” Perspectives on Film Noir, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 99–109. The article originally appeared in Film Comment 8, no. 1 (Spring 1972), 8–13 R. Barton Palmer, ed. Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 14–17. See also Raymond Durgnat, “Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” Cinema (U.K.), nos. 6–7 (August 1970), 49–56. It should be noted, too, that Schrader’s formulation follows from and grows out of the French criticism that pre-dates it. James Naremore, at a February 14, 1999 talk at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, pointed out the interesting and often confused fact that the term film noir was not coined by the French as a reaction to American films of a certain type but that, in fact, French writers in the 1930s had used the term to discuss Popular Front films like Pépé le Moko (1936). Noticing a similar strain of films in America in the 1940s, French critics applied the term accordingly. See James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 15, for a discussion that moves in the same direction. The matter, of course, was not helped by many of the early New Wave critics, who contributed to the conflation between crime and gangster film and noir. For more on the range of noir themes, see J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989) which, I might add, is especially attentive to the highly formalized role of noir narration. Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Owl, 1997), 93. For more on the cinema’s urban fascinations, noir and otherwise, see David B. Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City (New York: Routledge, 1997); Mark Shiel and Tony

NOTES

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

217

Fitzmaurice, Screening the City (New York, Verso, 2003). Frank Krutnik, “Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City,” in Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City, 83–109, is particularly instructive in its ability to lay out the details of noir’s urban geography. Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night, 94. James Naremore, More than Night, 145–50. Interacting with strangers throughout the film, Al is most typically referred to as Roberts. Andrew Britton has written convincingly on the unreliability of Al’s narration and the points where that narration breaks from the images we are afforded. See Andrew Britton, “Detour,” The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron, (New York: Continuum, 1993), 174–78. As Britton points out, however, the brief time they spend on-screen together seems to tell a different story. See Britton, “Detour,” 175. For more on the role of women in noir, see Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 121–66. Copjec’s reader offers a fascinatingly diverse set of perspectives on noir, as does Ian Cameron’s, published the same year. See Ian Cameron, ed., The Book of Film Noir (New York: Continuum, 1993). The “lunacy” of the desert is commented upon in Baudrillard’s America and would seem to be a factor in the subtitle to Corrigan’s chapter on genre, “The Road Movie in Outer Space.” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 105. Washington, DC’s National Building Museum featured an exhibit on the culture of road travel, “See the U.S.A.,” in which this marketing was nicely demonstrated. The exhibit ran from November 19, 1999 through May 7, 2000. For more on the frontier myth’s function within American history, see Richard Slotkin, “Myth and the Production of History,” Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70–90. André Bazin, “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence,” What is Cinema? Volume II. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 140. For an excellent analysis of the cinematic western as genre, see Thomas Schatz, “The Western,” Handbook of American Film Genres, ed. Wes D. Gehring (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 24–46. See also Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, eds., The Book of Westerns (New York: Continuum, 1996). For more on the Western’s presentation of what he calls “the basic scenario,” see Joseph Reed, American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 255. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is an example of this sort of film that focuses on Western migration and the “threat” of passing through Indian territory.

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26. There are, to be sure, several Westerns that focus on female characters. Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1953) is, perhaps, the most interesting. The contrast, though, is remarkable. In Ray’s film Vienna (Joan Crawford) does everything in her power to, in the final analysis, stay home. 27. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 28. Extrapolating this idea somewhat, and applying it to a key road movie not closely examined in these pages but referenced throughout, we might suggest that Thelma and Louise’s journey, in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), is a masculinizing one in that both characters are forced at every turn to use essentializing and stereotypically masculine means to escape the situations they face. This is perhaps why, for an unusually elongated period after the film’s release, the film’s “feminism,” or, conversely, its “reactionary” stance, continued to be debated by critics and scholars alike. 29. Linda Williams, Hard-Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 43. 30. As a number of the essayists in Eckstein and Lehman’s anthology note, the actual number of years here is notoriously difficult to figure out. 31. Lee Mitchell, Westerns, 11. See also Jane Tompkins, West of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 32. In Driving Visions Laderman traces the quest motif from classical Hollywood era films through contemporary road movies organized around the same logic. The theme is also a guiding one in the essays collected in Cohan and Hark, The Road Movie Book. 33. Gaylan Studlar, “‘What Would Martha Want?’: Captivity, Purity, and Feminine Values in The Searchers,” ed. Arthur M. Eckstein Peter Lehman, The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western (Detroit: Wayne State Univeristy Press, 2004), 171–96. An interesting and differently gendered companion to Studlar’s essay is Philip Skerry, “What Makes a Man to Wander? Ethan Edwards of John Ford’s The Searchers,” New Orleans Review (Winter 1991): 86–91. 34. Interestingly Mose, the Fordian/Shakespearean wise fool, looks forward throughout the film to an end to his own wandering and longs to rest, as he does in the film’s closing images, on the porch in his promised rocking chair. 35. Young Jim Morrison’s recurring dream of the crashed American Indians on the side of the road that appears in Stone’s The Doors (1991) is another important moment. 36. For more on the history of Monument Valley, its roads, and Hollywood’s use of it, see Richard E. Klinck, Land of Room Enough and Time Enough (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953). Ford’s particular “conquest” of the location is documented in the “Warner Brothers Presents” series included in the DVD extras of The Searchers.

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37. Lee Mitchell, Westerns, 93. 38. Ibid., 97.

