The Road Movie Book

edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark

Routledge, hardback #45.00, paperback #14.99

THE road movie is a strange form, it is both trash and high-art-violent, visceral, hip and existential, controversial and banal, all at the same time. It follows one of two narrative freeways. On the first, there's the two buddies trying to escape from the law or from the boredom of their lifestyle. On the second route out of town, there's the protagonists seeking to find themselves, the voyagers looking to throw off the shackles and discover sexual and emotional identities. But this ethos of hope is invariably transitory: typically the movie will end in capture, death, or return, or, as Julian Stringer puts it in his contribution to this collection, by testifying ''to the impossibility of the existential project. In other words, the myths of escape and self-discovery are chimerical, just two mirages along the way''.

Nevertheless, the journey is often fascinating. Thus the road movie has become a serious discourse on mad love and mobile homes, on friendship and intimacy, on freedom and the ache for home, on wilderness and disorder, and ultimately, of course, on America. Films like Easy Rider and Natural Born Killers rank among the most revealing self-analyses the US has produced. The open road, the vast vistas of land and landscape, the automobile, the violent criminal, they're all icons of modern America and the road movie brings them together. This all serves to validate what Baudrillard once wrote: ''Drive 10,000 miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together.''

This book takes its road movie seriously and, for most of the time, this is a good thing, like when Barbara Klinger dissects Easy Rider, and reveals it to be just as rich in ''the language of traditional patriotism founded in the visions provided by grand national scenery''. Her point, however, is that due to this dual aspect of affirmation and critique, the film is a better measure of its times.

This elevation of the road movie to great cultural artifact is sometimes a little too much. Sometimes the treatment is too hyper. The oh, so clever, culturo-socio-political, grand theses clump together in strange, elliptical paragraphs, tortuous to read. Sometimes you want to point out that it's only a movie.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting book and its intellectual vigour and critical mindset are a welcome counterpart to the numerous and vacuous filmstar biographies that clog the shelves of bookstores everywhere.