Road movie
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In general, road movies are a cinematic genre in which the action takes places during a road journey or a vehicle-based film. The genre name is also taken as the title of the 1974 film Road Movie by Joseph Strick. Notable examples include Easy Rider, Wild at Heart, Natural Born Killers, Y tu mamá también, Thelma and Louise, and Rain Man.
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[edit] History
Although the genre has its roots in earlier tales of epic journeys, such as Homer's Odyssey and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, road films are uniquely post-WWII, reflecting the boom of America's postwar automobility and youth culture. Despite the fact that road movies existed in the Depression era, the genre only became self-aware as a genre in the 1960s with "Easy Rider" and "Bonnie and Clyde." (Earlier films, like "The Wild One" and "Rebel Without a Cause," focus more on mobility than the road, but they are important influences nonetheless.) For this reason, road movies offer a great pop cultural history of America's shifting relationship to the road, cars, and other technologies, especially as various rebel groups—hippies, blacks, gays and lesbians, women, Asian Americans—remap the American road story.
Like their antecedents, the road movie tends towards an episodic structure. In each episode, there is a challenge to be met, although not all of them will be met successfully. In most episodes, a piece of the plot is revealed - knowledge or allies are gained, and so on. Sometimes, as Heart of Darkness, this progress is inverted, and each episode represents a loss rather than a gain.
Road movies traditionally end in one of four ways:
- having met with triumph at their ultimate destination, the protagonist/s return home, wiser for their experiences.
- at the end of the journey, the protagonist/s find a new home at their destination.
- the journey continues endlessly. In such cases, the last shot of the film is almost always the driver's point of view of a lonely highway at night.
- having realised that, as a result of their journey, they can never go home, the protagonists either choose death or are killed.
[edit] Action films
Another version of this is a road-based action movie, particularly the post-apocalyptic genre of the 1980s influenced by Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in which bands of barbarians would fight good guys in the post-apocalypse when gasoline was scarce and vehicles were makeshift.
[edit] References
- In the Easy Rider, Wyatt complains that his life is like being in a road movie.
- They Might Be Giants wrote a song entitled "Road Movie to Berlin," featured on the album Flood
- In the Family Guy episodes "Road to Rhode Island" and "Road to Europe," large portions of the film series are grafted onto the show
[edit] "Road to" movies
Road to... also refers to seven comedy films starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour.
[edit] Filmography
- Road Movie Filmography (via UC Berkeley)
[edit] Bibliography
- Road Movies: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library
- The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television by Katie Mills
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