Unlike,
for instance, comedy or drama, both rooted primarily in inherent faculties of
human emotion and empathy, certain cinematic genres find themselves and their
life spans distinctly linked to specific cultural and historical contexts. Film
noir is the classic example, its immediate life—from the early 1940s to the
late 1950s—short enough to warrant the protracted argument that continues to
this day as to whether it can indeed be classified a genre at all. Inextricably
linked to the social circumstances of the United States in the period
immediately following the Second World War, noir’s dominant themes and tropes,
though still reworked now in films categorised as neo-noir, address issues
particular to that place in that period of time. The western, too, though still
more recognisably intact in its classical form than noir, would seem to offer
little explicit relevance to modern America, its frontier narratives now
outdated by more than a century. The road movie, then, is a particularly
interesting case: arguably growing only more relevant with the passage of time
and the ever-increasing ubiquity of infrastructure, the genre has nonetheless
encountered ebbs and flows through the course of its lifetime that suggest an
important link between social circumstances and the road’s cinematic
exploration thereof. In briefly examining these resurgences and assessing the predominant
narrative and stylistic tropes that characterise the genre, this essay aims to
examine the films of director Kelly Reichardt in the context of modern America,
and through them to posit the emergence of a new breed of road movie that
speaks to the issues facing the nation today.
The
road has always been a persistent theme of American culture. Its significance,
embedded in both popular mythology and social history, goes back to the
nation’s frontier ethos, but was transformed by the technological intersection
of motion pictures and the automobile in the twentieth century. (Steven Cohan
and Ina Rae Hark 1)
Ever
before an understanding of the road movie’s relevance in contemporary American
cinema can be broached, we must investigate the key aspects which define the
genre and trace its evolution through the nation’s film heritage, particularly
in the post-war period. Timothy Corrigan’s four-point definition of the road
movie’s generic constitution is useful to consider here: the road as response
to familial disintegration; the presence of threatening obstacles along the
road; the postulation of the chosen means of transport as a sole bastion of
security and familiarity in strange new territories; and the romanticisation of
the road as male escapist fantasy, usually to the exclusion of the female
(143-6). We will examine these tenets in greater detail when we come to
consider Reichardt’s role as a filmmaker within this generic framework; for
now, it provides us with a helpful basis through which to examine the
historical prevalence of road narratives in American cinema. Most critics
agree, of course, on the road movie’s origin in the goal-oriented journey
narratives of classical literature, Homer’s Odyssey
the most widely cited exemplar, and films—as adaptations of literary road
narratives—such as The Grapes of Wrath
(John Ford, 1940). Shari Roberts has claimed, and few would disagree, that it
was Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)
that codified the road movie and made it a genre of its own, rather than simply
a recurrent icon of American cinema (51). Cohan and Hark, nonetheless, envision
the noirs Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer,
1945) and They Live by Night
(Nicholas Ray, 1948) as part of a first wave of outlaw road narratives that lay
the foundations of the genre’s narrative and stylistic conventions[1].
Such waves, they argue, “have occurred in eras where the culture is
reevaluating a just-closed period of national unity focused on positive,
work-ethic goals” (2). The second of those they classify, well-documented, is
that of the New Hollywood. The third and final, of most interest to us, that
which emerged “in the early 1990s as the Reagan era’s renewed offensive against
the Communists lost its primary target and the masculinist heroics of the Gulf
War gave way to closer scrutiny” (2).
We
wondered how the lone-rebel, a fixture in every road movie, could exist in the
‘90s when even the Burger King slogan tells you to "Break the Rules."
