Road movie
A road movie is a genre of film in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a "distinctly existential air" and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters". The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters. Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity, some type of rebellion, car culture, and self-discovery. The core theme of road movies is "rebellion against conservative social norms".
There are two main narratives: the quest and the outlaw chase. In the quest-style film, the story meanders as the characters make discoveries. In outlaw road movies, in which the characters are fleeing from law enforcement, there is usually more sex and violence. Road films tend to focus more on characters' internal conflicts and transformations, based on their feelings as they experience new realities on their trip, rather than on the dramatic movement-based sequences that predominate in action films. Road movies do not typically use the standard three-act structure used in mainstream films; instead, an "open-ended, rambling plot structure" is used.
The road movie keeps its characters "on the move", and as such the "car, the tracking shot, wide and wild open space" are important iconography elements, similar to a Western movie. As well, the road movie is similar to a Western in that road films are also about a "frontiersmanship" and about the codes of discovery. Road movies often use the music from the car stereo, which the characters are listening to, as the soundtrack and in 1960s and 1970s road movies, rock music is often used.
While early road movies from the 1930s focused on couples, in post-World War II films, usually the travellers are male buddies, although in some cases, women are depicted on the road, either as temporary companions, or more rarely, as the protagonist couple. The genre can also be parodied, or have protagonists that depart from the typical heterosexual couple or buddy paradigm, as with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which depicts a group of drag queens who tour the Australian desert. Other examples of the increasing diversity of the drivers shown in 1990s and subsequent decades' road films are The Living End, about two gay, HIV-positive men on a road trip; To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which is about drag queens, and Smoke Signals, which is about two Indigenous men. While rare, there are some road movies about large groups on the road and lone drivers.
Genre and production elements
The road movie has been called an elusive and ambiguous film genre. Timothy Corrigan states that road movies are a "knowingly impure" genre as they have "overdetermined and built-in genre-blending tendencies". Devin Orgeron states that road movies, despite their literal focus on car trips, are "about the the cinema, about the culture of the image", with road movies created with a mixture of Classical Hollywood film genres. The road movie genre developed from a "constellation of “solid” modernity, combining locomotion and media-motion" to get "away from the sedentarising forces of modernity and produc contingency".Road movies are blended with other genres to create a number of subgenres, including: road horror ; road comedies ; road racing films and rock concert tour films. Film noir road movies include Detour, Desperate, The Devil Thumbs a Ride and The Hitch-Hiker, all of which "establish fear and suspense around hitchhiking", and the outlaw-themed film noirs They Live by Night and Gun Crazy. Film noir-influenced road films continued in the neo noir era, with The Hitcher, Delusion, Red Rock West, and Joy Ride.
Even though road movies are a significant and popular genre, it is an "overlooked strain of film history". Major genre studies often do not examine road movies, and there has been little analysis of what qualifies as a road movie.
Country or region of production
United States
The road movie is mostly associated with the United States, as it focuses on "peculiarly American dreams, tensions and anxieties". US road movies examine the tension between the two foundational myths of American culture, which are individualism and populism, which leads to some road films depicting the open road as a "utopian fantasy" with a homogenous culture while others show it as a "dystopian nightmare" of extreme cultural differences. US road movies depict the wide open, vast spaces of the highways as symbolizing the "scale and notionally utopian" opportunities to move up upwards and outwards in life.In American road movies, the road is an "alternative space" where the characters, now set apart from conventional society, can experience transformation. For example, in It Happened One Night, a wealthy woman who goes on the road is liberated from her elite background and marriage to an immoral husband when she meets and experiences hospitality from regular, good-hearted Americans who she never would have met in her previous life, with middle America depicted as a utopia of "real community". The scenes in road movies tend to elicit longing for a mythic past.
American road movies have tended to be a white genre, with Spike Lee's Get on the Bus being a notable exception, as its main characters are African-American men on a bus travelling to the Million Man March. Asian-American filmmakers have used the road movie to examine the role and treatment of Asian-Americans in the United States; examples include Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, about a taxi driver trying to find about the Hollywood detective character Charlie Chan, and Abraham Lim's Roads and Bridges, about an Asian-American prisoner who is sentenced to clean up garbage along a Midwestern highway.
Australia
Australia's vast open spaces and concentrated population have made the road movie a key genre in that country, with films such as George Miller's influential Mad Max film series, which were rooted in an Australian tradition for films with "dystopian and noir themes with the destructive power of cars and the country’s harsh, sparsely populated land mass". Australian road movies have been described as having a dystopian or gothic tone, as the road the characters travel on is often a "dead end", with the journey being more about "inward-looking" exploration than reaching the intended location. In Australia, road movies have been called a "complex metaphor" which refers to the country's history, current situation, and to anxieties about the future.The Mad Max series, including the first film and its sequels Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga "have become canonical for their dystopic reinvention of the outback as a post-human wasteland where survival depends upon manic driving skills".
Other Australian road movies include Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris, about a small town where the inhabitants cause road accidents to salvage the vehicles; the biker film Stone by Sandy Harbutt, about a biker gang who witness a political cover-up murder; The thriller Roadgames by Richard Franklin, about a truck driver who tracks down a serial killer in the Australian outback; Dead-end Drive-in by Brian Trenchard-Smith, about a dystopian future where drive-in theatres are turned into detention centres; Metal Skin by Geoffrey Wright about a street racer; and Kiss or Kill by Bill Bennett, a film noir-style road movie.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert has been called a "watershed gay road movie that addresses diversity in Australia". Walkabout, Backroads, and Rabbit-Proof Fence use a depiction of travelling through the Australian outback to address the issue of relations between white and Indigenous people.
In 2005, Fiona Probyn described a subgenre of road movies about Indigenous Australians that she called "No Road" movies, in that they typically do not show a vehicle travelling on an asphalt road; instead, these films depict travel on a trail, often with Indigenous trackers being shown using their tracking abilities to discern hard-to-detect clues on the trail. With the increasing depiction of racial minorities in Australian road movies, the "No Road" subgenre has also been associated with Asian-Australian films that depict travel using routes other than roads. The iconography of car crashes in many Australian road movies has been called a symbol of white-Indigenous violence, a rupture point in the narrative which erases and forgets the history of this violence.
Canada
Canada also has huge expanses of territory, which make the road movie also common in that country, where the genre is used to examine "themes of alienation and isolation in relation to an expansive, almost foreboding landscape of seemingly endless space", and explore how Canadian identity differs from the "less humble and self-conscious neighbours to the south", in United States. Canadian road films include Donald Shebib's Goin' Down the Road, three Bruce McDonald films, Highway 61, and Hard Core Logo, Malcolm Ingram's Tail Lights Fade and Gary Burns' The Suburbanators. David Cronenberg's Crash depicted drivers who get "perverse sexual arousal through the car crash experience", a subject matter which led to Ted Turner lobbying against the film being shown in US theatres.Asian-Canadian filmmakers have made road films about the experience of Canadians of Asian origin, such as Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tak Sam, which is about her search for her "Chinese grandfather, an itinerant magician and acrobat". Other Asian-Canadian road movies look at their relatives experiences during the 1940s internment of Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government, Rea Tajiri's History and Memory and Janet Tanaka's Memories from the Department of Amnesia.