Chapter 3 1. Like so many Godard quotes, this one is notoriously difficult to source. Colin MacCabe, in his recent biography on Godard, indicates in a note his own frustration in tracing the source of these oft-quoted words which, Godard still insists, are themselves a direct quote of D. W. Griffith. MacCabe’s research has turned up nothing to support or crumble Godard’s claim. See Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 391. The issue is not helped by the fact that the details of the quote itself vary from time to time. A case in point is to be found in Jacques Rancière and Charles Tesson’s 2001 interview with Godard for Cahiers du cinéma, where the interviewers approach Godard with “In Histoire(s) du cinéma, you say that America is ‘a girl and a gun,’” to which Godard replies, “It was Griffith who said that, not me. What he meant to say at the time was fairly simple. You only need a revolver and a girl and you can make a film. Likewise, when I saw Voyage in Italy I thought, ‘With two characters in a car you can make a film.’” As the exchange reveals, the variations on the quote are limitless, though this author is especially intrigued by its recent automotive suggestiveness. See Jean-Luc Godard: The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/2001 (Berlin: Gachnang & Springer, 2002), 60. 2. Though Godard’s perspective has flexed to accommodate more fully America’s continued and far more alarming political mobility, his recent comments demonstrate his continued frustration over the freedom with which American ideology roams the planet. Just prior to the shooting of Notre musique, Godard told Frédéric Bonnaud, “The Americans say they are defending themselves by traveling around the world and going into other people’s countries.” Godard continues, turning back to America’s cultural imperialism, saying, “In a way, the cinema I know, the one I live in, has always felt like the cinema of an occupied country. And the occupier has always been Hollywood.” See “Occupational Hazards: JLG at Work, as told to Frédéric Bonnaud,” Film Comment (Jan/Feb 2005): 37–41. 3. For reasons having largely to do with traffic jams, Laderman and Sargeant and Watson, for example, attend to Weekend. There seems to be, in both of these works, an acknowledgment of Godard’s interest in automobility but little desire to plumb the depths of this interest or to examine its impact on the wave of American films that followed from Godard. John Orr, in a chapter called “Commodified Demons II: The Automobile,” is more generally interested in the role cars play in

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

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Godard’s work and the films that arise from Godard’s automotive passions. See John Orr, Cinema and Modernity (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993), 127–54. His chapter “The Absent Image and the Unreal Object” (86–107) is similarly concerned and begins to articulate the road’s centrality in international postwar films that contemplate notions of home and displacement. See Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 18. Though more whimsically hyperbolic, Godard’s statement also resembles Corrigan’s ideas regarding generic hysteria. See, for example, Dennis Turner, “Breathless: Mirror Stage of the Nouvelle Vague,” SubStance 12 (1983): 50–63. While Baudrillard’s writing frequently returns to the subject, the concept is most explicitly laid out in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Dudley Andrew, ed., Breathless (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 14. For more on the noir elements of the film, see also Steve Smith, “Godard and Film Noir: A Reading of A bout de souffle,” Nottingham French Studies 32, no. 1 (March 1993): 65–73. Smith’s suggestion that “Godard does not so much imitate as enact the process of imitation thorough the story of a perilous and fatal attempt to imitate” (67) is especially relevant here. Andrew, Breathless, 14. Quoted in David Sterritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 97. The phrase “I’m living more than I’m moving” is in the original, though I suspect, given the larger context and the opacity of the phrase itself, that Godard should be quoted as saying that he is “living more when he is moving.” Journalism and a more generalized notion of “the press” are ideas that occur with regularity in the films of Godard, who was himself a journalist (of the film-critical sort) before his entrée into the cinema. Sam Fuller, another journalist (of the yellow sort)-turned-filmmaker and a director very near the center of Godard’s referential universe, also frequently invoked the imagery of the press in his films. Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, in its frequent images of newspapers, has both directors in mind. In the work of all three filmmakers, the press arises as an earlier example of media-mobility and the rapidity of modern communication. This idea and its connectedness to automobility is brilliantly expressed in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde—where publicity is a catalyst for sustained mobility—and is updated for the late twentieth century in Oliver Stone’s similarly media-obsessed Natural Born Killers (1994). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations refer to the English Language continuity script, reprinted in Dudley Andrew, ed. Breathless. Michel’s gesture references a Bogart tic that is seen only occasionally in his feature

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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roles but turns up with some regularity in publicity and newsreel images. The actor, who famously had a hard time deciding what to do with his hands, fidgeted even more, for example, in footage of his late 1940s Committee for the First Amendment activities. Robert Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 176. Of course, Godard’s stylistic experimentation became, in due time, conventional in its own right. By the mid-1960s, Madison Avenue had invested so deeply in what it perceived as a new, more youthful visual grammar that TV ads from the period seem overcome with jarring edits. See Dudley Andrew, ed. Breathless, 11. This process of mainstreaming (and selling) also had a profound effect on American cinema of the period. The ripples of what we might rather narrowly call “Godardian” form extend into our contemporary images as well, affecting, by way of Richard Lester, the rock video aesthetic to be sure, but more centrally affecting what has become the road movie’s dominant form. Hyperbolic and overstated as they are, Oliver Stone’s formal explosions in Natural Born Killers are Godardian in reverse, commenting on the commercial culture that appropriated Godard’s structure and the manner by which this culture has seduced another generation of viewers-turned-consumers. Michel Marie, “‘It really makes you sick!’: Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959),” French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (New York: Routledge, 1990), 207. For a nearly comprehensive cataloguing of the various critical approaches to Godard’s editing, see Richard Raskin, “Five Explanations for the Jump Cuts in Godard’s Breathless,” POV: A Danish Journal of Film Studies 6 (Dec. 1998): 141–53. Perhaps most valuable for its plea not to sacrifice one reading in favor of another, Raskin’s list also indicates the fascination surrounding this singular formal decision. Raskin identifies some of the key “metaphorical” readers of Godard’s editing, critics for whom the jumpcuts are directly connected to Michel’s fractured perspective. See, for example, Bosley Crowther, “Breathless,” The New York Times, February 8, 1961, Section 1. See also Luc Moullet, “Jean-Luc Godard,” Cahiers du cinéma (April 1960): 25–26. For a more nuanced reading, though one that, as Raskin points out, fails to supply adequate evidence, see Annie Goldmann, Cinéma et société moderne (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1971/1974), 85–86. As our next chapter will demonstrate, the elusiveness of these desires will be picked up by Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, a film with the tagline “A man went searching for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.” Michel Marie, “‘It really makes you sick!’” 209. Ibid, 211. Andrew, Breathless, 8. Quoted in Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, 16.