(Reichardt, 1995: 12)
It
is here, amidst films such as Thelma
& Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), Natural
Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), True
Romance (Tony Scott, 1993), and My
Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), that Reichardt makes her initial
imprint upon the road movie, and indeed American cinema at large. David
Laderman has argued that the road movies of the era “reflect a postmodern
aesthetic and self-consciousness” that “expresses this period's more
conservative political climate” (50). Such is certainly the case with
Richardt’s debut River of Grass
(1994), which retrospectively reinterprets the lovers-on-the-run mythos of its
forebears, drawing distinctly on the narrative framework of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973). Reichardt displays a crucial
understanding of her own place within American cinema, playing on the generic
and iconographic precedents of her cinematic antecedents and reworking them as
a means by which to pass postmodern comment on the tenets of the road movie and
its misappropriation of American ideals. A stern inversion of the
romanticisation of road outlaws, then still flagrantly exhibited—albeit in
twisted variants—in True Romance and Natural Born Killers, the film portrays
the relationship between apathetic young mother Cozy and no-good layabout Lee
Ray, and their failed efforts to go on the run after they believe they have
accidentally shot a man. Standing pointedly in opposition to the fallacious
sense of escapism associated with the road, the film’s finale sees Cozy and Lee
Ray, having consistently failed to raise money through means either side of the
law, reach a toll booth and simply turn around and return home. Reichardt
offers with River of Grass a
resoundingly clear statement that the road and all it represents, despite its
contemporary resurgence, remains closed to the disenfranchised youth; it is, as
Emmanuel Levy writes: “a provocative meditation on… the future of movie myths,
or how real life defies reel life” (403).
None
better summate the effect of River of
Grass than Reichardt herself, who termed the film “a road movie without the
road, a love story without the love, a crime story without the crime” (quoted
in Levy 402). The concept of a road movie without the road reverberates
throughout her body of work, particularly in the extremely low-budget,
48-minute Ode (1999), filmed in two
days on Super 8 after financing for a second feature repeatedly fell through.
Even in this, a film defined by its stillness, Reichardt’s obsession with the
road can clearly be seen. Ode begins
and ends with the suicide of Billy Joe, who leaps to his death from the
Tallahatchie Bridge; in flashback, we learn of the significance of this for
Bobbie Lee, who—overly sheltered by her Baptist parents—has been secretly
involved with the boy for some weeks now. Though the action is confined
entirely to the boundaries of this prototypical small-town America setting—a
droll voiceover begins the film with the words “It’s a story as American as
apple pie. An all-American girl from an all-American town”—Ode alludes to the representational quality of the road as an
emblem of freedom. Billy Joe and Bobbie Lee are each often shot against the
road, walking along its centre framed by its edges as it stretches off into the
distance, their dream to escape this physical and psychological space visually
expressed in Reichardt’s implementation of road movie iconography. Michael Hammond
writes that “…the strip of highway which disappears over the horizon… [has]
continued to offer essential ingredients for rendering the American experience
as rootless, wandering and redolent with endless promise” (17); in repeatedly
returning to this image throughout the film, Reichardt invokes the potentiality
of all the road signifies, whilst never allowing her characters the escape from
their small-town American existence to attain it.
While
River of Grass and Ode each provide an interesting
contextualisation of their period in US history and cinema both, it is not
until the next decade that Reichardt comes to make her first significant
impression on the landscape of American film. Of the decade-plus period between
River of Grass and Old Joy (2006), Reichardt has commented:
“During the “good years” I couldn’t get a film made to save my life” (2008:
78). It is indicative of the potentiality of the road movie—and of Reichardt’s
particular take thereon—then, that it should find renewed success at a time of
arguable crisis in American national identity, with the nation cast in the
shadow of 9/11 and subsequent wars, and exacerbated by the most severe
financial crisis since the Great Depression. Clearly cast in the mold of the
male escapist fantasy of which Corrigan writes, Old Joy’s intimate focus on two male characters offers one of
Reichardt’s most interesting evaluations of modern America. Following old
friends Kurt and Mark as they reunite over the course of a camping trip, the
lyrical film juxtaposes their contrasting lifestyles as opposite exemplars of
American idylls, the latter a soon-to-be-father living life in suburbia, the
former an idealistic individualist existing on the peripheries of society.
