Road movie
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin' closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape... the last beautiful free soul on this planet."--DJ Super Soul in the film Vanishing Point (1971) "Until The Road Warrior (1982) and The Hitcher (1985), Duel is probably the best "road" chase movie ever made." --Horror Films of the 1970s (2007) by John Kenneth Muir |
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A road film is a film genre in which the film's plot takes places during a journey.
History
The genre has its roots in spoken and written tales of epic journeys, such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. The road film is a standard plot employed by screenwriters. It is a kind of bildungsroman, a kind of story in which the hero changes, grows or improves over the course of the story. The modern "road picture" is to filmmakers what the heroic quest was to Medieval writers.
The on-the-road plot was used at the birth of American Cinema but blossomed in the years after WWII, reflecting the boom of America's postwar automobility and youth culture. Even so, awareness of the "road picture" as a genre came only in the 1960s with Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde.
Structure
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.
Notable examples
Notable examples include Duel; Easy Rider; Vanishing Point; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Natural Born Killers; Rain Man; Thelma and Louise; Wild at Heart; Little Miss Sunshine; Sideways; Y tu mamá también; The Hitcher; The Cannonball Run; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Children of Men; National Lampoon's Vacation; Fandango; Road Trip; and Two-Lane Blacktop.