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22. Quoted in David Sterritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, 100. 23. I should interrupt myself briefly to explain the apparent “ease and plentitude” of my own argumentative movement. As I have indicated elsewhere, the examples I have chosen to explore in Road Movies, my particular case studies, are not unique but exemplary. Not only could or should other Godard films be considered in this context, but the films of Federico Fellini, especially La Strada (1954), fit well into this paradigm. Fellini’s film, even in its casting of Anthony Quinn, seems to raise questions about American mobility. The films of Michelangelo Antonioni come to mind as well. Antonioni was every bit as motionobsessed as Godard, though always, because of the expansive emptiness that is so central a part of his form, less likely to be accused of celebrating rapidity or spontaneity. Zabriskie Point (1969) is not only a road movie (like L’avventura [1960], like The Passenger [1975]), it is a film set in the United States, soaked in and critical of the hypocrisy of its own era. And the examples are not just European in origin. Satyajit Ray, most especially in the Apu trilogy (1955–59), expresses a deep commitment to exploring the idea of literal travel and the mobility of, here, Western culture. 24. This moment, of course, is another rupture in the film’s narrative skin, one that works in coordination with the film’s highly self-conscious (albeit entirely convenient) film and film-critical population: Godard himself, Jean-Pierre Melville, André S. Labarthe, Jean Domarchi, Philippe de Broca, Jean Douchet, and Jacques Sicilier all appear in the film and are all filmmakers and/or film critics. Though they are not credited in the film itself, Dudley Andrew’s continuity script identifies these key figures. See Andrew, Breathless, 32. 25. Ibid., 52, emphasis mine. 26. Michel’s relationship to the camera is similar to the brief, though important, relationship between Jim Stark (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955). In Ray’s film, a “chickie run” between the young men establishes “manhood,” with tragic consequences. In Godard’s film, Michel and the camera seem enmeshed in their own “chickie run,” and the reasons seem similar. As Buzz tells Jim, “You gotta do something.” The camera seems to pose a similar, though non-verbal, command to Michel. 27. Quoted in Andrew, Breathless, 165. 28. Ibid., 111. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Howard Hawks’s El Dorado would not appear until 1967, but the legend of the Promised Land of gold was very much in circulation in 1959 and would later attract Werner Herzog to Peru to shoot Aguirre, Wrath of God (1977). The legend is relevant also to Godard’s film,

NOTES

31. 32. 33. 34.

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which, after all, is about two characters in search of their own mythic land: Patricia seeks to exist in a mythic Paris, and Michel searches for some equally mythic cinematic version of America. Andrew, Breathless, 11. Ibid., 15. Fuller appears some years later in Godard’s Pierrot le fou. Dennis Turner, “Breathless: Mirror Stage of the Nouvelle Vague,” SubStance 12 (1983): 50–63.

Chapter 4 1. Nancy Hardin and Marilyn Schlossberg, eds., Easy Rider: Original Screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern Plus Stills, Interviews and Articles (New York: Signet, 1969), 11. I should note, also, that Hopper is now far more articulate and significantly less romantic about the director’s role generally and his own role specifically on Easy Rider. Kenneth Bowser’s film, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (2003) finds Hopper discussing in remarkably frank terms his fortune in being aided by the talent that surrounded him and in being given, in spite of his admitted excesses, free rein on a project that was not guaranteed to succeed. 2. David Laderman’s Driving Visions explores many of these films. 3. Again, I have singled out the French New Wave and Godard specifically in spite of, for example, Hopper’s marked interest in the thematically similar cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni. Hopper’s emerging grasp of cinematic modernism, in 1969, seems to have been confined to Godardian experiments in editing and was less involved in the contemplative study of mise-en-scène that was the hallmark of Antonioni’s work. 4. Laderman’s Driving Visions explores the idea of drift as it is filtered through Leo Charney. Reduced—problematically I think—to a sense of aimlessness and wandering, the idea becomes central to Laderman’s thesis that the road movie has become, post–Easy Rider, less politically engaged. Tracing Charney’s idea to its Barthesian roots, however, the road’s seductive capacities, similar to the seductive power of the Barthesian text, emerge in a manner that foregrounds the cinema’s longstanding use of the road as false temptress. See Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 5. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 6. 6. Barthes’ concept of the drift owes much to the Situationist International’s understanding of the dérive—a favorite play-form of SI and its predecessor organization, the Lettrist International. Libero

224

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

NOTES

Andreotti describes the process as “the art of wandering through urban space” (38). See Libero Andreotti, “Play-tactics of the Internationale Situationiste,” October 91, (Winter 2000): 36–58. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 19. Ibid. For more on the nostalgic and nationalistic uses of landscape in the film, see Barbara Klinger, “The Road to Dystopia,” Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge, 1997), 179–203. Jennifer Lynn Peterson traces the roots of this impulse in “The Nation’s First Playground: Travel Films and The American West, 1895–1920,” Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 79–98. And this particular landscape features rather prominently in Baudrillard’s America, as well. André Bazin, “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence,” What is Cinema? Volume II. (Berkeley: UC Press, 1971), 141. Ibid, 140. The article is reprinted in the notes accompanying the laser disc version of the film. Tom Burke, “Will Easy Do It for Dennis Hopper?,” Hardin and Schlossberg, eds., Easy Rider: Original Screenplay, 16. The Last Movie contains a film within a film directed by Sam Fuller, favored director of Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders. The gesture, in Hopper’s hands, seems only to mimic the French director (Fuller appears in Pierrot le fou [1964]). Wenders casts Fuller in The American Friend (1977), The State of Things (1982), and The End of Violence (1997). This interplay suggests the policy of exchange and borrowing that exists within the road genre. Dennis Hopper, “Into the Issue of the Good Old Time Movie Versus the Good Old Time,” Hardin and Schlossberg, eds., Easy Rider: Original Screenplay, 11. For a highly articulate study of 1960s cinematic politics that answers far more than its albeit quite important titular question, see Mark Shiel, “Why Call Them ‘Cult Movies’? American Independent Filmmaking and the Counterculture in the 1960s,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (May, 2003), http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=may2003&id=260§ion=article&q=mark+shiel Quoted in Eric Rentschler, ed., West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 43–44. Unlike its function in Saussurean semiology, here the sign, while understood, effectively truncates communication. See Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Peru: Open Court, 1986). Lee Hill, Easy Rider (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1996), 54. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster,

NOTES

225

1998), 70. Kenneth Bowser’s 2002 documentary film borrows its name from and claims to be based on Biskind’s book and should be consulted as well, though its tone is far more uncritically adoring and runs very near the territory of hero worship.

