The Freedom That Leads Nowhere

The genre starts in optimism, because America does. In its screwball youth the road was where a runaway heiress and a fast-talking reporter fell in love crossing the country in It Happened One Night — the highway as a space of romance and reinvention, the place where class dissolves and anyone can become anyone. This is the road as the American promise in motion: light out for the territory, leave the old self behind, and the open space ahead will make you new. The car is freedom, the horizon is possibility, and the journey is the country offering its oldest fantasy — that you can always start over somewhere down the line.

Then the 1960s put two bikers on the highway and the dream curdled. Easy Rider sends its riders looking for America and finds only a country that will kill them for their long hair, ending on the line that defines the genre's mature phase: "We blew it." The road movie of the New Hollywood era discovered that the freedom was an illusion — that you carry your prison with you, that the open road just gives your emptiness somewhere to drive. Two-Lane Blacktop strips the form to existential blankness, men who exist only to race with nowhere to be; Badlands makes the road trip a killing spree narrated in the flat voice of a girl who feels nothing. The highway that was supposed to lead to a new self leads, over and over, to violence, to dead ends, to the same self at a different mile marker.

The genre's deepest practitioners turned this disappointment into something close to grace. Wim Wenders, an outsider in love with American space, made Paris, Texas a road movie about a man walking out of the desert with his identity erased, the highway as a place to disappear and, maybe, to find one fragment of yourself worth keeping. Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise deadpans the whole myth — three bored people driving to Cleveland and Florida and finding them exactly as empty as New York. And Thelma & Louise gives the genre its most honest ending: when two women finally find real freedom on the road, the only place it can lead is off the edge of a cliff, because a society that never had room for their freedom leaves the highway literally no destination. They drive into the air because the ground has run out.

That is the genre's permanent discovery, and it is a uniquely American heartbreak: the road promises that you can escape yourself and your country by moving fast enough across it, and the journey keeps proving that you cannot. The freedom of the open road turns out to be the freedom of flight — motion without arrival, escape without a destination, because the thing you are fleeing is riding shotgun. The road movie loves the highway as much as America does, and it keeps having to report back the same hard news: the country at the end of the road is the country you started in, the self behind the wheel is the self you tried to leave, and the only true freedom the highway offers is the freedom to keep going until the road, or the continent, runs out.

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The line: It Happened One Night → Easy Rider → Two-Lane Blacktop → Badlands → Paris, Texas → Stranger Than Paradise → Thelma & Louise

This line crosses:

• The Ten Years the Directors Won — Easy Rider is both a founding road movie and a founding New Hollywood film; "we blew it" is the disillusionment of a whole era.
• The Art of Almost Nothing Happening — Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise deadpans the road myth into pure dead time, the highway as another place where nothing happens, beautifully.

Read through: Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds.), The Road Movie Book · David Laderman, Driving Visions.

A note on the argument: the road movie's history and its films are documented record. The framing of the genre as a recurring discovery that "freedom on the road is really flight" — the American promise of self-reinvention that keeps failing — is this essay's reading.