These character archetypes, equal cornerstones of American
identity—particularly in its cinematic heritage—offer a dichotomous tension we
also see exhibited in contemporary road movies such as Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007) and Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004). Most interesting of all, however,
is the overt sexual tension which exists between the men in Old Joy, Reichardt invoking the
possibilities of the road movie to explore, as Hammond puts it, “erotic
homosocial tensions at play in male-male relationships, heightened by the road
movie’s alteration between the wide-open spaces of the landscape and the
enclosed space of the car” (16). In the cramped confines of their vehicle and
the mostly undisclosed nature of their personal history, the men evoke an
immense intimacy which reaches a sensual climax as they visit hidden hot
springs, the underlying sexuality in which their relationship is constantly
steeped here allowed to manifest itself as a reconcilement between the
disparate life outlooks, fitting Bennet Schaber’s claim that “[t]he utopian
hope of these films is that, in tracing a single, marginal path, one might
discover so compelling an image that margin and mainstream, preriphery [sic] and center, would once more cohere”
(38).
It
is interesting to note the pronounced stylistic distinction undertaken in
Reichardt’s work between River of Grass
and Old Joy: where the former took
its cues from a clearly American heritage, the latter owes a greater debt to
European cinema. This influence is even greater in Wendy and Lucy (2008), of which Reichardt notes:
We
were watching a lot of Italian neorealism and thinking the themes of those
films seem to ring true for life in America in the Bush years. (2008: 78).
Prominently
comparable to Umberto D. (Vittorio De
Sica, 1952) in particular, not solely for its focus on the relationship between
a dog and its owner, Wendy and Lucy
looks at America through the lens of European cinema, providing—to some
extent—an exterior view. Consistently subversive, it begins with a journey
clearly characterised by physical and emotional destinations, deliberately
codifying itself as a road movie[2],
before bringing things to a startling halt by denying its characters the
ability to undertake this journey. Overtly referenced in the dialogue—“Not a
lot of jobs around here, huh?”—the growing economic issues are a rising concern
for Reichardt, given voice in Wendy’s inability to afford the upkeep of her dog
Lucy or repairs for her broken-down car, which renders her another solitary
figure framed against the freedom the road represents, yet unable to attain it:
the immobility of the characters speaks to the immobility of contemporary
America, and the manner in which it is stilted in its current place. This,
coupled with the European sensibility of the film, is prominently echoed in Gerry (Van Sant, 2002), which—along with
taking distinct inspiration from the Hungarian Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, 2000)—similarly paints its
characters as aimless figures cast upon the road, unable to progress along it.
What
ultimately links the road movie to the Western is this ideal of masculinity
inherent in certain underlying conceptualizations of American national identity
that have persisted, if only through continual ideological struggle. (Roberts 45)
Having
specifically addressed the aimlessness and immobility of contemporary America,
Reichardt turns her attention to the past with Meek’s Cutoff (2010), less a road movie—though still exploiting
elements of that formula—than a revisionist western, again a distinctly
American genre. The manner in which Reichardt subverts the expected tropes of
the western aesthetic and narrative is perhaps even more radical than in her
earlier films, most immediately apparent in the film’s use of Academy ratio.
Reducing the panoramic vistas so often associated with frontier mythology, the
confinement of the vast expanses to a smaller screen space constitutes a firm
rejection of the romanticisation of the west, as too does the minimal plot,
bereft as it is of the sensationalist violence seen in so many earlier
iterations of this particular genre. Indeed, in returning to the roots of the
nation and imposing upon it the realist sensibility typical of her work,
Reichardt undermines the sense of refuge provided by the past and refutes the
escapist fantasy of American history as often postulated in western narratives.
More specifically, she depowers the male characters of the film, whose refusal
to acknowledge that they are lost presents a patriarchal crisis that indicates
a deeper dissatisfaction with a leadership that has brought American to new
frontiers in modern times with seemingly just as little direction: “Will it
become American land?” is the question posed by one of the film’s characters as
they wander further into unfamiliar territory, led by a native they seem unable
to decide whether to trust. Patriarchal crises of a similar sort can be seen in
several road movie narratives of recent years, from the uncertain parentage of Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005) to
the emasculated trauma of This Must Be
the Place (Paolo Sorrentino, 2011), each suggesting certain failures in the
leadership of father-figures.