Chapter 5 1. See Jeffrey Ruoff, “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,” Virtual Voyages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 12. 2. Robert Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–2. Kolker and Beicken’s examination is singular both for its clarity and its coverage and remains the central critical source on Wenders. See also Alexander Graf, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway (London, Wallflower Press, 2002). Where Kolker and Beicken usefully cast a wide net, Graf works more closely, guided by a singular and deeply important question (a question the filmmaker and this author obsess over as well) regarding what might best be called the cinema’s narrative drive. The resulting text is more a sustained and quite convincing argument than a critical overview and compliments its predecessor (which, oddly, is scantly referenced) quite nicely. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden’s The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative and the Postmodern Condition (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1997) also provides a useful overview. 3. Michael Covino, “A Worldwide Homesickness,” Film Quarterly (Winter 1977–78): 9–19. 4. Kolker and Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, 4. 5. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 19. 6. Kolker and Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, 22 7. Pinball machines, featured in many of Wenders’s films and with which Wenders spent much of his youth, function on exactly this logic of “betweenness.” Pinball machines provide an interesting metaphor for Wenders’s cinematic world, which typically focuses on characters attempting to “stay in play” in a world where events and obstacles occur randomly. 8. Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, 16 (brackets mine). 9. Like the “no vacancy” scene in Easy Rider, signs here are mutually understood. Here, however, the pre-verbal serves to establish rather than further sever community. 10. The legacy of Volkswagen, especially the company’s commercial relationship to Nazism, is here quite literally sunk. The Beetle’s Germanic roots make it an impossible vehicle for either of the film’s characters, who are undone, at least in part, by their uncomfortable relationships to their nation and its history. Later in the film, at a lunch counter at a

226

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

NOTES

VW plant, Robert decides to join Bruno in his drifting repairman’s journey. Gerd Gemünden, in “On The Way to Language: Wenders’ Kings of the Road,” comments on the non-verbal linguistic playfulness of this scene and hints at the politics of desire that seem to inform it. His analysis, however, leaves out the critical openness of this desire’s subject/object relationship and fails to recognize the fact that language is one of the scene’s desirable objects. See Gerd Gemünden, “On the Way to Language: Wenders’ Kings of the Road,” Film Criticism XV, no. 2 (Winter 1991), 16. Robert Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, 71. For more on the fascinating history of Bibendum, see the company’s excellent and surprisingly thorough historical website at: http://www .michelin.com/corporate/front/templates/affich.jsp?codeRubrique=9 9&lang=EN. By the company’s own account, Bibendum was more than a corporate mascot; he was something of a pop-cultural icon whose visibility signified in very specific ways, ways that moved (the company would like us to believe) beyond product sales. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 82–90. Ibid., 5 For a detailed analysis of the film’s interest in the idea of language, see Timothy Corrigan, “Wender’s [sic] Kings of the Road: The Voyage from Desire to Language,” New German Critique 24–25 (Fall/Winter 1981–82): 94–107. See also Gerd Gemünden, “On the Way to Language: Wenders’ Kings of the Road,” 13–28. Kolker and Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, 78. Ibid., 54 Key also is the shape of this device and its symbolic association with German military history generally and Nazism in particular. The connection is never commented upon, but the film’s occasional referencing of German cinematic fathers—the pictures of Fritz Lang that appear in the film—and Wenders’s acknowledged uncomfortable relationship to German images indicate that the association is working in the background. “The American Dream,” quoted in Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Sean Whiteside in association with Michael Hofmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 144. A mobile home also figures prominently in Wenders’s The State of Things (1982). For a smart reading of this notion of American mobility in New German Cinema, see William Beard, “American Madness,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 40 (January 1992): 59–74. See

NOTES

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

227

also Eric Rentschler, “American Friends and New German Cinema: Patterns of Reception,” New German Critique 24–25 (Fall/Winter 1981–82): 7–35. For more on the historical context of the New German Cinema, its political investments, and young German culture’s relationship to American popular culture, see Timothy Corrigan, New German Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). Eric Rentschler’s West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills: Redgrave Publishing Company, 1984) is also a useful overview, as is John Sanford, The New German Cinema (New York: Oswald Wolff, 1980). Wim Wenders, “The Men in the Rodeo Arena: Lusty,” Emotion Pictures, 114–15. Bruno’s process of concealment and his subsequent return to the place of his birth are interestingly related to Sigmund Freud’s ideas regarding the uncanny, das unheimliche. In his work on the uncanny, Freud recognizes the ambivalence of the term. See Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1997), 224. Bruno’s journey to the house where he lived alone with his mother functions according to both of Freud’s definitions. On the one hand, it is a journey back to the familiar, back to the womb, as it were. The mise-en-scène of this portion of the journey is, in fact, strangely womb-like—shrouded in fog, concealed. On the other hand, it is a terrifying moment, where multiple layers of concealment are exposed. Bruno’s connection to the past is called to the surface, as is his connection to the maternal, which in the Freudian sense is always simultaneously comforting and terrifying. Wim Wenders, “Kings of the Road,” The Logic of Images, 13. Quoted in Nancy Hardin and Marilyn Schlossberg, Easy Rider: Original Screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern Plus Stills, Interviews and Articles (New York: Signet, 1969), 28. Kolker and Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders, 59.

Chapter 6 1. My ideas about the film and about Stone more generally owe a great deal to Robert Kolker’s chapter on Stone—whom he pairs with fellow road film maker Arthur Penn—in The Cinema of Loneliness. See Robert Kolker, The Cinema of Loneliness, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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NOTES

2. Roland Barthes, S/Z, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 3. 3. Gavin Smith, “Oliver Stone: Why Do I Have to Provoke?” Sight and Sound (December 1994): 10. 4. Gary Crowdus and Richard Porton, “The Importance of a Singular, Guiding Vision: An Interview with Arthur Penn” Cineaste 20, no. 2 (1993): 9. 5. Smith, “Oliver Stone” 12. Few critics, in fact, neglect to mention Stone’s legendary heavy-handedness. For a smart, contemporary review of the film, see Nick James, “Natural Born Killers: Film Review,” Sight and Sound (March 1995): 44–45. For a somewhat more typical summation of Stone’s style, see Jon Katz, “Natural Born Killjoy,” Wired (December 1994): 126–33. 6. While both films are certainly in some way “about” the aftermath of the Vietnam War, it is perhaps this critical gesture toward the media that sets Stone’s film apart. In the years following the “crisis” in the Gulf, Stone poignantly critiques “the first” multimedia war. 7. Smith, “Oliver Stone,” 12. 8. Inland Empire (2006) is less concerned with the physical image of the road. 9. I am not alone in my identification of this tendency. See, for example, Michel Chion, David Lynch (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 92, for a discussion of the strange familial politics of Blue Velvet. Chion also contends that Wild at Heart, aside from being a film enmeshed in the plot of The Wizard of Oz, is “a film of childhood” (138). See also Charles Drazin, Charles Drazin on Blue Velvet: Bloomsbury Movie Guide No. 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), for a discussion of “families” (50–51) and The Wizard of Oz (172–76). I should note, however, that despite their learnedness, both books suffer for their imitation of Lynch’s own organizational strategies and the subject of his 1968 short film The Alphabet. The strategy confuses and creates the artificial “feeling” that things are connected by virtue of their fitting into their alphabetical categories. For a more scholarly approach to Lynch’s work through Lost Highway, and one that attempts to get at the heart of the sometimes confusing gender politics of Lynch’s work, see Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). Additionally, my Two Lane Blacktop vs. The Wizard of Oz dichotomy is itself overstated, though usefully so. What’s at issue, I think, has more to do with public perception—Hellman’s film as rebellious, anti-social, and the story of Dorothy in Oz as wholesome. As we’ve seen throughout, however, these perceptions often lose sight of the common thread that runs through both films; a thread that, in both films, effectively returns viewers to the structures the characters appear to flee from.

NOTES

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10. David Breskin, Inner Views (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 92. 11. See Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, Revised Edition (New York: Faber and Faber, 2005), where Lynch can be found talking about (but not connecting) everything from his family life to, more recently, his interest in the location of the road. 12. For an interesting discussion of the “maternal energies” at work in The Elephant Man, see Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch (131–38). See also David Breskin, Inner Views (70–71). Here, when asked about the “oedipal thing” happening in his films, Lynch identifies the familial obsessions contained in The Elephant Man and, as Breskin notes, becomes somewhat defensive over Breskin’s attempts to find this connection across his body of work, stating that “it could just be a coincidence” and adding, “How much is something inside me? I think the inside-you part dictates a lot.” (71). Lynch’s choice of words here is interesting in that they conjure up birthing images themselves—ideas residing inside of the artist. 13. Drazin, Charles Drazin on Blue Velvet, 51. 14. The second portion of this title is a quote from David Lynch from his interview with David Breskin (72). Lynch, in defense of artistic abstraction and works of art that create the same sort of confusion that life offers up, uses the cliché verbally here and participates in it visually in The Straight Story. 15. Brendan Lemon, “Even Auteurs Need a Break from Themselves,” New York Times, October 10, 1999. 16. Kevin Jackson, “The Straight Story: Film Review,” Sight and Sound 9, no.12 (December 1999): 58. 17. Breskin, Inner Views, 55—56. 18. Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Howarth and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 279–92. 19. See Charles Drazin on Blue Velvet , 64—66, for more on Lynch’s interest in Edward Hopper. It is Hopper’s capturing of an America so real as to be unreal (as in Baudrillard), I think, that Lynch finds so captivating. 20. Jackson, “The Straight Story,” 58

Epilogue 1. Antonioni’s metaphorical use of travel in this film and elsewhere, in fact, holds as central a place as Godard’s in the history of vehicularity’s critical function in the cinema. For an excellent and smartly contextualized reading of the Italian road movie more generally and its own considerable international influence, see Kerstin Pilz, “Dreams of Escape:

230

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

NOTES

Variations of the Italian Road Movie,” Romance Studies 21, no. 2 (July 2003): 140–52. Murray’s work for Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Life Aquatic) and in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation establish him as something of an iconic mid-life wanderer, a status Jarmusch clearly capitalizes on. Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), with its premarital chaos and tidily ironic marital ending is a poor but widely popular film that, nonetheless, moves in the same direction as Jarmusch’s film. This direction even more blatantly descends, in Payne’s case, from the happily hokey road-elopement films explored at the beginning of this book, films that begin with the illusion of institutional escape only to find the outlaws themselves re-absorbed, surrounded by in-laws. Though not released in theaters in the United States at the time of this writing, Kiarostami’s latest feature endeavor, Tickets (2005), features sections directed by Britain’s Ken Loach and Italy’s Ermanno Olmi, as well. In step with Kiarostami’s larger transportational interests, the film is organized around three stories taking place on the same intercity train traveling between Central Europe and Rome. Jarmusch’s work with Wenders’s cinematographer Robby Müller and his relationship with Finnish road movie director Aki Kaurismäki is suggestive of this international interplay. I am especially grateful to Azar Nafisi for her role in organizing “Encounters With Kiarostami,” a month-long series of screenings and dialogues with the director held between March and April of 2001 at the Freer Gallery of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. The series introduced me to a number of rarely screened Kiarostami films and, along with his collection of photography, made abundantly clear his unyielding interest in the metaphorical richness of the road. See Mir-Ahmad Mir-Ehsan and Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami: Photo Collection, trans. Claude Karbassi (Tehran, Iranian Art Publishing, 2000), for a photographic and poetic journey through Kiarostami’s road obsession. Nassia Hamid, “Near and Far: Abbas Kiarostami with Nassia Hamid,” Sight and Sound 7, no. 2 (February 1997): 24. André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” What is Cinema? Volume II. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 65–66. See Rudolf Arnheim, “The Complete Film,” from Film as Art (1957), reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 183—86, and “Film and Reality,” from Film as Art (1957), reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, 322–31. Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, “The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema,” Screen 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003):