Tracing
the growing success of Reichardt’s films across her career, we can clearly
identify a certain trend that gestures to a wider paradigm in contemporary
American cinema, the road movie fulfilling—as per Cohan and Hark’s definition—a
representative role for this time of change in the nation’s society. Indeed,
though Reichardt’s unwavering obsession with the genre may position her work as
the strongest indicator of this burgeoning trend, hers are but a handful of the
wide variety of road movies which have appeared to address the dominant crises
facing America today, caught as it is in numerous overseas conflicts and just
as many domestic troubles. With their seeming disavowal of the achievement of
narrative aims, endings pitched toward overtly negative or ambiguous
conclusions, and characters who are fortunate even to emerge from the story as
isolated as when they entered, these films could be seen to constitute a new
wave of road movie, uniquely tailored to a new wave of American issues.
Bibliography
Cohan, Steven and Ina
Rae Hark. “Introduction”. The Road Movie
Book. Ed. Steven Cohan and
Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 1-14. Print.
Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without
Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1991. Print.
Hammond, Michael. “The
Road Movie”. Contemporary American Cinema.
Eds. Michael Hammond
and Linda Ruth Williams. London: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Print.
Laderman, David. “What a Trip: The Road Film and American Culture”. Journal of Film and Video
48.1 (1996): 41-57. Print.
Levy, Emmanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American
Independent Film. New York: NYU
Press, 2001. Print.
Reichardt, Kelly.
Interview by Gus van Sant. BOMB 105 (2008): 76-81. Print.
———. Interview by Todd Haynes. BOMB 53 (1995): 11-15. Print.
———. Interview by Todd Haynes. BOMB 53 (1995): 11-15. Print.
Roberts, Shari.
“Western Meets Eastwood: Genre and Gender on the Road”. The Road Movie Book.
Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 45-69. Print.
Schaber, Bennet.
“Hitler Can’t Keep ‘em That Long: The Road, The People”. The Road Movie Book.
Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 17-44. Print.
Filmography
Badlands.
Dir. Terrence Malick. Warner Bros., 1973.
Bonnie
and Clyde. Dir. Arthur Penn. Warner Bros., 1967.
Broken
Flowers. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Focus Features, 2005.
Detour.
Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. Producers Releasing Corporation, 1945.
Easy
Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Colombia Pictures Corporation,
1969.
Gerry.
Dir. Gus Van Sant. Epsilon Motion Pictures, 2002.
The
Grapes of Wrath. Dir. John Ford. Twentieth Century Fox
Film Corporation, 1940.
The
Hitch-Hiker. Dir. Ida Lupino. RKO Radio Pictures,
1953.
Into
the Wild. Dir. Sean Penn. Paramount Vantage, 2007.
Kiss
Me Deadly. Dir. Robert Aldritch. Parklane Pictures Inc.,
1955.
Meek’s
Cutoff. Dir. Kelly Reichardt. Evenstar Films, 2010.
My
Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. New Line Cinema,
1991.
Natural
Born Killers. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1994.
The
Night of the Hunter. Dir. Charles Laughton. Paul Gregory Productions,
1955.
Ode.
Dir. Kelly Reichardt. Glass Eye Pix, 1999.
Old
Joy.
Dir. Kelly Reichardt. Film Science, 2006.
The
Postman Always Rings Twice. Dir. Tay Garnett.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1946.
River
of Grass. Dir. Kelly Reichardt. Good Machine, 1994.
Sideways.
Dir. Alexander Payne. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2004.
Thelma
& Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Pathé
Entertainment, 1991.
They
Live By Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO Radio Pictures,
1948.
The
Third Man. Dir. Carol Reed. British Lion Film Corporation,
1949.
This
Must Be the Place. Dir. Paolo Sorrentino. Indigo Film,
2011.
True
Romance. Dir. Tony Scott. Morgan Creek Productions, 1993.
Umberto
D.
Dir. Vittorio De Sica. Rizzoli Film, 1952.
Wendy
and Lucy. Dir. Kelly Reichardt.Field Guide Films, 2008.
Werckmeister
Harmonies. Dir. Béla Tarr. 13 Productions, 2000.
[1] Cohan and Hark offer only these
two examples here; elements can also be seen particularly in The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldritch, 1955), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay
Garnett, 1946), and
arguably even The Third Man (Carol
Reed, 1949) and The Night of the Hunter
(Charles Laughton, 1955).
[2] A
classification furthered by the eventual revelation of a fragmented family
situation and the emergence of distinctive threats, as per Corrigan.
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