NOTES

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

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38–57, though not focused exclusively on Kiarostami, also traces the layers of influence in Iranian cinema, paying particular attention to Neorealism and the French New Wave. Key to their analysis is the treatment of time and place in each movement. See Godfrey Cheshire, “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste 25, no. 4 (2000): 13. Ibid. Hamid, “Near and Far,” 24. Laura Mulvey, in an article on Kiarostami written for Sight and Sound around the time of Taste of Cherry’s British opening, explains this road/cinema connection in terms that focus on the degree to which both structures function to record human existence and labor is a critical factor within this process. She also identifies the preservational capacity of both the cinema and the road—a similarity that, I think, Kiarostami himself is both aware of and intrigued by. Roads, like film, record and contain human activity, human mobility. See Laura Mulvey’s “Kiarostami’s Uncertainty Principle,” Sight and Sound (June 1998): 27 Like Godard’s quip regarding guns and girls, the “origins” of this quote are fantastically difficult to trace, cropping up as it does in a number of interviews, essays, etc. One very early instance occurs in Miriam Rosen, “The Camera of Art: An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami,” Cineaste 19, nos. 2–3 (Fall 1992): 40. Ten, a deceptively simple though highly conceptual film, has generated a good deal of critical thought, some of it Kiarostami’s own. See Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) for a personal overview of Kiarostami’s work and its context. The book includes interviews with the filmmaker where he specifically discusses Ten. Geoff Andrew’s 10 (London: British Film Institute, 2005) is a thoughtful analysis of the film that attends both to the director’s interest in the road and in his interest in the very act of “direction.” Kiarostami’s own 10 on Ten (2004), which Andrew discusses, is the filmmaker’s own pedagogical, cinematic journey through his own process. It is also yet another in a series of Kiarostamian road movies. See Godfrey Cheshire, “Abbas Kiarostami: Seeking a Home,” Projections: A Forum for Filmmakers 8 (1998): 217. Each dramatic unit in the film is marked by a number, counting down from ten, and a counterclockwise, animated wipe. On the soundtrack, a whirring, projector-like nose punctuated by singular bell-ring lends to the film’s overall suggestion of time passing. Zavattini’s oft-quoted and never cited dictum is relevant to Kiarostami’s cinema and to the cinema of the road more generally. See David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th Edition (New York:

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NOTES

Norton, 2004), 355—67, for an accessible account of Zavattini’s influence on Neorealism. 20. Jonathan Rosenbaum, discussing this early work and its peculiarly appealing didacticism, connects this to Brecht’s “Lehrstücken” or learning plays. See Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, 9. 21. Geoff Andrew, 10, 46.

Index ABC Africa (film), 198 Acadian Elopement, An (film), 41 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (film), 102, 125 Alice in the Cities (film), 159 Almost Famous (film), 156 Alphaville (film), 78 Altman, Robert, 123 Amazing Race, The (TV), 183–84 American Mutoscope and Biograph (AM&B), 9, 38, 39, 40, 41 American culture abroad, 1–5, 49–50, 75–77, 79, 86, 87–88, 89, 91, 97–98, 99–100, 147–51, 188–90, 194–95, 196–97 And Life Goes On . . . (film), 191 Andrew, Dudley, 79, 84, 90, 95, 96, 98 Andrew, Geoff, 199 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 183, 222n23, 223n3, 229n1 Attractions, 16, 21, 210n1 Auerbach, Jonathan, 210n1, 215n48 authorship, 101–2, 171–72, 185–86, 188, 193, 223n1 automobiles and carelessness, 38, 41–42 as central to the early cinematic imagination, 14–15 as central metaphor in Godard, 10, 77, 96 destructive powers of, 27–31, 32–33, 89 in domestic union, 37–45 in film noir, 35, 51–52 influence on cinematic narrative, 13

in Kemp Niver, 37 Muybridge’s work before the widespread availability of, 18–20 switch from trains to, 35 automobile trick films, 27–30, 38, 39–40 Baby, Yvonne, 94 Badlands (film), 54, 102 Barthes, Roland, 10, 56–57, 103, 133, 139–40, 157 Baudrillard, Jean America, 1–5 and American culture, 77, 158 and automobility, 103, 209n2 and Monument Valley, 71 and postmodern ecstasy, 156–57, 163, 164 on the seductiveness of the American road, 1–5 and the simulacra, 79, 162 Bazin, André, 62, 111–12, 187–88, 190, 197 Beicken, Peter, 130, 132, 133–34, 136, 138, 153 Belasco, Warren James, 211n6 Bergson, Henri, 17–18 Bibendum. See Michelin Man Bicycle Thieves (film), 187–88 Biskind, Peter, 113, 124 Bitzer, Billy, 9, 38, 39, 40, 44, 52 Blue Velvet (film), 165, 169–70, 177 Bonnie and Clyde (film), 54, 79, 158, 163, 164 Bonnie and Clyde myth, 91, 95, 157–58 Boxcar Bertha (film), 102

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INDEX

Bread and Alley (film), 187 Breaktime (film), 190 Breathless (film) as central to road movie genre, 10, 50, 88, 99–100, 102–3 and drift, 105 and gangster genre, 78, 97 relationship to American cinema, 4, 5, 10, 50, 73, 86, 98 and travel metaphors, 89–91 Breskin, David, 167 Broken Flowers (film), 8, 156 Brown Bunny, The (film), 8, 156, 185–86 campfire as mobile domestic, 66–67, 110–11, 113, 119, 121–22, 175 Casey, Roger N., 211n6 Change of Heart, A (film), 42, 43 chase films, 39 Cheshire, Godfrey, 190–91 Christie, Ian, 13–14, 28–29, 35 Christopher, Nicholas, 51–52 city, the, 32, 42, 47, 51–53, 55–56, 58–59, 71, 72, 88, 90, 109–11, 112, 193 Close Up (film), 189 Cohan, Steve, 5–7 communication in Breathless, 83–87, 92–94, 96–98 and community, 2, 12, 26, 27, 29, 30, 39, 48, 53–54, 56–58, 68, 81, 107–8, 174, 184 failure of, 106, 114–15 in Kings of the Road, 130, 136–38, 141–47, 150–51 silent, 81, 82, 115, 141, 224n18, 225n9, 226n11 in The Straight Story, 179–81 Coppola, Francis Ford, 102 Corrigan, Timothy, 3, 6, 47 Cott, Jonathan, 80, 86 Coutard, Raoul, 82, 90 Covino, Michael, 131

Crowdus, Gary, 158 Daly, Nicholas, 14 Detour (film), 9, 47–48, 50, 52–61, 73, 82, 84, 85, 88, 108, 109, 147, 155, 159 Devil Thumbs a Ride, The (film), 52 direct editing. See jump cuts domesticity in Breathless, 88–89 in Easy Rider, 107 and elopement films, 37–45 as male dream, 56, 58 in Lost Highway, 168–69 mockery of in Detour, 59–61 in Natural Born Killers, 160–61, 164 in Searchers, The, 69, 70 and the Western, 63–69 and Wim Wenders, 130–31 valorization of, 72–73 drift, 103, 104–7, 108, 133, 223n4, 224n6 Duel (film), 102 Dumb and Dumber (film), 155 Easy Rider (film) and changes in film stock, 125–26 and editing, 119, 122, 124–25 and European influences, 102, 114, 126 and influence abroad, 126–27, 132 Laszlo Kovacs and, 90, 110 and language, 114–22, 138 and myths regarding shooting schedule, 113 and the road movie genre, 102 and rock and roll, 118 and silence, 115–18 and the seductiveness of the road, 10, 103–5, 113 and the Western, 111–12, 113–14, 120 Edison, Thomas, 9, 25, 31, 38 Eisenstein, Sergei, 15–16, 83

INDEX

Electra Glide in Blue (film), 102 Elopement, The (film), 39–40 elopement films, 37–45 Explosion of a Motor Car (film), 29 familiar, the 8–9 Fellow Citizen (film), 190 film noir automobile in, 51–52 the city in, 51–52, 112–13 defining, 50–52 flashback/voiceover in, 52–55, 85, 217n16 and French cinephilia, 216n11 Godard’s admiration of, 79 style vs. theme in, 51 fin de siècle. See turn of the century Fire Walk with Me (film), 165 Five Dedicated to Ozu (film), 198 Five Easy Pieces (film), 102, 184 Fleming, Victor, 107 Ford, John, 9, 11, 48, 109, 110 Frazer, John, 33 Gaudreault, André, 15, 16–17, 212n14 genre Breathless and relationship to, 79, 85, 88 defining film noir, 50–52 flexibility of, 215n1 French New Wave and effect on, 3–5 international influence of American, 9, 49 road movie’s continuity with classical era, 47 road movie’s existence outside of, 48 Timothy Corrigan on road movie’s relationship to, 3 Godard, Jean-Luc on America’s international influence, 50, 133, 219n1, 219n2 and Breathless as central to road movie genre, 10, 50, 99–100

235

and cinematic reference, 76, 87–88 on mobility and communication, 80–81 roadside atrocities in the work of, 30, 89 Great Train Robbery, The (film), 9, 28, 31, 32, 35–37, 38 Griffith, D. W., 9, 38, 39, 42, 44 Guerico, William James, 102 Gun Crazy (film), 52, 79, 82 Hales Tours, 14 Hamid, Nassia, 191 Hammond, Paul, 33, 34 Hark, Ina Rae, 5–7 Hellman, Monte, 102 Hendricks, Gordon, 19 Hepworth, Cecil, 28–29 Hill, Lee, 113 Hitchcock, Alfred, 58, 69, Hitch-Hiker, The (film), 52, 58 Hopper, Dennis, 10, 76, 114–15, 124–25 See also Easy Rider How It Feels to Be Run Over, 28 individual, the and alienation in Kiarostami, 107, 186, 194 and isolation in Easy Rider, 120 in Lost Highway, 169 and the monologue in Breathless, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93 and the monologue in Detour, 58 Interrupted Elopement, An (film), 43–44 Italian Neorealism, 83, 112, 136, 187–89, 193, 197 Jaglom, Henry, 125 Jarmusch, Jim, 8, 12, 107, 126, 185 jump cuts in Breathless, 82–83, 85–87, 92–93, 95, 105, 221n13, 221n15 in Easy Rider, 118–19, 122, 124–25

236

INDEX

Kerouac, Jack, 4, 133 Keystone comedies, 9, 38 Kiarostami, Abbas and characters in search of completeness, 107, 186 and Muybridge, 199 and Persian culture, 190–92 and personal mobility, 194 and traffic, 190, 192, 194 transportational obsessions of, 11, 186, 209n7 and Western cultural inheritance, 187–90, 194 Kings of the Road (film) and “betweenness,” 131, 134–35, 137–38 and black and white, 126 and communication/community, 130, 136–37, 141–47, 150–51 and domesticity, 135–36, 144, 152, 227n25 and Easy Rider, 132, 153 and family, 143–44 and landscape, 131, 138 and the long take, 11, 130, 131 and silence, 136–37 and stillness, 140–41 and women, 151–54 Kirby, Lynne, 28 Klinger, Barbara, 48–49, 216n5, 224n9 Kolker, Robert, 12, 81, 130, 132, 133–34, 136, 138, 152, 227n1 Kovacs, Laszlo, 90, 110 Kracauer, Siegfried, 25–26 Lackey, Kris, 211n6 Laderman, David, 5–7, 48–49, 184 landscape in Kings of the Road, 131 in Searchers, The, 71–72 Lewis, Joseph, 79 Locomotives. See rail travel Los Angeles, 53, 109 Lost Highway (film), 165, 168–69 Lumière, Louis and August

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (film), 26–27 Automobile Accident, The (film), 27–28, 29, 31, 38 compositional selectivity in the work of, 24 distrust of technology/modernity in the work of, 9, 31 ideological function of mobility in the work of, 25–28 photographic origins of, 24 travel films of, 30–31 Universal Exhibition 1900: View of a Moving Sidewalk (film), 27 Washerwomen on the River (film), 24–25 Lupino, Ida, 58, 69 Lynch, David and characters in search of completeness, 107 and family values, 155–56, 166–71, 178 and postmodernity, 11 and road imagery, 155–56, 165–66 roadside atrocities in the work of, 30 Malick, Terrence, 102 Marie, Michel, 83 Méliès, Georges gender in the work of, 22 travel and transportation in the work of, 29, 32–35 trick films of, 28 Trip to the Moon, A (film), 9, 31–33, 34, 38, 41 Metz, Christian, 16 Michelin Man, 138–40, 226n13 Mitchell, Lee, 63, 64, 71 mobility of American culture, 3, 4–5, 50, 75–77, 87–88, 89, 91, 97–98, 99–100, 147–51, 188–90, 194–95, 196–97 anxiety over, 2, 35, 38–39, 45, 58–59

INDEX

attractiveness of, 69, 103–5 in Breathless, 94–95 and editing, 82–83 and Godard, 80–81, 87 or “movement” and film narrative, 15–18, 32, 35, 78, 82 of Native Americans, 62, 69–70 in the Western, 63–65, 67 modernity social costs of, 2, 8, 11, 31, 72, 132 Monument Valley, 71, 108–11, 125, 131, 164, 218n36 Morris, Christopher, 209n4 motorcycles, 115–16 Mulholland Drive (film), 156 Mulvey, Laura, 231n14 Musser, Charles, 15–17, 25, 31, 36 Muybridge, Eadweard and changing ideas regarding time and space, 21–22 critical focus on series photography, 18–19 and his doubters, 21 gender issues in the work of, 22–23 memorialization of the human body in the work of, 22–24 motion studies of, 7, 8 and Occident, 20–21 technology and the work of, 22–24 traveling photography of, 9, 19–20, 213n20 Natural Born Killers (film) and domesticity, 160, 161, 162, 164 and drift, 106 and media, 158–59, 161–64 and narration, 159–60 and Native Americans, 70, 160 and postmodernity, 11 and TV, 36 Niver, Kemp, 37–38, 211n4 Old Joy (film), 8, 156 Palmer, R. Barton, 51

237

Paris-Monte Carlo Run in Two Hours, The (film), 29, 33 Passenger, The (Professione: reporter) (film), 183 Penn, Arthur, 54, 79, 158 phones/phone lines, 39, 44, 53, 56, 61, 141–42, 144, 193 Pierrot le fou (film), 78 Porter, Edwin S., 9, 31 Porton, Richard, 158 press, the, 22, 77, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 142, 143–44, 158–59, 161–64, 220n10 Psycho (film), 58 Rafelson, Bob, 102 rail travel anxieties regarding, 35 celebration of in the Lumières, 26 and the cinematic situation, 13–14, 36–37, 230n4 Rain People, The (film), 102 Ray, Nicholas, 149, 150 rebellion and the counterculture, 107, 117, 224n16 and drift, 106 in elopement films, 39, 40 as road movie myth, 2, 7, 12, 72–73, 216n5 Regularly or Irregularly (film), 190 road, the as eulogy to stability, 76 and the information superhighway, 156–57, 158, 163 international appeal of, 3, 5–8, 10, 12, 75–77, 222n23, 224n14, 229n1, 230n5 in literature, 211n6 seductiveness of, 12, 103–5, 108 as transitional space, 72 as unsafe, 58–59 Road Movie Book, The, 5–6 Road Rules, 183–84

238

INDEX

rock and roll, 114, 117, 118, 131, 147, 148, 221n13 Ross, Kristin, 5 Ruoff, Jeffrey, 129, 211n2 Sarafian, Richard, 102 Salvador (film), 155 Sargeant, Jack, 7 Schrader, Paul, 50–51, 52, 87, 98 Scorsese, Martin, 102, 125 Scott, Ridley, 54, 125 Searchers, The (film), 9, 48, 50, 55, 61, 62–73, 82, 108, 138 Seltzer, Mark, 23 Sennet, Mack, 9, 38, 41, 43 Shiel, Mark, 224n16 Sideways (film), 8, 156, 230n3 Smith, Gavin, 163 Solnit, Rebecca, 213n20 Solution, The (film), 189 Spielberg, Steven, 102 stability in Breathless, 79, 95, 96 in Detour, 57, 61, 73 in early films about automobility, 38–45 in Kings of the Road, 140–41 mobility in the name of, 56, 57 in The Searchers, 9, 62, 64, 66, 73 in Stone and Lynch, 11 valorized in road movies, 2, 12, 76 Stone, Oliver and characters in search of completeness, 107 and format changes in Natural Born Killers, 125, 158–59 on media, 157 and postmodernity, 11 and road imagery, 155–56 roadside atrocities in the work of, 30, 218n35 Straight Story, The (film) and anti-kineticism, 11, 172, 177, 179–81

and communication, 179–81 and familial options, 175–77 and family values, 167, 171–74 and Lynchian ideology, 165–66 and postmodernity, 166 Stranger than Paradise (film), 126 Studlar, Gaylan, 69 Sugarland Express, The (film), 102 Sunshine Sue (film), 42–43 Taste of Cherry (film) and comments on Western influence, 194–95 and the family, 195–96 and the non-Western road movie, 12 and traffic, 192, 194 Ten (film) and communication, 198 and the family, 196–99 10 on Ten (film), 198 Thelma and Louise (film), 54, 125, 164, 218n28 They Would Elope (film), 40–41 Through the Olive Trees (film), 191 Tompkins, Jane, 64 tracking shots, 90, 123, 222n26 trains. See rail travel Traveler, The (film), 189 Trip to the Moon, A (film). See Méliès Turner, Dennis, 99 turn of the century and postmodernity, 155 and technological change, 11 technologies and impact on cinema, 13–14 Twin Peaks, 165 Two-Lane Blacktop (film), 102 Ulmer, Edgar, 9, 11, 48 See also Detour U-Turn (film), 155 Vanishing Point (film), 102 wanderer, the, 67 Watson, Stephanie, 7 Weekend (Week End) (film), 30, 78 Wenders, Wim

INDEX

and America, 225n7 and black and white, 126 and cinematic reference, 76 and distrust of stories, 129 and the legacy of Muybridge, 11, 129 Western, the, 9, 48, 49, 51, 62–64 Where is the Friend’s Home (film), 191 Wild at Heart, 125, 165, 170

239

Williams, Linda, 22, 63 Winston, Brian, 18 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 54, 65, 107, 125, 164, 166, 170–71, 228n9 women and mobility, 55, 59, 60, 70, 82, 88, 136–37, 144–45, 151–54, 196–99, 218n28 zoom lens, 110, 111, 123